From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Surgery in the Schoolhouse
This article documents the 2022 Brisbane production. For the broader taxonomy of Australian theatre adaptations, see A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight (theatre).
A durational site-specific experimental theatre work realised in a mothballed Brisbane heritage school (closed 1997), using the building's original rooms—classrooms, assembly hall, kitchen, dormitory, infirmary—as thresholds and scenes. Rather than staging plot, the production enacted the texture of recurrence: two rotating performers moved through rooms repeating and varying gestures, conversations, silences. The school's material history—honey-coloured timber, heavy doors, narrow stairs—became an active collaborator; the uncanny suburban space and colonial haunting worked through architecture. Critical response noted the work's resistance to narrative closure: visitors exited into Brisbane winter with no clear sense of "resolution," mirroring the novel's structural incompleteness.[1] The intimacy between the pair was staged as wordless and durational—long sequences of bandaging in the old infirmary, or silence in the assembly hall with ambient sound through roof speakers. Indigenous Australian creatives consulted on spatial dramaturgy and the ethics of the colonial building as performance site [citation needed]. The work raised questions about disabled embodiment, consent in durational contexts, and the historical weight of Australian suburban space.
See also
- Experimental theatre and Beach Surgery
- Site-specific theatre and Beach Surgery
- Australian theatre adaptations
- Uncanny Australian suburb
- Durational performance
References
- ↑ Australian Theatre Review, ██ , September 2022.