
During Sydney Festival 19, Sydney audiences will be able to share in the joyous homegrown work A GHOST IN MY SUITCASE from Barking Gecko, a sumptuous production about ghosts, grief and a secret family gift, adapted from Gabrielle Wang’s award-winning children’s novel. Twelve-year-old Celeste visits China to scatter her mother’s ashes, where she reunites with her gutsy grandma and is thrust into the thrilling world of ghost-hunting.
The Guide had the opportunity to ask some questions of Matt Edgerton, co-director of A GHOST IN MY SUITCASE.
SAG: The play’s staging captures the water city so beautifully, was the show always conceived with a video element?
MATT: I came across the novel in late 2015 and actually had no idea how we would adapt and stage it! The design, including the video elements have really evolved alongside the play script as we’ve explored the story with our creative team and visited locations in China. We had initially thought of having live water flooding the stage but moved away from this to what is actually a much more ‘fluid’ design – a series of constantly moving boxes that we project images onto which can take us anywhere we want to go in an instant.
Media Artist Sohan Ariel Hayes travelled back to China with my co-director Ching Ching Ho to film and photograph footage in Shanghai and the water town Wuzhen, which make up the majority of the images we use in the show. It has been an incredibly meticulous process of selecting images and mapping them onto moving surfaces so I’m glad it has paid off! Hopefully it lets an audience get swept up in this epic ghost-fighting adventure! Continue reading SUNDAY SERIES: INTERVIEW WITH CO-DIRECTOR OF ‘A GHOST IN MY SUITCASE’