Perth Voice Interactive

FANCY a bit of David Lynch-style theatre with gothic horror and tales of the afterlife?

Then you’ll love the dark and dreamlike At the End of the Land, an absurdist and immersive solo show by award-winning poet and performance maker Talya Rubin.

Travelling to the afterlife, an unreliable teenage narrator and her demonic Red Monkey sidekick muse over the disappearance of her fellow Victorian-era orphans and what it’s like to be dead. 

“At the End of the Land is about the liminal space between life and death,” Rubin says. 

“It is an uncanny and unsettling exploration of things that we don’t understand, that we’re trying to grapple and wrestle with in terms of the nature of our existence.” 

Rubin was psychic as a child, claiming to have seen ghosts and the invisible, and she explores her changing relationship to this mysterious realm in the show.

Originally from Montreal, as a child actor she appeared in films and TV shows starring Alan Arkin, James Woods, Loretta Switt and Elliot Gould.

She won a national Canadian poetry award for the most promising poet under the age of 35, and her second collection Iceland is Melting and So Are You was released in 2021.

A visually arresting production with spirit photography, mediumship and projections, At the End of the Land has a frenzied, non-linear narrative.

“I’m hoping that audiences come away with an experience of something that is really dark, immersive and unusual,” Rubin says.

“That alters the nature of their questioning of existence and leaves them with the feeling of more of the mystery of what it means to be alive and human.”

The show was created by Too Close to the Sun, a WA theatre company known for its immersive productions that blend performance, visual art, video and sound.

The company was co-founded by Rubin and Nick James, and features video designer Samuel James, award-winning composer Rachael Dease, and Richard Lester Prize Portraiture-winner Tarryn Gill as the Red Monkey maker.

Part encounter, part gothic horror, At the End of the Land is an uncanny investigation into the things we cannot explain.

At the End of the Land runs November 28 to December 2 in PICA’s Performance Space in Northbridge. Tix at pica.org.au.

by STEPHEN POLLOCK