By Gur Arie Pipepskovitz

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His 30th birthday was the trigger for Gur to realize that he has never been in a relationship and his expectations of love are unrealistic. In a ‘rational’ response Gur will embrace and embody his alter-ego, the scandalous Victorian author Mary McLane who was waiting for her loved one to come and take her away -The Devil.

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This night Gur and Mary will finally stop waiting. To help them with their mission, Gur recruits his eccentric friend- Maya to be a subservient maid for Mary and to act as a subversive accomplice for him. While performing a satanic ritual, they will scheme through Gur’s inventory of ex’s to understand what went wrong and will invoke the Devil so they could, at last, gain true love.

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As the piece unfolds we witness three interlinked power dynamics; between Gur and Maya, Mary and the devil and Mary and her maid. In constant role-playing, these multi-faceted characters will fight for control, love and recognition, slowly losing the distinction between their alter-egos and their true selves.

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It's a 57-minute edgy tragicomedy, for two actors and a MacBook Pro, about modern love in the digital age and our attempts to find our other half through rather devilish acts (quite literally, in our case).        

After two successful runs of lust and witchery, we wish to keep spreading the message that finding love can be difficult. With humans and with demons.

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With Maya Goldstein, Performed in the Nunnery Gallery and Chisenhale Dance space.

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Artists Feedback:

The achievement of your work — and this really was a capstone piece — was in the way in which the piece itself evidenced your research, your theatrical vocabulary and your social consciousness. Neil Bartlett on steroids filtered through the occult. In other words, what you found a way to do here was to animate the barely latent narrative of power and desire within modern theatre that, for instance, Genet tuned to and activated for us so brilliantly, harnessing it, as you did, to deeper, wider, political and social ideas without ever needing to say that outside the metaphor of the theatrical space. This was a piece about modernism and modernity, about existentialism and angst, about national and personal identities, about youth and ageing, change, love, and about the limits of language to express the violently surreal nature of the life we live, with anything like adequacy. It was about what it means to have to go to extremes. It had risk, bravura and deep intellectual roots in 20th century theatre, art and literature. Joy and pain, loss and shame — how close they all are. Your writing was extremely powerful. Magic and the occult are attempts at making sense of the world, of unearthing knowledge in alternative ways, of tuning in to different levels of consciousness — yes, that is also what theatre can do.

Clair McDonald is a theatre writer, editor, theatre practitioner and  a Unitarian minister.

This was a full-bodied crafting of your vision into a unique work that at the core wedded your autobiographical material to a biography and in form married performance self-disclosure to a kind of gothic drama for two hands. Its great success was in its hybridity and how this expanded into the mirrored territories of ego and alter-ego, master and servant. These were part of the architecture of this full-length piece that was both written and devised, theatre and performance. You managed to introduce life of Mary McLean deftly to your audience with an audacity that characterizes your work, weaving in the idea of reincarnation and magical practice and thinking that left you plausibly both yourself and the other, dual gendered and costumed – a strong presence as the subject and object of what would unfold.

Graeme Miller is an artist, theatre maker and composer. 

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This is definitely one of the BEST SHOWS I've seen in the last years. Ravishing, fun, and with a twist of magic. A dialogue across centuries to tell two parallel stories that merge in the same consuming and timeless search for 'the one'...

Giulia Casalini is an indepedent curator & producer.

 

Video and full script of the production on request.

 

Link to more pictures from Victim

 

Link to a blog written about Victim by Jenny Mathews (in Japanese) 

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