Marion Davies & the Moon
by Adrian Hornsby
A traveller stops at a barn to seek shelter. A woman lets him into her house, feeds him, and takes him to bed. Later that night she hands him a knife. Her husband is asleep beside them.
Marion Davies and the Moon is a mixed-media play, incorporating film and dance, and drawing on the French nouveau roman, film noir, and the ineluctably gorgeous Hollywood of the '20s and '30s. Elements composing narrative are laid down and taken up again as the forms shift, but the characters remain somehow constant. It is possible almost to rearrange everything and keep finding the same. There is the sense that we are always re-expressing ourselves — that we are always re-expressing, and that we are always ourselves. And so it is possible to tell the story of a whole life using only isolated moments, transposed among variant settings.
‘Scrawls of her body across the bed and outside the fields tracked neat like circuit boards. Cars pass from the stack of the dying day, and the buildings blink, threesixtwo windows, lit like the faces of dice…’
‘Just like those songs that seem to sum up everything you ever had to say and yet have nothing at all to do with your life’
FILMS (SELECTION)
Train station goodbye
dur: 1'15
Marion Davies & the Moon, Train Station Goodbye from kmz on Vimeo.
Take off everything
dur: 2'00
Take off everything reprise
dur: 1'08
That's how strong my love is
dur: 1'11
Marion looks to the moon
dur: 0'33
Stage Screen Lag
Marion Davies & the Moon, Stage-Screen Lag from kmz on Vimeo.
PRODUCTION PHOTOS
PRODUCTION HISTORY
10–15 June 2003
Sudden Théâtre, Paris
Marion Davies & the Moon
by Adrian Hornsby
Original Cast: Cassandre Fiering, Mark Downey, Jeffrey Grice, Martin Lewis
directed by Adrian Hornsby
lighting by Uri Rubenstein
movement with Mik Kuhlman
all films directed by Adrian Hornsby, camera Jethro Massey
