Daisy Chain

Daisy Chain tells the story of two children?/ teenagers? who find themselves in hell after picnicking in the forest. Unfortunately, the audience also found themselves in hell for the duration of the grueling two-and-a-quarter hour run time.

Writers Eryn and Alan Skinner were operating within an absurdist framework and they hit the nail on the head. Everything about Daisy Chain was so utterly absurd that it successfully distanced and alienated the entire audience.

I got the idea we were in for a long night during the first scene change. Apparently hell is run by ‘technicians,’ robotic drones dressed in white coveralls. Their purpose for the evening was to document everything that happened to the children and generally irritate us. Each scene change was performed in complete silence with the two technicians walking on and off stage, first removing each set item piece by piece then setting all the new items … piece by piece. You can understand how irritating this was when two people have to clear and set a number of set items one by one. No wonder the first act ran for one hour and forty minutes.

Oh, didn’t I mention that? THE FIRST ACT RAN FOR AN HOUR AND FORTY MINUTES. It was comforting that, during interval, I overheard a number of other audience members asking “How much more is there?” Obviously it wasn’t just me. Then, following the fifteen-minute interval, the second half ran for a grand total of twenty minutes. Absurd.

The play itself could have been set in the lunchroom of the philosophy department at Melbourne University. Every scene was a discussion on post-modern sin, semantics, the meaning of life, the meaning of time, misanthropy, and more. It is completely unreasonable to expect an audience to follow such a wide range of complex topics for such a prolonged period of time.

In the second half we find out that one of the children is actually dead and has to stay in hell but the other is free to go. And what is the moral we get from this two-and-a-quarter hour marathon? The power of choice.

So go and see Daisy Chain if you want to, it’s your choice.

Ian Nisbet