Ruby Bruise was a play directed by Daisy Brown, written by Finnegan Kruckemeyer and produced by Vitalstatistix Theatre Company.

Freeranger Amy Milhinch was invited by Daisy to set design and concept the look and feel of Ruby Bruise. While the play was very much about 'play,' it was also abstract and surreal. Amy's visual ambition was to give deep meaning in a way that may not be recognised by the mind at the conscious level.

What was the play about?
From her birth, Ruby ages at 10,000 times the normal speed, reaching maturity by the afternoon. She explores the stages of her life from childhood. Awareness of being sexually vulnerable and understanding what it's like to be friends with little girls. Sticky adolescence: being self obsessed and competing to be the centre of attention. What it means to feel utterly alien and to contemplate the side door called death.

How was the play told?
This journey is told by degrees by four performers, each an aspect of her psyche. The audience are privy to her inner dialogue as these diverse parts of Ruby egg one another on, argue, engage in harsh self criticism, play games for all they are worth and occasionally achieve unity.

The brief
Amy's brief was to tell Ruby's story through set design and costuming, to understand and deliver her plight and to communicate who this person was, with all her radical internal personae and her surreal application to her life. It was important that the audience were on Ruby's side, identified with her plight and cared about her. She was to be surprising, magical, funny, outlandish and strange.

The process
Daisy talked about who Ruby was. We read the play. The performers explored ideas in the play and presented them to the creative team. Ruby's place, it was decided, should be safe. It was Amy's feeling that the space should feel like the inside of a thought. Thoughts change and move and are different depending on which way you look at them.

The Waterside Workers Hall, the theatrical space, is a very large room. How was it that we could give the illusion of it being neat and warm and close, but also take advantage of the extent of the space. The solution was to alter it in a profound way, to use the space to create distance and isolation.

From the very beginning the creative direction was around wrapping, and being wrapped. Wrapping is about being safe, surprises, abstraction and guess work. We wrapped things in cloth, making Ruby's set soft and beautiful.

Set Design
The huge hall was cloaked in hundreds of meters of fabric. It was constructed like a giant tent and ran on a pully system. The set began small and neat, representing Ruby's beginning. As the play unfolded so did the set. Folds in the cloth were used to throw shadows, appearing and disappearing. A dialogue was delivered from outside the set, but with a face pressed into the folds, giving a solarised effect.

As the play unfolds, so does the set. At the end of the play Ruby sits at the end of a tunnel, a long way from her source. At this point the distance of the hall is fully realised, as the giant tent pulls long, unfolding the billowing cloth and stretching to a vanishing point.

Costume Design
The pallette was overwhelmingly neutral. Bright colour was introduced to emphasise ideas within storytelling, such as a magic scene, where red indicated showmanship. The four actors were dressed similarly, but not identically, emphasising the various facets of Ruby.

The costumes were all about comfort: trakky dax, long sloppy shirts. The actors were dressed in layers. The costumes were also used as tools to tell Ruby's story. Long socks became skipping ropes, shirts flipped over heads to make monsters. The costumes were super flexible and strechy and sheer, mimicking the space.

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design arts