This is astonishing theatre. It knows the song the sirens sang was a lullaby.

Cameron Woodhead, The Age, 2010

Ed McCallister is a happily married man who is neither happy nor married. When overlooked for a promotion at work he returns home to find a woman, possibly his wife, setting up an elaborate suicide machine … all he wanted was someone to remember his birthday.

These are the isolate is an unsettling, darkly humorous and tragic tale of the destruction of isolation.

Awards

2010 Melbourne Fringe Award for Best New Writer (Winner)  | 2010 Melbourne Fringe Award Theatre Works Award (Winner) | 2011 Victorian Green Room Award Lighting Design, Independent Theatre (Nominated) – Katie Sfetkidis

Performance History

Originally performed at the 2010 Melbourne Fringe Festival with the following cast and creatives:

Presented by Mutation Theatre | Written by Katy Warner | Performed by Katy Warner & Tim Wotherspoon | Outside Eye and Mentor Matt Scholten | Produced by Patrick McCarthy

Remounted as part of the 2011 Theatre Works Selected Works Program with the following cast and creatives:

Presented by Theatre Works and Mutation Theatre | Written by Katy Warner | Directed by Marcel Dorney | Performed by Katy Warner & Tim Wotherspoon | Lighting Design by Katie Sfetkidis | Lighting Operation by Kris Chainey | Produced by Patrick McCarthy and James Tresise

Reviews

The writing is seriously promising, witty, concrete and detailed … there’s no doubting the promise it reveals, especially in the bold poetic of its theatrical attack.  – Alison Croggon, Theatre Notes, 2011

The writing is outstanding, with a kind of Schroedinger’s Cat quality – you know the experiment where a cat in a box is both alive and dead at the same time until the moment the box is opened and uncertainty is reduced to reality? There are elements of uncertainty at play here, but unlike your standard narrative mystery which involves the withholding of vital facts, this one presents incommensurate realities simultaneously so the mind is forced to switch back and forth between possibilities that can’t be reconciled. It’s a bit like those pictures that are both a lamp and a pair of faces but the brain can’t register both at once. – John Bailey, A Capital Idea, 2010

4 1/2 Stars. Katy Warner’s play is full of rapid-fire word games — a compelling construction of a fractured interior nourished by Beckett. Albee might be another spoke in its wheel. I kept imagining Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? where both Martha and the absent child are phantoms … this is astonishing theatre. It knows the song the sirens sang was a lullaby. – Cameron Woodhead, The Age, 2010