Ruby Moon and a Beautiful Life

Ruby Moon is a gothic fairytale, with the play repeatedly drawing on the familiar tale of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. A parent’s worst nightmare is to have lost their child, especially if the neighbour is assumed to have been involved. “The child randomly taken from our midst is an all-too-common tragedy which threatens us in a deeply primal way” (Matt Cameron). In using this element of a crippled fairy-tale with the added form of heightened naturalism, there is the constant essence of fears of contemporary suburbia, woods and wolves, of strangers taking what is most precious to people, this effectively has an uncomfortable and unsettling impact on the audience as they are positioned and confronted with the ideas of how bad society could be, and invites them to wonder and relate it back to their own lives and own children. Cameron describes the setting of the play as being “timeless and placeless.” With not specifying where it is, when it was and essentially saying that all of this could happen to anyone.
Cameron states “that the play is as much about what is unseen as that which is seen.” The use of a solitary spotlight on an actor on an otherwise dark stage draws our eyes to the character and the story they tell within that light, but it also makes us wonder about the darkness, what do we imagine is lurky in that darkness? “The Ruby mannequin stands under the street lamp with the moon hovering”, the moon symbolises the ominous indicator of night along with the street only being lit dimly by streetlamps and the Ruby mannequin which is essentially used in desperate hope of extracting information from their neighbours. Sounds of “distant thunder rumbling and rain falling, a soundscape of whistling wind, the echoing of wind chimes and a creaky tree, together with the darkness and thoughts of a taken child, create a sinister atmosphere, of extreme suffering and deepens that sense of unease and fear amongst the audience. This play is a gothic fairytale, like all