Underworlds have always held a morbid fascination, from Dante to the Duffer brothers. They invert and subvert, and reveal our true selves – or transform them into something monstrous. In the program notes for this hybrid theatre and dance work, with a monologue by Emme Hoy and choreography by Stephanie Lake, director Matthew Lutton cites HP Lovecraft as a key inspiration. A great conjuror of subterranean hellscapes, his work is certainly a good place to start.
Lovecraft’s underworlds tend to have an oceanic (or at least aqueous) source, and his creatures are usually waterlogged and briny. The underworld in Monsters is the result of a giant sinkhole, and the creature at the centre is amorphous, barely glimpsed. Hoy’s script leans heavily into the allegorical nature of Lovecraftian horror, but gives it a distinctly urban, almost mechanistic flavour. This is a monster of the city, the result of an unspoken but communal metropolitan failure.
Alison Whyte is our narrator, beginning the piece from the side of the stage with a cuppa in her hand. It’s a deliberately casual, even lackadaisical opening and it takes a long while to generate the predominant tone: a kind of hushed, compulsive determination. Soon she shifts from third to first-person narration, becoming a woman searching, with the aid of a professional cave diver, for her sister in the depths of the sinkhole.
