The Secret Room
Roberta Bosetti directed

by Renato Cuocolo

Over the past few years Renato Cuocolo and Roberta Bosetti have been on a remarkable theatre journey in their provocative and highly original trilogy Interior Sites Project: Room of Evidence/The Secret Room/The Water Room.

The trilogy unfolds with seven audience members being collected from a point in the city where the drama begins.

They are driven to a secret location, enter an unfamiliar house, have dinner, become acquainted with this woman and her stories, and the sleep overnight, to be returned to the pick-up point the following morning.

This project has created huge interest in Australia and overseas as a small group of people joined Roberta Bosetti in a dramatic and intimate investigation into a woman's memories of a troubled past.

In 2000, The Secret Room won Most Innovative Performance at the Green Room Awards and was awarded the MO Award for Best Production of the Year.

“The Secret Room” addresses and explores in a highly charged atmosphere, ideas and themes that have been received with great interest from audience and critics:
- The concept of the private house as a public stage.
- The relationship between woman, home, placement,
   domesticity and personal space.
- The mechanism of the concealment of the uncanny by the familiar

“The Secret Room” is based on the utilization of the private house in such a way that domestic and personal space are exposed to the outside viewer. In this way the viewers have access to an intimacy which is usually denied to them. The house is not a back drop for the stage but a trap for reality. Real life space and theatre space overlap.

“The Secret Room” attains an instant wholeness. Everyday existence and that of the theatre share the same rhythms and interweave with one another.
It’s not a performance presented in a house, but rather a theatricalization of the nature and functions of a house. What is enacted is the relationship between private and public. The house has become a stage for private life.

We believe that the spectator should inhabit the space/performance rather than look at it.
In “The Secret Room” there is no intermediary between the spectator and the protagonist (box-office, foyer) nor is there separation of conventional space as in a theatre (stalls, stage). There is only the direct relationship between the protagonist and the viewer with the possibility of some exchange, of an agreement. We use all the rooms of the house: the entrance hall, the sitting room, the kitchen, the bed rooms, the dining room, where dinner will be served, and the secret room.

This is the most intimate and isolated place that belongs to every house - the place in which everything that ought to remain hidden comes to light.

something is uncanny- that is how it begins

“The Secret Room” deals with the traces of an alterity which refuses to be totally domesticated. The uneasy sense of the unfamiliar within the familiar, the unhomely within the home. In this slippage from homely to unhomely surfaces an intimate violence within the familiar domain, which is to say, the domain of the family, the homestead, the house. Being domestic, but utterly foreign, exposes the covert operations of the house. The ostensible order of the house is itself repressed, domesticated by the very domestic violence it makes possible.

“The Secret Room” is a performance about rules, control, surveillance and punishment.
It addresses the insidious but pervasive logic of placement: the house as a place of confinement for women. Women must inhabit the structures they demolish, and within them they must shelter an indestructible desire for interior life.
In the development of the text, we have used strong references to the real life of the actor protagonist of the performance (Roberta Bosetti). Through a long and at times painful process of recollection, we are constructing a text based on her personal and intimate experiences. The final text is a fine balance between reality and fiction..
During “The Secret Room” the structure of the home, with its private and public rituals, emerges and deeply connects with Roberta’s personal memories in an intense way. The house is an organic and architectural incarnation of emotions experienced by the actor. Using the house facilitates a thematic return to the source of all our recollections: the family house of our childhood.

Beneath the powerful writing is the under-the-skin experience of oppression for being “other”- a Jew, a black, a lesbian, and always, a woman. But this is not the story of a victim. This woman is a fighter in red dresses. Anger, in the guise of rage or irony, fuels the work; compassion and insight temper it.This writing comes from a deep dark place. Listen for the rage; you‘ll hear it. Listen again, and you’ll hear laughter, the light side of the dark, the surplus of pleasure from that powerful release.

The ordinary is not ordinary. It is extraordinarily uncanny.