'The very simple elements employed so ingeniously here - a stage within a stage, smoke, darkness, light and sound - powerfully call up your own memories of fear or threat. The theatre becomes, quite nakedly, a kind of psychic echo chamber.' Alison Croggon, Theatre Notes.
'Saulwick’s masterstroke is to use as few pointers as possible so the space we inhabit most of all is our own imagination. The objects and anecdotes are triggers and mnemonics into our deepest fears ...' Fiona MacGregor, Realtime.
'Together she and Knight make a sort of magic that immerses all the senses. Pin Drop packs a visceral punch and leaves behind echoes: the audience telling their own stories in the foyer later.'
Allison Browning, jemima is not my name
'Tamara Saulwick is a powerhouse performer that drags the audience kicking and screaming. Pin Drop is a tour de force of fear.'
Stephen Russell, Time Out Melbourne
'One of the most extraordinarily involving and rewarding theatrical experiences. Unforgettable. Go.'
Geoffrey Williams, Stage Whispers
'Genuinely startling one-woman show.'
Richard Watts, Artshub
'Pin Drop makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and might leave you scared of the dark.'
Anne-Marie Peard, AussieTheatre.com
'A very stylish and ambitious performance … a descent from the relative security of the actual world into the murk of the unconscious.'
Tony Reck, Realtime
Urszula Dawkins speaks with Creator/Performer Tamara Saulwick about Pin Drop
Threats – whether real or imagined – have a way or playing out within our bodies. A noise in the house at night: will you get up, throw the lights on, grab a baseball bat and investigate? Or freeze solid and listen, preparing to grab keys, jump out the window and find a place to hide? Or will you say ‘it’s just the wind’ and turn over and go back to sleep?
Pin Drop is a close-up look at fear, built around a series of audio interviews – true tales told by people about curly experiences. Listening to a super-suspenseful contemporary music work some years ago inspired Tamara Saulwick to make a performance work with a similar quality – a tension that would run from beginning to end. The music work involved “playing the inside of a piano”; Pin Drop instead knocks and plucks at the mind’s dark corners, telling stories in order to elicit our own memories of threat, reaction and response.
Saulwick knows from experience that in a scary situation, no one can predict how they’ll behave. “We imagine it and people play out scenarios in their minds,” Saulwick says, “but what actually happens in that moment of fight or flight – we don’t really know until the moment occurs.”