A performance installation by Kim Collier and Jonathon Young

Produced by Electric Company Theatre

Presented by Magnetic North Theatre Festival

World Premiere: June 5-14, 2008 - Centre for Digital Media Great Northern Way Campus, MST Territories/Vancouver

Don't trust the narrator

This performance installation about the unreliability of the narrative voice is performed in a long, vertiginous corridor inside an East Vancouver warehouse. A kind of companion piece to At Home with Dick and Jane, central tension is drawn between portraits of the ‘simple life’ and the inherent distortions of obsessive self-reference. The story of Mr. and Mrs. Flannigan is told in two lines: “Mr. Flannigan is blind, Mrs. Flannigan is lame. They are old, they are happy, they have each other.“ In this concise description, we find both domestic and narrative bliss. But when a wanted felon signs on as the Flannigans’ narrator, their affairs become increasingly difficult to bring into order. The once happy couple age rapidly, become afflicted and during a wild night of debauchery at a Dadaist cabaret called The Cadaver, the Narrator loses all trace of the Flannigans and becomes subject to his own narration. The Flannigan Affair experiments with a miniature replica, extending the stage into infinite variations of itself; while sensual staging evokes the language and logic of dream.

Part of HIVE2, The Flannigan Affair was popular enough with audiences to cause at least one fight over the flag needed to hold a place in line. Once inside, an exclusive audience of twelve partygoers experience the dizzying visual ecstasy unfold down the long, narrow corridor. At fifteen minutes in length, the show is a playfully surrealistic bite-sized experience. In 2008 it was shared by a cast of six, ten times per night over the course of HIVE2 at the Magnetic North Theatre Festival – 100 performances in total.

HIVE2: Created and co-produced by Boca del Lupo, Electric Company, Felix Culpa, Leaky Heaven Circus, Neworld Theatre, The Only Animal, Radix, Rumble Theatre, Theatre Replacement,Theatre SKAM, and Theatre Conspiracy.