Amazing mix of projections, music, and work makes Mark Murphy’s coma a technical marvel, but the story is ultimately prosaic.

The Wonderful World of Dissociation. It was a game twice. It began with an Alice in Wonderland fantasy, equally funny, surreal, and frightening. After intermission, the scene jumped into a sterile hospital ward, making it clear that we were aware of a young woman’s manic episode earlier, before her treatment began.

What about Mark Murphy’s ambitious Out of this World?

The patient this time is Ellen Jones, played by a wonderful Sarah Swire, athletic, dark and desperate. Her wonderland sits somewhere between the gravity-resistant theater of Robert Lepage and the enigmatic symbolism of David Lynch. Eager to understand her surroundings, she is lost in a confusing universe, hampered by public administration, thrown into the air and shaded by the explosive rays of the sun and the broken glass of video projections that fill the walls.

Presented by V-TOL for an extended UK tour – the show is an engineering marvel, seamlessly integrating Murphy’s film content and Pod Bluman’s projection design with Nathaniel’s Reed ever-present music: one minute of shaky beats, the next relaxed minute of jazz. Aerial work, often the most forgiving discipline, is also performed with grace and purpose.

It is absorbing, dazzling and impressive. And then Swire takes a step forward, the house lights come on and she looks us in the eye.

It is a shocking moment that changes our perspective. But while it is a sign of the manufacturing adventure, it is also the beginning of its downfall. Because that’s where it becomes clear that Jones and her new husband have been in a car accident, and what we’re seeing is the nightmarish effects of a drug-induced coma.

There is no doubt that Murphy brilliantly evokes this state, but once we know what is going on, the mystery dissolves and becomes poetically prosaic. History has nowhere to go. Everything that happened between Jones and her husband Anthony (Scott Hoatson) is in the past and as they act out their love scenes with tenderness and conviction, we don’t know enough that they lose each other.

They are obviously sad. Who wouldn’t be? It’s as if Out of This World is pushing us to feel something – anger, a sense of injustice, or even just a better understanding – that the story doesn’t deserve. You can’t be angry about a car accident. It’s just an accident. In this sense, the show is apolitical; exuberant, spectacular and surprising, but narrow and introverted in his concerns. There is much to love, but a powerful beginning is thwarted by an insignificant conclusion.

Who is Sarah Swire?

She is one of those women who leaves an indelible mark on her mind, a force of nature whose innate self-confidence and total inability to censor herself place her at the center of attention in every social encounter.

An important part, we believe, had to do with the class: it has that unconscious, effortless right common to the British upper classes, that unbridled sense of self-importance that comes from growing around power.

And, judging from the interview and excerpts, it hasn’t changed. Still mischievous as ever, still fond of her own opinions and ruthless in her criticisms of those, invariably almost all, that are missing.

Daughter of former defense secretary and former Lazard bank president Sir John Nott (who, incidentally, has a shape when it comes to bold memoirs, once confessed to appreciating Margaret Thatcher a bit rotten), she is married old Etonian Hugo Swire.

Mark Murphy

Mark’s work for V-TOL generally involved a fusion of art forms – dance, text, music, film, and design – to create rich and complex theatrical experiences that firmly explored human weaknesses and atrocities.

In essence, Murphy’s main interest has always been in human beings: the relationships we have between ourselves and ourselves. The result was a theater that explored the dark side of the human psyche in a direct and honest way, suggesting observations that Murphy has the ability to reveal intimacy, reach dangerous levels of tension, touch extreme sensations and express them. From the beginning, Murphy developed his own vocabulary of movement that would become the hallmark of V-TOL, referred to in the press as a brand of fast-paced, dangerous and dangerous dance theater. Murphy’s style of movement is immediately captivating and theatrically confident.