Country: Belgium Language: French and English (with Spanish subtitles) Approx. duration.: 1 hr 15 mins (no interval) Year of production: 2012
"Fabrice Murgia's Ghost Road is an accomplished road movie full of nostalgia and dreams"
- LA LIBRE BELGIQUE
An older woman is alone onstage. She is the only one left in an empty city where human civilisation has receded. She goes in search of the reasons for this decay and for her loneliness. Has she been left behind by a hastily fleeing community, or has she consciously opted for abandonment?
The inspiration behind this production is a journey that Fabrice Murgia and Dominique Pauwels - two of European theatre's leading emerging talents - took through ghost towns, past dilapidated houses and rusty gas stations in California, Arizona and Nevada. The journey is an initiation, a quest, an exodus... Through it they tell the stories of the men and women who left.
The work was premiered on September 20 last year in Rotterdam's Rotterdamse Schouwburg and, before arriving at the Festival de Otoño a Primavera, could be seen in November at the Temporada Alta of Girona. Following its opening night, Belgium's De Standaard newspaper wrote: "With Ghost Road, Fabrice Murgia has created for our epoch an ambitious work of art: a requiem for the West and a declaration of faith in something new. Ghost Road is the mental state of the West, of which the eternal belief in progress seems to have become an empty house, mortgaged by a system exhausted by its excessive ambition. Culture as an old lady. Murgia brings this swan song marvellously to life".