Scorched Earth – St Ann’s Warehouse ★★★★★

Scorched Earth turns a cold case into something incendiary.

Writer, director, and choreographer Luke Murphy has created a hybrid of crime thriller and dance that is unpredictable and thought-provoking, and there is little question who the killer is in the murder being reinvestigated. Instead, Murphy focuses on property-based violence and the volatile emotions tied to the idea of ownership — who has the right to claim land, and how far they’ll go to keep it.

The victim: William Dean (Will Thompson), a newly arrived, rather confident property owner who outbids John McKay (Murphy) at auction for a stretch of land that McKay has tended with great care for several years. But the victory comes at a great cost, as Dean may have won the auction but in so doing lost his life that same evening. And one of his orange shoes.

The local authorities ruled the death an accident, but a decade later Detective Kerr (Sarah Dowling) reopens the case. Her interrogation sessions with McKay make up the bulk of the play, though not in a conventional form. Scenes seamlessly blend into each other, text and choreography accumulating toward a climactic coup de théâtre where the five cast members (Tyler Carney-Faleatua and Ryan O-Neil among them) dismantle Alyson Cummins’ striking set to reveal a steep green slope where the murder is re-enacted, in a style more intent on capturing emotion than uncovering fact.