Gather, sweet acolytes, and feast upon this year’s vision of Worship – Memento Vivere.

Perth collaborative, Foxglove Productions, have been bringing this creation to FRINGE WORLD annually since 2019; each time more ambitious, elaborate, and expansive. Not merely a show, Worship is a dark avant-garde experience and after previous seasons in festival tents and nightclubs, The Rechabite Hall lands strongly as a venue, almost a coming home for such performance art.

Equally a show to watch, to listen to (with a carefully curated sound design) and even to smell, with incense and rosemary. If not for covid protocols, taste and touch may even have been included. Moody, gothic, and starting near the witching hour, the performers embrace death, the afterlife, and rebirth, a journey of transformation not just for them, but also the audience.

Claustrophobic, unsettling, one act metaphorically bleeding onto the floor, another drowning to a persistent industrial heartbeat, a swirling downward spiral – these are death, and they are legion. Reaching down to the pit of the stomach, to grab our unconscious id, and throttle it. An uncomfortable feeling of deep loss, whilst children nonchalantly play.

After death, monsters trapped, bound, chained, battling fire, blood, and pain. Anubis, weighing each of our hearts against the feather. Angels, fearsome to gaze upon, terrifying in their grace and beauty.

And finally, the phoenix rising, flying, surrounded by embers, falling in lazy circles. Jaw dropping, even from behind our mandated masks. Anointing both the performers and the audience back to life.

At points, you just watch and take it in, uncertain of what is coming next, lost in the utter wonder of it all. Astonishing local talent with a fantastic sense of storytelling, unafraid of strong artistic choices. Memento Vivere puts one in mind of Mulholland Drive, Hannibal, or The Cell, a surrealist dream musing on death, existence, and reality, that we, the audience, literally wake up from when it ends.

A triumph.