‘Are We There Yet?’ — Final Reflections and Marisa Carnesky’s Ghost Train

Abstract

In November 2010 we took a short train ride together from our historic, university town of Lancaster to the neighbouring seaside resort of Blackpool. Taking the Blackpool train we were destined for another train: performance artist/burlesque performer Marisa Carnesky’s Ghost Train.¹ Billed as a ‘quirky arthouse funfair ride’, for this show Carnesky and her design team constructed a fairground ghost train, but one to house live theatre acts. The conceit of the show is a journey to a ‘nowhere’: a place in between worlds. This is framed by a speech given in the carefully realised ‘retro’ station waiting room where a ‘mother’ explains that she is striving to keep alive the memory of ‘daughters’ who, in an attempt to keep safe from the encroachments of a terrible war, left their town, boarded a train one night and vanished never to be seen again. The subsequent ten-minute show/ride is a mix of ghost-train conventions and live female apparitions achieved by a combination of traditional theatrical illusions and digital technology. Accompanied by a border guard, the passengers are seated in the carriages and jolted along the sharply twisting, turning track; are plunged into dizzying and disorientating darkness broken up by beautiful, surreal and unsettling tableaux, all the more disquieting for only being glimpsed.