Fetch review: Superb art-horror installation about impending disaster

Two strangers meet onboard a flight in this installation, presented inside a shipping container. Photo: Paula Trojner

The Lir Academy, Dublin Fringe Festival

★ ★ ★ ★

“There are varying degrees of anxiety, from a general sense that something is wrong to full-blown panic attack,” says someone in Fetch, the superb new installation by Lauren-Shannon Jones and Samantha Cade. This mystery voice, omnipresent and dissembled, seems to be summing up the plot structure of a horror story. 

Set onboard a flight, the installation seats us inside a dark shipping container. The details of aircraft interior design inspire Fenna Von Hirschheydt’s excellent lighting, recreating the half-light of a cabin. Overhead illuminations announce the arrival of two passengers sitting across from each other. One is afraid of flying and the other has flown too much. 

By virtue of being presented inside a corrugated steel container, Jones and Cade’s production will inevitably draw comparisons to those sonic impresarios Darkfield - whose horror installation Séance ships to Dublin next month. But Séance, despite its neat illusions, is more a collage of genre motifs - the rogue phantom, the scenery ripping apart. Fetch has a plot, in the darkly clever script written by Lauren-Shannon Jones.

Through headphones, we hear the two passengers make awkward small talk before sharing personal details about themselves. One man, the nervous flyer, collects data for a corporation. But the other passenger is a frequent flyer, uprooted between time zones, burning carbon emissions by giving lectures on environmental sustainability. He couldn’t be living a more depressing life than if he were based on a fetch, a supernatural apparition signalling imminent death, which, in Jones’s script, he is. 

Similarly, director Samantha Cade’s production has a touch of the otherworldly, as it gently transports us between the dim cabin to a mystical self-relaxation lesson - where the calm instructor eventually transforms into something more ghastly. Even in that nirvana storm clouds gather, and doom feels inevitable.

As in her mind-warping play Viva Voce, Jones weaves in psychological theories with satiric lightness. In one scene, a character talks about a behavioural study showing participants different states of tooth decay. Those intensely exposed to the most festered teeth began to demonstrate signs of ignorance in their own lives. Human apathy seems untroubled, and possibly even an unsettling cover for environmental catastrophe.

The plane starts to shake towards its plummet, but Fetch doesn’t show the gore of the crash. It’s more interested in the warning signs of impending disaster, portrayed in art-horror atmospheric touches. The anxieties of the cabin are heard in Leon Henry’s painstaking sound design, against the deafening grind of a catering trolley. Most unnerving is when the installation takes one passenger’s advice: if you think something is wrong, study the expressions of the cabin crew. Warped and disturbed, they give us their answer. 

Runs until Sep 22nd.