We are seeing what we saw before: the Ghosts of Student Theatre

n March 2013, I returned to an on-campus space at the University of Sydney to direct a student production of Tracy Letts's 2007 play August: Osage County for the Sydney University Dramatic Society (SUDS). It was a space with which I had been intimately familiar as an undergraduate and as the rehearsal process went on, I found myself time and time again citing the work I had made and seen at SUDS in the preceding years to stimulate all manner of discussions around design, rehearsal, and meaning-making. At the same time, the space itself continually reminded me of all this history. From properties, costumes, and equipment, to the marks quite literally returning through the floor, I could hardly move for all the ghosts in these "mnemonically highly charged surroundings" (Carlson 2001, 145). The objects in the space and indeed the space itself were "possessed by the voices of the past" (Sofer 2003, 27), providing glimpses and impressions of a history continually painted over but never quite covered up.