Cirrus@Austlit

'Tolstoy, Ibsen, Racine, Flaubert, du Maurier.

Five of the most important writers the world has ever known created five of the most important beautiful and dangerous female characters ever written.

Enter Emma Bovary, Hedda Gabler, Anna Karenina, Phedre and Mrs Danvers for the first time ever on the same stage.

At first the landscape looks like a large waiting room. Perhaps it is the runway of a Paris fashion show, or the plains of Purgatory? Or perhaps it is the mythic ballroom at Mandalay or a great salon in St Petersburg?

Four beautiful women arrive only to be greeted by a mysterious woman who controls the entire event. Who are they? Are they lost? Are they suffering from amnesia? Are they searching for their lover or a place to find shelter? But the space is already inhabited and a masquerade ball is about to begin.

What follows is a collision of memories, stories and characters - fragments of lives that end with a dance of death leading towards the inevitable, final brutal denouement that each woman must endure.

To find true beauty each woman discovers that such beauty comes at a cost. Beauty is dangerous. Beauty is difficult.' (Source: http://www.qtix.com.au/event/Beauty_is_Difficult_12.aspx )