Review - Animal

Animal

Created by Susie Dee, Kate Sherman and Nicci Wilks

Director - Susie Dee

Performers – Kate Sherman and Nicci Wilks

Composer – Kelly Ryall

Designer – Marg Horwell

Lighting Designer – Andy Turner

Projected Text and Dramaturgy – Angus Cerini

Producer – Adam Fawcett

Theatre Works – St Kilda

17 to 27 November 2016

Susie Dee, Kate Sherman and Nicci Wilks, with the assistance of Angus Cerini, have had the courage to delve into the murky depths, and usually hidden experience, of the insidious damage of abuse.  Marvelously they have extracted a poignant poetic essence.  And with the help of an exemplary production team are sublimely communicating this to audiences.  

Designer Marg Howell has created what looks like a found space and made Theatre Works feel cavernous.  It is fitted out, like a huge shed, with metal encased water tanks.  There is a sense of being in the country feathers are littered and float about and a kind of angel bell is ringing.  Two young barely clad women are perched near the rafters like featherless birds with clipped wings who are unable to escape and destined to an existence of ‘acting out’.  Imagery abounds and so do semiotics.

Composed sound (Kelly Ryall) is often effectively loud at times, and at some points appropriately disturbingly overwhelming.

Animal interprets the tragic effects of the internalized response to abuse.   It is not the experience of being violated we witness.  It is the resulting carnage that is expressed through the exceptional work of performers/co-creators Kate Sherman and Nicci Wilks.  The ordeal is relived again and again.   A huge energetic expression of trauma is exhibited through their strong vigorous physical performances.

Wilks is extraordinary in her capacity to morph into an innocent child.  Evidently the abuse, this work is most particularly looking at, is the sexual abuse of young girls.  This aspect of victimization is depicted as children dancing in a ‘sexy’ way for someone.  There is a weary desperation in this dance, a sense of fretful apprehension.  It is evident that their aim to please is marked with a deep fear and a kind of defeated resignation.

The perpetrator is absent, but his presence is palpable.  He is rendered an absent shadowy figure – a larger than life specter that will always haunt.  His victims may have murdered him, however if this is the case, it is to no or very little avail.  His dark presence looms larger than life.

All roads seem to lead to a bottomless pit of psychological pain.  This devastation is expressed with amazing clarity in a kind of helpless, hapless stillness.

The abstracted roles these two women play interchange between victim and bystander, inferring an unavoidable situation.   They take on dresses – guises.  There are two distinctly different costumes one indicates more kudos the other outright victim status.  Although throughout there is a shared victimhood and a strong sense of sisterhood even when they attack each other.   They express an extraordinary intimacy through shared experience.

One discussion I had in the foyer likened the work to The Boys (the film adaptation by Stephen Sewell).  However it is not so much the horrifying edge of threat we witness, as audience, but the overwhelmingly demoralizing results of violation.  It is not frightening but enlightening.

Also in the foyer while I was half listening in to someone telling me it didn’t make them feel anything, I was observing a woman struggle with her tears.  Responses will by mixed.

This is such a gutsy challenging work – so worth catching – we will be talking about it for years.

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - Shit

Dee & Cornelius Presents

SHIT

By Patricia Cornelius

25 June – 5 July 2015

Southbank Theatre, The Lawler

Director Susie Dee

Set and Costume Designer - Marg Horwell

Lighting Designer – Rachel Burke

Sound Designer - Anna Liebzeit

Producer – Ebony Bott

Performed by – Peta Brady, Sarah Ward, Nicci Wilks

Shit is a vivid and vital work.  A vivid and vital work that is almost uncanny in its capacity to reveal the perpetuating triggers that activate generational carnage in our growing underclass.  It is as though the essence of naturalism has been distilled and refined to highlight the plights of three characters who are very ‘close to the wire’.  And in turn it is presented with a clarity that allows us to touch on the roots of emotion and motivation.  It is like a sharp knife scraping the flesh off the bone and exposing something that is too raw to be fully comprehended.  Cornelius’s insights offer a rarefied satisfaction akin to reveling in the abject. 

Peta Brady, Nicci Wilks and Sarah Ward
Photo -  Sebastian Bourges

Shit is about three ‘forsaken’ women.  Three women who have been brutalized from the onset who have only seen glimmering moments of kindness who support and antagonize each other in their shared wretchedness and viciously defensive vulnerability. 

For the broader community it presents a very sad indictment on what we tacitly accept what is happening in the ever-growing underbelly of our communities.  It is also, at times, heartwarming and poignant as it signposts avenues for healing through consistent caring for the very young at least. 

The raw emotion expressed by the actors seems to be barely modified from what one would witness on the streets – but we are watching a refined work of art.

The writing is poetic and vital and is matched so skillfully with beautifully choreographed Physical Theatre and a dash of instinctive magic and insight from Director Susie Dee.

 Peta Brady, Nicci Wilks and Sarah Ward
Photo -  Sebastian Bourges

Something Dickensian is brought out through Dee’s in the direction and a conveyance of how the brutality of surviving has created/modified character.  All three actors (Peta Brady, Sarah Ward, Nicci Wilks) express their characters emotional damage through a kind of stunted physicality and posture as well as in grotesque facial expressions and Cornelius’s carefully chosen words.  Arms are held threatening out from the body and muscles are continually being flexed.   We are engaged on kinesthetic and emotional levels in the desperation and turmoil that each character feels.  Watching these convincing characters on stage offers a remove and a chance to think a bit and try to understand.  And perhaps whisper ‘but for the grace of God?’

The set by Marg Horwell could be some underground tunnel such as the old tunnels at the once Spencer Street Station, they could be street windows and they could be restrictive prison cells.  And featured there is one of those huge round convex magnifying mirrors, that suggests the threat of what could be laying in wait, round the next corner.

Peta Brady, Nicci Wilks and Sarah WardPhoto -  Sebastian Bourges

Anna Leibzeit underpins with a subtly entwined soundscape that is edgy and provocative – at times sharp and disturbing.

Generally people seem to be raving about this very satisfying work.

Suzanne Sandow

Review - Savages

Savages

By Patricia Cornelius

Directed by Susie Dee

Set and costume design – Marg Horwell

Lighting design and production management – Andy Turner

Composition and sound design – Kelly Ryall

Stage Management – Clare Shepherd

George  - Lyall Brooks

Runt – Luke Elliot

Rabbit – James O’Connell

Craze – Mark Tegonning

45 Downstairs

16 August – 8 September 2013

Savages is a rich, rewarding powerful theatrical investigation of the type of masculine reality, relationships and circumstances that support, what is ultimately, predatory anti-social behavior. 

It is based on the Dianne Brimble case and explores events leading up to the discovery of her body in the small cabin on a P&O Cruse Ship that was occupied by the men who drugged and assaulted her.

There is a strong sense of ensemble and all actors excel in their roles working with courageous commitment to the text, that moves smoothly from the heightened poetic to simple naturalism, in an incisively complimentary staging by Director Susie Dee.   

The work is cleverly placed on an abstracted stylized set  (Marg Horwell) - inferring a number of environments including; underneath a bridge, a drawbridge, a ships hull, a ships deck and a disco whilst lights (Andy Turner) greatly assist in creating atmosphere.  Sound created by Kelly Ryall is used to powerful effect both naturalistically and symbolically.  It infers, cruelty, harsh alienation and, at times, expresses a dark foreboding.

Fueled by alcohol and years of disappointing miss-communication with the ‘fair sex,’ these blokes affirm each other’s sense of failure.  They nurture a lustful misogyny through the deeply binding bond, and knowing intimacy, of the type of impaired mateship that ‘others’ women.  They are all needy and craving love but heinous and destructive in their hostile desperation.

Alienation, limited communication skills and possibly intelligence, thwarted expectations, harsh treatment of one another; dishonesty and manipulation all come into play.  In almost all cases the men lack adequate nurturing love in their lives and have some difficulties relating comfortably and appropriately to their Mothers.  They also lack basic lack skills for constructive introspection and the emotional intelligence that we are beginning to understand is so important to teach children and particularly boys at school.

Parallels can be drawn with the film The Boys in that they both explore events leading up to the actual crimes.  Though this work is perhaps more probing and less terrifying than the film of The Boys by Gordon Graham and adapted by Stephen Sewell.

This timely work is engrossing theatre.

(For Stage Whispers)

Review - Beached - MTC

Melbourne Theatre Company

Beached

By

Melissa Bubnic

Director – Petra Kalive, Set Designer – Andrew Bailey, Costume Designer – Kat Chan, Sound Designer – Robert Jordan, Animator – Rebecca Hayes.  Cast: Producer – Anthony Ahern, JoJo – Susie Dee, Louise Fanny Hanusin and Arty Damien Sunners.

Lawler Theatre

22 April – 10 May

Beached is refreshing and engaging and will certainly delight Secondary School audiences with some of the outrageous shocks embedded in the writing, particularly in regard to the use of ‘language’.  It is a fun romp written by a young writer that will be becoming even funnier as it tightens up through consecutive runs.

Arty (Damien Sunners) is over fed and pampered by his suffocating mother JoJo (Suzie Dee).  He sits in a sedentary position on a couch, part human part foam rubber, and eats almost more than is humanly possible.  The reality television program Shocking Fat Stories lays claim to Arty’s story and in doing so attempts to doctor the story for maximum effect and revulsion factor.

But that is not all, there is more to the story as the work touches on a number if social issues with startling and liberating political ‘incorrectness’ at times.

Suzie Dee’s mother character JoJo initially seemingly grounded in clown is a strongly realized, complex and convincingly dogged woman.  Anthony Ahern serves the production well as the producer and delightfully in a number of small video roles.

Although over written and just a bit too long and sometimes calling out for changes in the physical rhythms of the staging the direction is deftly and comfortable handled by Petra Kalive.

Beached is a real gift to Teachers as it touches on many complex issues and MTC have comprehensive and useful teacher notes online.  

Highly recommended!

Suzanne Sandow
(For Stage Whispers)