Annie is a fan of football. A fan of the boys from her team. She knows the line up, the injuries, every level of play. As a kid she felt like a bird in flight, agile, swift. She loved games. She loved her body and what it was capable of. At sixteen, that was taken away.
Olivia has
had two boyfriends and never had a male friend. She’s never been in love. She
used to think she’d travel and have adventures. But just like the women Annie
mentions, she’s never lived her dreams. She was too scared. Scared of men.
Ruby likes
to run with the boys, but she’s in control. She knows the rules. She knows how
to turn men on and play the game, but she is the one who gets to choose. She
loves sex. She loves sex with young, fit men. And she knows where to get it.
Three women
walk into a club.
We already
know these women so well. Where they come from, what they are looking for and
tonight is the night they might find it. Want to find it. Tonight is the night.
Let’s go.
A chorus of
men. A pack of footballers. They enter the club like they own the place. They
are on the prowl. On the hunt. Looking for sex. Looking for cunt. These are the
men Annie is a fan of, Olivia is scared of and Ruby has fucked before.
A club is
loud, noisy, sweaty, disconcerting. A place to drink and dance and get loose.
Out of control. And in Patricia Cornelius’ In the Club, it’s a place to
confront the predatory nature of men and the complex, complicated relationship
between footballers and the women they target.
The play
was originally commissioned in 2018 for the Adelaide Festival and this is its premiere
in Melbourne, the home of football.
Theatre
Works has been transformed into a nightclub. Red carpet. Red walls. Long vinyl
couches at each end of the room. These are places to take a rest, meet someone
and maybe struggle to get out of and away from. Bethany J Fellowes has used
every inch of the space to create a sparse but epic battleground.
Niklas
Pajanti’s lighting and Sound Engineering by Evan Drill & Daniel Gigliotti
cement the audience in the nightclub, the heavy bass beating in our chests and
ringing in our ears. This is the feeling of late nights, dark corners and a
dancefloor that contains a multitude of possibilities.
Laid over
the top of this monochrome space, Aron Murray’s video designs combine
projections of intimate moments and a dazzling array of lines and shapes. Now
the space feels like it could transform into anything – the space expands and
contracts, depending on the lines and boundaries of his work.
The digital
effects also work in concert with tracks by Jaguar Jonze (from her debut album),
that transforms a text of bracing, confronting dialogue into that dreaded hybrid - a play with songs.
Director
Kitan Petkovski’s choice to integrate songs into this piece is odd and
distancing. While Jonze’s lyrics and melodies are affecting, they interrupt the
flow of the script. Cornelius’ work is full of the kind of rhyme and wordplay
that create action and thought and feeling – sometimes devastating – without
the need to rely on theatrical trickery to boost the drama.
I think
back to the opening of Cornelius’ play SHIT, which is a barrage of the
word fuck and then a torrent of invective from the three characters of the
piece. It’s confronting, challenging and hard to take. The performers brought
those characters to life, but the text itself was brutal.
The text of
In the Club contains a different kind of brutality but the language is
equally charged and the tension is baked into the situation. Once we escape the
relative safeness of three back-to-back monologues, the play itself could go
anywhere.
When the
men arrive on Cornelius’ page, they are indistinguishable from each other. Just
MEN. The tautness of the dialogue, with its specific cadence, is the driving
force. Line to line, scene to scene, we are trapped in that club. Those three
women with a pack of men.
Each time a
song drops in, the drama relaxes. Even though I enjoyed a lot of the songs and
the digital art that went with them, I wanted to get back to the characters. The
tightness of Cornelius’ work was dissipated.
Her writing
is still there, of course. And the trio of actors bringing the women to life
are top notch.
Brigid
Gallacher’s Olivia is the stand-out and she has the toughest material to deal
with late in the play, but before that, she gets to have the kind of fun you
can have when you meet someone for the first time – even if he’s a dickhead
footballer.
Michelle
Perera’s Ruby is confident, but tired of the games. She gets most of the funny
moments, rebuffing another player because she can have her pick and she’s had
this one already. Perera’s energy is exciting from moment to moment, and the
history of this woman is in the way she carries herself and performs for the
crowd.
Eva Seymour
layers Annie with toughness and vulnerability, since we get to know the child
before she’s assaulted by one of her heroes. Everything else is armour and a
desperation to set things right.
But
otherwise, the production smothers and strangles the text in strange ways. For
every powerful moment of revelation, we get a song to unpack the subtext, or
lyrics projected on the wall to overwhelm us with information.
Musician Jonze
describes her debut album, Bunny Mode, as a work of collective strength
and anger. Cornelius’ work is not that. The women in this play are weighed down
by a society that brands them sluts and troublemakers and they carry
internalised misogyny with them. They absolutely don’t share a collective
strength, even if their anger is clear.
Where the
play itself is knotty and unsentimental, this production want us to think it’s a
story of female empowerment. But it’s not that simple. These things never are.
- Keith Gow, Theatre First
In the
Club is playing at
Theatre Works until November 11th
Photo: James Reiser
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