Sydney Fringe: Slut

Slut is a short and snappy Fringe Festival contribution, directed by Natarsha Wrensted who has melded a great ensemble from the performers.

Patricia Cornelius’ 2008 script presents multiple characters—a gaggle of school girls—who circle around the slut: Lolita. The black stage is minimally dressed with functional plastic-and-metal chairs and white rectangles of screen and scrim (designers Christina Hatzis and Andrew Lee).

With the opening words, “A man is dead”, the story of Lolita (played by Felicity McKay) begins to unfold.

The girls have known her all their lives, they tell us. Using childish body language and vocal expression, they recreate playground admiration and jealousy. She’s smart, they say. Every one of them claims to be Lolita’s best friend.

But group dynamics change as Lolita’s breasts develop, especially when a certain male teacher pays 9-year-old Lolita special attention.

Through body language, the actors differentiate their school-uniform-clad characters, creating a sense of individuals. Each actor physically conveys the new, different ways they inhabit their bodies as they grow from girls to young women.

Tossing the lines from one to another, the girls create a whirlwind of emotion at the same time as presenting different perspectives. At one stage each tells of unwanted attention from men : “We’d by then experienced being touched … Is this meant to be nice?”

Lolita herself is a blond-haired baby bombshell whose pubescent sexuality is convincing and appalling at the same time. In the role, Felicity McKay embodies Lolita’s strutting, her overly loud laughter, her compulsion to be the centre of attention.

The girls at first are in awe of this early developer. But their attitudes change from admiration to disgust in an emotional shift that sweeps up the audience, making us uncomfortably complicit, along with the girl “friends”.

The play’s conclusion returns to the man whose death was announced at the beginning. But we still don’t know who this man actually is; he isn’t a character we have grown to know and like, so we have no emotional investment in his fate. His death makes a moral point, rather than an emotional one: he dies attempting to protect Lolita from violence that her sluttiness has unleashed.

This particular turn of events feels forced and artificial. Although the play sets out to explore unfair social judgements of sexually active women, it ends up reflecting old-fashioned ideas that female sexuality is a fearsomely powerful force that kills and destroys.

In a gentle moment, Lolita whispers that she wishes she could have imagined something more for her life. This is a tender acknowledgement of how her own and other people’s views of her constricted and confined her—making her “dumb”, for example, where she had previously been smart.

“Slut” is a harsh label and when applied (to women only, of course), can have devastating impact. But sadly, this play ends up discouraging women from owning their sexuality, rather than claiming it. Nevertheless, bringing the issues to the surface is valuable, and this ensemble’s zinging energy gives it entertainment value as well.

Cast: Ashley Avci, Christopher Broadbent, Brigitta Brown, Sophie McCrae, Rowan McDonald, Felicity McKay, Elisa Scott, Zoe Tomaras Kimberley, Jane Watt