Girl Shut Your Mouth
Four young women are talking in a teenage bedroom, walking the tightrope between schoolgirl and womanhood – trying to be grown-up packing a suitcase, but clinging to a childhood toy that won’t get left behind. Each asserts themselves, takes a joke as an insult – it’s a great study in adolescent conversation, until Katie almost screams at the others ‘So then where is your bullet?’
Quickly, we think we’re in a different time and place: this is dystopia, sometime in the future – except we’re not. It’s now, and if it’s not right here, it’s close to it. These young women are today’s refugees, fleeing violence and oppression to find a better life elsewhere, maybe right here. Except these four women are white and western.
Gita Bezard’s Australian dark comedy is confronting, cleverly mixing the struggles of finding yourself and becoming an adult, with a society that doesn’t just push them down for being female, but wants them dead.
Deadset Theatre pull no punches as a young people’s theatre company dealing with challenging themes. Director (and Deadset co-founder) Matilda Butler skilfully shapes her four performers, allowing each to ascend and take the lead, before fading back to allow another to take her place. And Butler has a great ensemble to work with: Lizzie Zeuner is the dominant Katie: equal parts condescension and over-the-top smugness at being the only one injured enough to be able to escape. Jasmyn Setchell is at the other end of the clique spectrum – her character, Darcy, is anxious, outwardly scared, yet practical, trying hard to balance her concern for the group with that for her own life.
Zeuner and Setchell give remarkable, though very different performances. Zeuner exemplifying the audience’s hope that this is just fiction, with Setchell bringing us crashing back to earth with a natural realism to remind us this is most definitely happening outside the four walls of the theatre.
Ashlynn Blunt is brilliant as the level-headed Grace, the understated anchor of the clique. Blunt is entirely believable as someone who has experienced so much trauma that it’s now the norm, chewing up her hard-to-swallow dialogue and delivering it so calmly. Despite Katie’s volume and brashness, it’s Grace who guides the group through the first half of this story, and Blunt achieves that with a subtlety and experience beyond her years.
But the second half is all about Mia (Mia Ellis), who when she thinks she’s let down the group in an earlier experiment, seeks redemption through even riskier behaviour. Ellis’ transition from superficial self-confidence to traumatised victim is exceptional. It’s heart-breaking and real.
These four escalate and accelerate the story to its shattering climax, with most of the ensemble crumbling their facades to show the real fear and uncertainty beneath, whilst Blunt’s Grace confidently takes control of their destiny. Oscar Sarre’s sound design ominously underpins throughout the performance, but it’s at this distressing conclusion that it takes a more leading role.
Zoe Muller balances light and shadow in her lighting, and director Butler has stripped back the set to designs made in brightly-coloured tape on the floor, between the two rows of seat either side of the traverse stage setting. That stage presentation brings the audience right into the action – the performers engage us, confront us, looking us straight in the eyes as they deliver another stinging line, so that we’re participants in this drama, not just observers. Butler uses all of this space to define scenes and places. However, the length of the traverse meant that the teenage bedroom was a little distant and its visibility impaired by the seating arrangement. But even this doesn’t diminish the power of the story and these four women taking us on their journey with them.
The shock of this story is increased because writer Bezard has taken these four characters out of the environment of high school tensions and placed them into one that’s still familiar, but where it happens only to ‘other people’. Deadset’s Girl Shut Your Mouth immerses us, and it’s exciting, real, and devastatingly essential.
Mark Wickett
Photographer: Paul Butler
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