let bleeding girls lie

Three quite different women sit in a row; they are giving blood at the Blood Bank.  Played by three very fine performers, they are clearly strangers, a random collection, no connection whatever beyond being there that day and donating blood.  And they are trapped.  Unless they rip the cannulas from their arms and bolt, they are stuck with each other for the hour or more the process takes.

Director Olivia Satchell takes the risk of letting us simply look at the three for some time, before a word is spoken. Lou (Emily Tomlins), in her jeans, Doc Martens and tank top, looks hip and disaffected.  As if bored to sobs, she stares into space, she yawns, she nods off.  Beside her, Grace (Belinda McClory) very serious, reads a hard cover book; she looks middle-class, prim, and closed, hair pulled tightly back, glasses on a cord.  ‘Juice’ (Chanella Macri), careless how she looks in skirt and top, checks and rechecks her mobile phone; otherwise she has that vacant, somewhere else look of someone all too used to waiting and waiting.

So, we look, we form impressions as to the character of each woman.  By the play’s end, those impressions will be, if not overturned, then radically revised.  Behind and above them, the only other piece of set dressing is a clock with no hour of minute hand – just a seconds hand that sweeps relentlessly round and round and round.  Tom Backhouse’s and Hannah McKittrick’s unsettlingly sound design suggests rather than represents the ambience of the women’s experience, mixing hospital sounds, distant voices, traffic, and industrial white noise.

As the women sit there, ‘live’ television news runs (unseen and unheard by us) on the now omnipresent-in-all-waiting-spaces television screen.  A nail bomb has exploded at a rock concert, causing horrific, bloody carnage; most of the audience are young girls.  That is the context of women’s lives today.  We are intrigued when Lou says, ‘It’s gender specific’.  This news ‘item’, run on a loop, can’t be ignored and each woman’s response – considered, spontaneous or ‘incorrect’ - reveals more of their characters.  Bit by bit, layer by layer, they approach and retreat from each other.  Moved, they offer help, are rebuffed, and shrug it off.  There are many, many apologies for blurted, impertinent remarks and nosy questions.  Is it contrived or merely ‘normal’ that each woman has in her past helpless loneliness, wrenching loss, tragedy, being disregarded, disrespected, and ignored?  What did they do about it?  What will they do about it?

Were this play about three men, it would be an entirely different play. Men would likely be competitive, their stories would be focussed and leave out any emotional commentary, and they would most probably not probe for emotions.  Who knows where that might lead?

There are some puzzling (at least to me) aspects here. There are a series of blackouts, suggesting shock, but the cast make that perfectly clear. Grace discovers that her mouth, or her throat is bleeding. Lou blows up and pops a balloon, and later pulls a bloody string from her mouth.  Many pink balloons fall from above.  Most puzzling of all is the decision to end the play with Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ (the singer here, not one of our three characters, appears to be uncredited).  This inexplicably popular dirge seems to be an attempt to underline what does not need underlining.  It’s redundant; it goes on and on and comes close to dissipating the emotions and insights built by the three fearless, pitch perfect actors.

Nevertheless, as we realise the playwright’s intent and conceit, we are held, fascinated – and we wince, we sigh, we laugh, and we feel deeply for each woman.  This is a bold play in that ‘nothing happens’ – except the peeling away of each woman’s persona – their defences, pretences, evasions and ‘front’ – until something close to the real, vulnerable, self-deprecating but brave and enduring selves are revealed. 

Michael Brindley

This play, let bleeding girls lie, Is the third part of the grief trilogy by Satchell, and it’s planned to stage all three parts at the La Mama Courthouse. There is a fundraising campaign up and running to help this happen.

Photographer: Darren Gill