There is a lot written about Patricia Cornelius' SLUT, which premiered in 2008 and has been performed extensively in Australia, although it tends to tell the same story. That story positions the play as a resistance against 'shame culture', victim-blaming, and labeling of women based on their sexual activity. The play's appearance just before the international SlutWalk demonstrations of 2011 lends itself to this reading - as an attack on attempts to dismiss domestic and other social violences against women with comments like 'she was asking for it' 'she shouldn't have dressed like that' and so on.
Although they don't defend only women, such movements are de facto anti-misogynist in the sense that the term 'slut' is one which is frequently used to devalue women based on a criteria of promiscuity or chastity. Sitting through SLUT, however, in this stripped-back and simple staging by director Rachel Baring at the wonderful Fitzroy theatre The Burrow, a slightly different, and satisfyingly nuanced, picture emerges. Protagonist Lolita (Laura Jane Turner) is characterised as a high-school 'slut' through various events such as giving blow jobs in parks, attracting a queue of boys at parties, stealing boyfriends, and generally, according to the chorus of women which incessantly commentate on her (Lauren Mass, Jessica Tanner, and Michaela Bedel), walking a fine line between high-school domination and total self-destruction via promiscuity. The story is punctuated by Lolita's point of view, offering her dream-like confusion in which she clings to memories in order to define an identity increasingly out of her control.
However, Lolita is not the only narrator of her story, and the most interesting part of the play is perhaps the role of the chorus, which acts as a type of jury for Lolita's promiscuity. This trio run through an endless and hyper-dramatised commentary of Lolita's progress through high school, from her early development of breasts, to being the first to lose her virginity at 12, to her attracting the attention of the male members of the school body. In forming this super-bitchy clique, the chorus work is outstanding, so precise as to seem at times seeming almost choreographed but retaining a responsive and flexible core, as they enact a Jesus-like deitification and crucifixion of Lolita - both revering and diabolising her, sometimes in the same breath. This kind of 'harmless banter', part of the constant bubble of chatter that made up a majority of Australian conversation in high-school, is, to me, what defines SLUT as a truly feminist play, and a great one. It targets the patriarchy indirectly, focusing on its manifestation in a lack of solidarity among women. Supporting this reading is that men are barely present in the play - once as a perverted schoolteacher hitting on Lolita, and once as a year 12 student who she has sex with. Neither are particular positive but both appear as kind of furniture to the main drama of the play - performing a token role of dividing and conquering women.
In this sense, SLUT seems to have very different objectives to its namesake political movement. Whereas the latter attempts to push back against social categorisation of women - largely by patriarchy and presumably using male agents - SLUT is a play about, and speaking largely to, women, asking 'what is to be done?' Like any good tragedy, it focuses on the tragic circumstances and the victim, resisting didacticism and reserving judgement for the audience, whilst offering irrefutable, unavoidable evidence. Yet even though we might view the behaviour of the chorus as repulsive, Cornelius refrains from targeting them, either. Rather, the nuts and bolts of the tragedy are laid out, with the end result a lingering, despairing question of 'Why does this happen?'
And that question is an interesting one, which reverberates even beyond the specific microcosm of the play. Why does Australian society in general, and its high schools in particular, feel the need to create these 'sacrificial lambs' - victims that help to justify or explain the behaviour of the masses? Why this impulse to destroy someone's life to make us feel better? Is a society outside of this categorisation possible - one in which the anxieties of sex, or indeed race and class, in high school can somehow be navigated without the need for the identification and destruction of a tragic hero?
Can't Australians be a little more secure than that?
One senses that, since the play's premiere in 2008, some of these questions have been answered in Australian schools, although conservative-led pseudo debates such as the ongoing Safe Schools fiasco mark significant steps backward for sexual rights. SLUT, however, remains painfully recognisable to those of us who went through Australian high schools in the 90s - particularly in the bush - in this sense, it's perhaps more a play for adults than present-day students. Nevertheless, purely as a call for solidarity between women, SLUT is an important advocate for targeted, well-placed anger as a tool for political agency and collectivity. Far from a didactic and principled woke-rage, the play relentlessly proposes its tragic scenario, and, as mentioned in Baring's director's notes, our complicity within it.
But more's the point, SLUT's call to women is a revolutionary feminist one: to stop punishing each other and thereby participating in the system of control, and rather focus on the real forces that attempt to divide and conquer. With that, its power extends outside of the specific incident that formed the basis for the play, and into nothing short of authentic systemic overthrow. As well as acknowledging its powerful conviction on sexual identity and self-determination, then, it's good to recognise - and perhaps learn from - SLUT's unabashed revolutionary intent, which does not ask concessions from a broken system, instead attempting overthrow through the mechanism of solidarity.
Further viewing - a 2019 conversation at the Wheeler Centre, featuring the playwright and the original director of SLUT, Susie Dee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW0gx9Oj9SM
SLUT
Written by Patricia Cornelius
Directed by Rachel Baring
Performed by Laura Jane Turner, Lauren Mass, Jessica Tanner
and Michaela Bedel
Lighting Design - John Collopy
Sound Design - Daniella Esposito
Stage Management by Jordan Carter
Produced by Michaela Bedel and Jessica Tanner
Until March 21
Although they don't defend only women, such movements are de facto anti-misogynist in the sense that the term 'slut' is one which is frequently used to devalue women based on a criteria of promiscuity or chastity. Sitting through SLUT, however, in this stripped-back and simple staging by director Rachel Baring at the wonderful Fitzroy theatre The Burrow, a slightly different, and satisfyingly nuanced, picture emerges. Protagonist Lolita (Laura Jane Turner) is characterised as a high-school 'slut' through various events such as giving blow jobs in parks, attracting a queue of boys at parties, stealing boyfriends, and generally, according to the chorus of women which incessantly commentate on her (Lauren Mass, Jessica Tanner, and Michaela Bedel), walking a fine line between high-school domination and total self-destruction via promiscuity. The story is punctuated by Lolita's point of view, offering her dream-like confusion in which she clings to memories in order to define an identity increasingly out of her control.
Photo: Jack Dixon-Gunn
However, Lolita is not the only narrator of her story, and the most interesting part of the play is perhaps the role of the chorus, which acts as a type of jury for Lolita's promiscuity. This trio run through an endless and hyper-dramatised commentary of Lolita's progress through high school, from her early development of breasts, to being the first to lose her virginity at 12, to her attracting the attention of the male members of the school body. In forming this super-bitchy clique, the chorus work is outstanding, so precise as to seem at times seeming almost choreographed but retaining a responsive and flexible core, as they enact a Jesus-like deitification and crucifixion of Lolita - both revering and diabolising her, sometimes in the same breath. This kind of 'harmless banter', part of the constant bubble of chatter that made up a majority of Australian conversation in high-school, is, to me, what defines SLUT as a truly feminist play, and a great one. It targets the patriarchy indirectly, focusing on its manifestation in a lack of solidarity among women. Supporting this reading is that men are barely present in the play - once as a perverted schoolteacher hitting on Lolita, and once as a year 12 student who she has sex with. Neither are particular positive but both appear as kind of furniture to the main drama of the play - performing a token role of dividing and conquering women.
In this sense, SLUT seems to have very different objectives to its namesake political movement. Whereas the latter attempts to push back against social categorisation of women - largely by patriarchy and presumably using male agents - SLUT is a play about, and speaking largely to, women, asking 'what is to be done?' Like any good tragedy, it focuses on the tragic circumstances and the victim, resisting didacticism and reserving judgement for the audience, whilst offering irrefutable, unavoidable evidence. Yet even though we might view the behaviour of the chorus as repulsive, Cornelius refrains from targeting them, either. Rather, the nuts and bolts of the tragedy are laid out, with the end result a lingering, despairing question of 'Why does this happen?'
And that question is an interesting one, which reverberates even beyond the specific microcosm of the play. Why does Australian society in general, and its high schools in particular, feel the need to create these 'sacrificial lambs' - victims that help to justify or explain the behaviour of the masses? Why this impulse to destroy someone's life to make us feel better? Is a society outside of this categorisation possible - one in which the anxieties of sex, or indeed race and class, in high school can somehow be navigated without the need for the identification and destruction of a tragic hero?
Can't Australians be a little more secure than that?
One senses that, since the play's premiere in 2008, some of these questions have been answered in Australian schools, although conservative-led pseudo debates such as the ongoing Safe Schools fiasco mark significant steps backward for sexual rights. SLUT, however, remains painfully recognisable to those of us who went through Australian high schools in the 90s - particularly in the bush - in this sense, it's perhaps more a play for adults than present-day students. Nevertheless, purely as a call for solidarity between women, SLUT is an important advocate for targeted, well-placed anger as a tool for political agency and collectivity. Far from a didactic and principled woke-rage, the play relentlessly proposes its tragic scenario, and, as mentioned in Baring's director's notes, our complicity within it.
But more's the point, SLUT's call to women is a revolutionary feminist one: to stop punishing each other and thereby participating in the system of control, and rather focus on the real forces that attempt to divide and conquer. With that, its power extends outside of the specific incident that formed the basis for the play, and into nothing short of authentic systemic overthrow. As well as acknowledging its powerful conviction on sexual identity and self-determination, then, it's good to recognise - and perhaps learn from - SLUT's unabashed revolutionary intent, which does not ask concessions from a broken system, instead attempting overthrow through the mechanism of solidarity.
Further viewing - a 2019 conversation at the Wheeler Centre, featuring the playwright and the original director of SLUT, Susie Dee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW0gx9Oj9SM
SLUT
Written by Patricia Cornelius
Directed by Rachel Baring
Performed by Laura Jane Turner, Lauren Mass, Jessica Tanner
and Michaela Bedel
Lighting Design - John Collopy
Sound Design - Daniella Esposito
Stage Management by Jordan Carter
Produced by Michaela Bedel and Jessica Tanner
Until March 21
