A review by Vanessa Bunn for EXTRA! EXTRA!
Spartan Dogs presents
by Jane Shepard
Director - Stephen Darcy
Designer – Nikki Coleman
Running as part of the Gaea Theatre Festival, which aims to explore “women in conflict, love, science and incarceration”, Jane Shepard's Nine, which has also been produced as an award winning 16mm film, certainly meets the brief.
Nine opens by plunging the audience into the stark world of its two tormented characters, 1 and 2, played by Mary Mallen and Emily White. The opening sound in this short, sharp shock of a play is rapidly running water, initially soothing, then becoming more urgent and threatening. The initial interpretation of the sound is rapidly dispelled when the audience discover two chained and beaten women on-stage. What follows is a play that explores the power of words and the complex, almost Beckettian relationship between the two main characters, which brings to mind that of Vladimir and Estragon of Waiting for Godot in its intensity and inscrutable nature.
It is not made explicit what tortures and experiences the women are forced to endure when taken from the room in turns. It is exactly the fact that the women endure untold and unimaginable distress that makes their plight all the more terrifying. It is the unknown, that which they cannot control, that unnerves 1 and 2 the most and they also use this to torment each other throughout the play.
Words are everything in a world where there is nothing else to explore or decipher and Mallen and White both offer exuberant performances in which words are a palpable power and treasure, they swear with absolute vigour and wholeheartedness, and recall proverbs with a sense of achievement and importance that would be completely overstated in any usual context. The search for truth and meaning and the distinction between what is universally known and, by contrast, personal are linchpins of the psychological distress played out in Nine.
Everyday contemporary costumes, almost anti-costumes, make the scene more urgent and threatening by locating it in the present. The expertly realistic make-up creates intrigue. Each time one of the girls is taken away their return is met with great suspense by the woman who has been left behind and consequentially the audience members too. Bruises, cuts and grazes are splattered across the bodies of both women and they bleed and convulse in turns; these instances are performed with overwhelming intensity by both actors. The set is barren, the chains which bind the characters are the only props utilised and a broken chair, a vent on the wall and some scattered papers complete the scene. Simple lighting is expertly used to begin and end scenes dramatically and the only sounds, the running water and a beat, penetrate gaps in the action.
The relationship between the characters is deeply complex and both actors portray the ambivalence of it impressively, an unsettling balance of reliance and hatred which stems from being one another’s only company and only point of comparison to oneself. The companionship which prevails through torment is perhaps the most affecting thing to emerge from the action and Nine is also an affecting exploration of self preservation in a place where nothing is sacred and anything palpable will be inevitably violated.
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