A series of 11 mono­logues about love and sex writ­ten by Uth­er Dean. It’s per­formed by 6 women – Alice May Con­nolly, Bri­anne Kerr, Han­nah Banks, Freya Daly Sad­grove, Hil­ary Pen­warden, and Kegan Carr Fran­sch.

From the start we’re invited into a sur­real world where the object of love and/or sex might not be human. The mono­logues are intense, obsess­ive, des­per­ate, breath­less, funny, poignant, and alto­geth­er human.

Con­nolly describes an intense rela­tion­ship from the first meet­ing through to the end in her first mono­logue. She’s cheer­ful the whole way through but the sense that she really knows what is going on lurks under­neath her words. Her second mono­logue is a call to arms against per­fect couples. (You can ima­gine how it ends.) Kerr’s first mono­logue is about an obses­sion that affects her abil­ity to stay pro­fes­sion­al at work. Her char­ac­ter mis­reads the situ­ation and ends up in a hor­rible pos­i­tion. Her second mono­logue is des­per­ately sweet and very human­ist­ic. Kerr gives us two clear char­ac­ters – one all intern­al, the oth­er all extern­al. Banks’ two mono­logues are quite dif­fer­ent. The first is a char­ac­ter who can’t bear to be touched (for a very good reas­on mind.) All unre­quited love and loneli­ness her pain is palp­able. The second mono­logue is the exact oppos­ite. Pas­sion­ate, breath­less, swoon‑y, fast paced.  Sad­grove gets what I think are the two most dif­fi­cult mono­logues. Her first one fea­tures a colossal squid and con­sists of her read­ing from cards. Smug and twee are the two words that come to mind while watch­ing. The second is a list of ‘things to do’ which reminds me of one of my favour­ite poems. This time she’s full of ennui and anxi­ety. Good stuff. Pen­warden is onstage provid­ing music and sound effects dur­ing the whole per­form­ance so it’s fair enough that she per­forms only one mono­logue. She does this beau­ti­fully, full of sor­row for missed oppor­tun­it­ies. Carr Fransch’s first mono­logue is about love and susten­ance. Her char­ac­ter­isa­tion of the ‘oth­er’ is funny – just before things turn more sin­is­ter. Her second char­ac­ter is quite dif­fer­ent. She is puzzled, proud, and venge­ful in her role as exposed lov­er.

It is won­der­ful to see the shifts that most of the act­ors are able to make in their tones and phys­ic­al­ity for each mono­logue. As a show­case for these act­ors it works really well. I like Dean’s writ­ing. It’s poet­ic­al and goes to weird places in order to explore what it is to be human.

 

NB. It con­tains coarse lan­guage, and descrip­tions of sex acts and viol­ence (both phys­ic­al and emo­tion­al.)