Dolores

On set silence – save for a corny love song, rumbling trains and the desperate dialogue of two sisters and their stories of violence.

With 34 women killed in Australia this year already, there's never been a more pressing time to increase awareness of violence against women. This late night production by Edward Allen Baker has strength in its humanity and mercy.

It opens on a Sunday afternoon where a woman’s (Janine Watson) solitary enjoyment of life's guilty pleasures – Coke, a smoke, cupcakes and a trash mag – are inconveniently interrupted when her sister Dolores (Kate Box) bursts into the house pleading for help. Having escaped the grip of another abusive husband, she’s seeking safety with her friends or family. Despite a supposed grave need, Dolores is quickly to shown the door, in response to her horrific history of falling for the bad guy.

What follows is an hour in which the audience is seized and swept into the dangerous depths of partner violence. Box and Watson are electric in their performances. They quarrel over Dolores’s poor life choices and recollect their memories of childhood as they ponder the question of where things went so wrong. The set – children’s toys and clothes scattered through a dilapidated house – represents the intersection of home and hell. Box moves through it picking up and packing up as if seeking order in chaos. Box’s portrayal of Dolores is rendered bearable only by the reprieve of careful one-liners using the only the blackest humour. In the end the sisters find that perhaps they can only tolerate so much pain.

It’s a heavy subject but a ripper of a play.