From writer Patricia Cornelius and director Susie Dee comes a play about three women (Nicci Wilks, Peta Brady and Sarah Ward, all phenomenal) who are shit. They’ve had shit lives and that’s turned them into terrible people. These are not Strong Female Characters, though they’re fierce as fuck; they’re also pitiful and powerless. These are not Damaged, Victimised Women either, despite what each of the characters has been through. Between them, they’re angry, forlorn, hopeful, cheeky, gritty, full of fight and forsaken; these are not pleasant people and they’re women whose stories aren’t ever really told.
So Dee and Cornelius show us who they are, through their cuss-filled conversations with each other that swing between the light-hearted and darkly funny to the confronting and devastating. All of it will challenge any comfortably held, middle-class notions and prejudices you might have. There’s occasionally a rhyme to the dialogue, and a poetic cadence, even when the three are shouting. Between these conversations, industrial music plays while the characters walk, watch, wait; we see their shadows and profiles behind a thick wall with three windows, and we see their reflections in a convex security mirror – it’s all leading to the climax. But you already know how it’s going to end for these women, and your body clenches for and because of them the whole way through Shit.
