Felicity’s Score: 3.5 stars
A Girl In School Uniform (Walks Into A Bar) at KXT may submerge the audience into complete darkness at times, but brings to light a sense of impending danger felt by any woman in the world right now.
Hannah Goodwin directs Lulu Raczka’s thriller at Kings Cross Theatre with a playful eye. The show is set in a time and place quite similar to our own aside from one major detail; life threatening blackouts. A schoolgirl and barmaid are brought together by a town fraught with danger as it’s thrown into complete power outages without warning. Lights? Gone. Back up generators? All broken. Girls? Go missing and turn up dead.
Steph, a teenager attending private school, has her comfortable life thrown into disarray when her best friend Charlie goes missing during a blackout. The last place she was seen? A deserted bar owned by Beth. But Beth isn’t forthcoming at all. So Steph visits again. And again. Until eventually, the two are forced to come to terms with a mutual enemy outside as a blackout traps them inside…along with the audience.
Caitlin Burley is affecting as a 16 year old, creating moments of heartbreak and wry humour when needed. Michelle Ny presents the barmaid’s abrasiveness with a certain lightheartedness that creates a realistic turn to vulnerability when needed. The movement and quick scene changes are impressive and effective. Jessica Dunn creates a soundscape that does much of the atmospheric work (aside from Phoebe Pilcher’s literal blackouts).
In the beginning the pacing feels a little rushed in terms of the passing of time. The quick vignettes in between scenes are effective images, but are so fast that it’s hard to have time to digest the passing of time. Sometimes Goodwin has allowed some inordinate reactions from the actors (e.g. the reaction to a photograph) which create slightly naff moments, but these incidents are few.
Torch lighting in the blackouts is captivating, and although I don’t feel the stakes of danger outside quite as much as I should, Ny and Burley have brilliant moments of chemistry as a duo that engage us regardless. This unknown ‘hazard’ of the dark is very much like the danger many of us feel in the world. Whether we get home before nightfall, avoid public transport after daylight, or hold our keys between our knuckles; there are a myriad of ways that underlying fear affects our lives. The way in which these two women reject the orders to move on, to trust that everything that can be done is being done, imagining another world in which they take back their power…is a reflection of the burgeoning consciousness of women who are done with being afraid. The ‘darkness’ we have been historically kept in is being met with the luminosity of women ready to fight back.
Felicity Anderson, Theatre Now
20 Sep – 5 Oct 2019
Venue: Kings Cross Theatre
Theatre Company: Futura
Duration: aprox. 70 min
Ticket Prices:
$20 – $35
Tue – Sat 7:30pm
Sun 5pm
