The marketing gave me the impression this piece would interrogate the experience of queer black women in white Australia via ancient Greek myths. This struck me as inauspicious, the equivalent of attempting to explain quantum mechanics using hieroglyphics.
But, as they say in Jurassic Park, “Theatre finds a way” (or they say something like that; I couldn’t really hear over the roar of all those dinosaurs.)
As it turns out, this piece does not claim to represent the queer black experience. Nothing in the monologue implies anything so outrageously reductive.
And the use of Greek myth is beautifully subtle and intensely powerful.
I will admit, however, that for a while, I feared this one had defeated me. The 90 minute monologue was a challenge, both because of its confronting subject matter and because of the difficulty I had following its narrative.
But, ultimately, it offers a rich, raw and deeply humane insight into love and vulnerability.
Written and performed by Aliyah Knight, and directed by Bernadette Fam, Snakeface presents a fictional character who seeks love and suffers brutality. Knight has a wonderfully warm, engaging stage presence, generating immense sympathy for the character.
Knight’s language is stunningly poetic. Its ruling motif is physicality; it’s visceral, sensual, violent. There’s much talk of bodily fluids and organs. There’s the suggestion that Truth is found only in the rag and bone shop of existence: one lover is judged honest or genuine because of the animal-like noises he makes in the bedroom.
Knight’s own physicality, a hypnotising balance of rhythm and writhe, emphasises the primacy of the body.
The set by Keerthi Subramanyam is dominated by a huge slab of clay, reflecting the character’s interest in sculpture and the plastic arts. But also, via its biblical and classical connotations, it suggests vulnerability. Are we made of mere clay? Will we be reduced to stone? (It also hints at the hopefulness of creation, but more on that later.)
Back to the Greek myths. The Medusa motif effectively expresses the seemingly overwhelming desire to destroy those who have hurt us. And the character has been seriously mistreated, a victim of at least one sexual assault. And though rage is presented as an utterly natural response to brutality, the inspiring maturity of the piece is that it’s not valorised. Rage is an attribute of a monster, one wrought by cruelty. Rage is no resting place.
And a resting place is finally offered, a new creation is possible, one that embraces the physical, but also knows a calm that transcends it.
Paul Gilchrist
Snakeface by Aliyah Knight
Presented by Fruit Box Theatre, as part of 25A
At Downstairs Belvoir until 27 April
Image by Abraham de Souza
Theatre Red 