(in which I write an absurdly complicated and self-indulgent response to a simply beautiful piece)
There’s something gloriously familiar about this show. This is partly because it presents a genuine slice of Sydney life: a woman waiting at the Bank Hotel for a Tinder date. It’s also familiar because a one woman show about dating follows a tried and tested path.
But Megan Bennetts does something special with this one.
Bennetts has an extraordinary stage presence, and the character she creates, Emma, is utterly adorable. Bennetts’ script is clever and superbly structured, and with the guidance of director Nisrine Amine, she executes both the verbal and physical comedy brilliantly. Let me unpack both of these.
Bennett’s vocal performance is wonderful. Tell a tale of the modern woman drinking alone in a pub and it’s oh so easy to fall into the dull, stereotypical vocal patterns of the ladette: brutality masquerading as confidence, aggression impersonating autonomy. Bennetts instead allows the humour to be grounded in natural rhythms of speech, unforced, subtle, and far funnier for that.
Her physicality is first-rate. Moments of drunkenness are played magnificently, with hints of Emma’s inebriation mischievously showing through despite the character’s best attempts to disguise them. And the flashback to Emma as a backpack wielding school girl is gold.
Now, apart from outlining the scenario in the broadest terms, I’ve avoided discussing what the show is about. Without spoilers, I can say that it explores one of the greatest tensions in human experience: sexuality versus individuality.
Though sexuality is so important for how we see ourselves, it cares nothing for us. It’s a blind, brute force. It’s as though we’re some flimsy chime and it’s all the winds of the wide world. In the collision of the two something beautiful can occur, but it seems we’re more suited to zephyrs than cyclones, and yet the earth’s great diurnal journey fuels more fury than fluff. Bennett’s script interprets the grand clash between sexuality and individuality as a battle with social expectations, and that’s indubitably true (and probably more suited to the dramatic form than my audacious metaphors.) Despite what the world says, Emma must decide what matters for herself.
I began this response by suggesting Losing It follows a well-trodden path – but with a crucial caveat. To explain myself, a diversion. Reductionists will tell us sexuality is all about reproduction. But in the human experience, reproduction is an inaccurate term; in so far as it guarantees Life’s continuance, sexuality ensures not reproduction, not replication, but rather diversity, both genetically and socially. That’s sexuality’s function. (Evolution could have simply chosen cloning, which it has for a number of species.) Sexuality’s raison d’être is to have us not eternally tread the same path. To consider sex this way is to begin to question convention. And now one final crazy metaphor (building on my previous motif of sex as a primal force): Sexuality is the ocean in which swims the fish of individuality. Sexuality is as broad and deep as the sea, and for the fish there’s no escape – but there also are no defined paths, only endless possibilities.
It’s the offering of this vision of glorious variety that makes Bennetts’ work special.
And I must emphasise, Losing It has none of the ridiculous density of my response; it’s fun, wise and splendidly Life-affirming.
The script was developed through the Katie Lees Fellowship, an initiative encouraging young women in art, and commemorating a beautiful soul.
Paul Gilchrist
Losing It by Megan Bennetts
At Flight Path Theatre until 18 November
Image by Robert Catto
Theatre Red 