THEATRE Review
2024
WORMHOLES
OMNIBUS THEATRE
★★★★★
Written by EMILY JUPP
Dir. SCOTT LE GRASS
23 JUL–10 AUG
3 AUGUST, 2023
In theatre, there can be no room for phoning in a performance or expecting audiences to accept mediocre texts. Good theatre asks one thing of their audience: come to your seat with an open mind, and on the audience's part, we have one clear request: create a show that doesn't just move us but will leave an indelible impression. Walking away from Wormholes second preview at Omnibus Theatre, this brave, raw, and powerful show had left a very deep impression on me.
There is no simple way of talking about coercive relationships or how they can impact someone's life. It is harder still to show how a victim has to contend with abuses that become phycological warfare on their metal and physical health. From gaslighting to the controlled removal of friends and family, which is meticulously planned by someone whose only intent is to cause their victim misery. This can become even more challenging for friends or family who are witnessing their loved one being broken down, isolated, and becoming dependent on their abusers. As for the victim, time unfortunately is never on their side. Once they have been brave enough to wake up to the reality of their relationship and what it really means, they’re usually a shell of their former selves.
A play that places a spotlight on the damage physically and mentally experienced by a victim who is in a coercive relationship is going to face challenges. Audiences can still be fidgety around certain topics that are so important within our society yet still fall under this strange banner of unspoken truths. However, playwright Emily Jupp has written a play that is brutally frank and is guided by her character, Woman, played by Victoria Yeates. In this role, Yeates offers an amalgamation of women who find themselves trapped in relationships that seem to have no clear way out. The moment Yeates walks on to the stage, the audience feels this nervous, anxious tension but also somewhat content.
Yeates offers an acting masterclass in her portrayal of Woman and multiple other characters. It’s impossible to appreciate the ease with which Yeates moves through each of these characters, many of whom conflict with or gaslight the woman’s experiences and struggles. At the beginning of the play, we see the woman, now resigned to her place she now calls ‘home’ but is, justifiably, unable to shake off and perhaps accept her lived experience with him. It is only through the flashbacks that we get to see a different woman. This woman is carefree; she's confident and happy and gets to enjoy her life and friends. There is an appreciation of the freedom she gets to enjoy because it is her freedom, her choices, on her terms. This is a woman who can’t hide the desire for life that is in her eyes as she dances with her friends; she has no real designs on the path she wants to take in life but is open to the adventure ahead. Comparing this woman to the one we meet at the start of the play is an unfair comparison, but it's one that’s impossible to ignore. Yeates, through Jupp’s text, and Stuart LeGrass’s director eloquently shows the audience the character, the spirit of the woman that was crushed by Him.
It is the universality of Jupp’s text that is the most heartbreaking of all. In every audience there is bound to be one or two people who have experienced this type of abuse, or, at the very least, will know someone who has. As the woman shares her life and hopes for the future with her son, the audience is all too aware that she’s never going to be free and she’s never going to be safe. This type of victim has been the source of inspiration for countless characters in songs, films, books, and theatre. Seeing the woman struggle to come out of this abusive daze, one begins to get a greater sense of her confusion, loneliness, and isolation. This makes the reunion between the woman and her friend Jess all the more salient.
Scene 8 is short but is packed with so much pain and heartache that to witness Yeates bring Jupp’s text to life in the way she does leaves one devastated. Why doesn’t she just leave? A fair but ignorant question that’s likely to be asked by many who may hear of a friend or colleague that is facing the type of abuse. In this short conversation between Woman and Jess, the audience understands that it’s not as simple as packing a bag and leaving. The woman might appear free, but there is no freedom from the prison He has created for her; his control is total, and he knows it. She might go to work but has to hide behind a mask of make-up for fear of people seeing her reality. Simply meaning that he hits her in the face, knowing she will be going to work. But, for me, this also adds an extra layer of masculine privilege with Him knowing he is safe in the comfort that the public can be so blinkered by the clear evidence of the physical abuse someone might be going through.
"Wormholes holds no punches as it examines the slow, methodical, and systematic breaking of one woman’s sense of herself and how damaging it can be to have one’s self-worth destroyed."
The simplicity of Leah Kelly’s should not be understated. The blue-coloured stage with yellowish-green flecks reminded me of being in the deepest part of the ocean. Wormholes is a scientific idea of being transplanted to a different reality, and for the woman, it’s about praying to be sucked into an alternative world far away from the one she’s in now, meaning she is in this constant state of sinking. And now, even as she reflects on her history as she sits at the bottom of the ocean, she knows it’s a task to try and get out of the mindset she is now forever placed in.
Paul Housden’s sound and Jodie Underwood's lighting offer a trifecta of brilliance that gives bold realism to Jupp’s text and aids Yeates performance brilliantly. Director Le Grass has managed to bring to life a challenging show that requires anyone taking part to genuinely grasp and understand the text and, perhaps even more importantly, accept that the work they are creating isn’t just reflecting real life and real experiences, but it is going to help save lives. Le Grass has connected with Jupp’s text and forged a bond with Yeates that has allowed him to direct from a place that is equally real as the writing and performing.
By the end of Wormholes, one needed a moment of reflection. I found myself with a little scrap of paper making notes as I was trying to suppress my feelings. Inspired by the playwrights own experiences over several relationships and years, Wormholes holds no punches as it examines the slow, methodical, and systematic breaking of one woman’s sense of herself and how damaging it can be to have one’s self-worth destroyed. This is a universal story that is experienced by millions of women all around the world. It is sometimes easy to try and simplify domestic abuse as being strictly physical, but it is much deeper than that. Society, and in some cases even laws, have been too slow in accepting the mental abuse women experience, which not only breaks their spirits and sense of who they are but, by a painful default, leads them to become dependent on their abusers.