Writer: Elisabeth Gunawan
Director: Simon Gleave
Trash theatre mixed with confrontational stand-up, bouffonery, dance, movement, caricature comedy and more, Unforgettable Girl is perhaps best summarised as a piece of performance art or a live art installation bought to the stage.
Writer/performer Elisabeth Gunawan emerges from a cardboard box at the start of the show, she is attached to the end of a long piece of rope controlled by fellow performer Kyll Anthony Thomas Cole, who can restrict how far she moves across the stage for the benefit of herself and the audience. Like a broken marionette with an attitude problem, her movements are jerky and her speech is erratic as if she is malfunctioning and unaware of social niceties. What she says is funny but unsettling.
As she then reveals herself to be Vaccine, a mail-order Thai bride, complete with her own instruction manual, the show twists further into dark corners exploring the objectification of the real people behind the stereotype, and the pornographic fetishes that western males play out using them, reducing them to sex toys. Cole’s contribution to this via a speaker to distort his voice into what she is hearing at the other end of a phone or video call adds to the reduction of the person to the object.
Wider parallels are drawn when Gunawan re-emerges as a middle class, middle age white woman celebrating her whiteness, her privilege and the people of different colours that she is friends with as if they were there to tick a box rather than because she actually liked them or even saw them as people. The delivery and content are funny, while also grotesque, and the message behind it is angry and incendiary.
Abandoning speech and comedy for movement, doll play, caricatured imitations of sex acts and dark porn fantasies seen through the other end of a camera lens, the degradation and subjugation of Vaccine and the people she represents is brought home in a way that is often shocking and brutal but always innovative and inventive.
One of the most original, risk taking shows and performances on the fringe this year, Gunawan is an artist as much as she is a performer, and this is a statement and a provocation as much as it is a show. Cole is superb as her co-performer, his own movement scenes showing the talent he has in his own right as well as ensuring that Gunawan’s creation and imagination are fully realised under Simon Gleave’s expert direction.
Runs until 28 August 2023 | Image: Contributed
The Reviews Hub Score
Truly unforgettable
