By Darby Turnbull
The good folx at Bullet Heart Club just don’t stop, barely six weeks after the stunning Thirty-Six Kitan Petkovski and Ro Bright reunite at Darebin Arts Speakeasy for Eva Rees’ latest play, Djuna.
It’s in the interest of any who attend this play that they know as little about the plot or content as possible going in. I will stress however it is not for the squeamish and prospective audiences are advised to bring their willingness to sit with discomfort and sometimes excruciating tension. I will also say that for all the people who drone on and on about how younger generations, especially younger queer people are overly pious, morally absolute and dare I say prudish about works of art that depict complex, nuanced and warped sexual dynamics, I would impishly refer them to this play which busts through those myths with a sledgehammer. It’s rare to see a play presented with such bold audaciousness that holds as much faith in its audience’s sexual and emotional sophistication as this one.
The bare bones of the story are thus: Marcus a man in his late middle age meets a young trans woman (her name changes several times) for a liaison in a hotel room and what follows is a taut psychosexual thriller which keeps the audience in rapt suspense on the nature of truth, power, autonomy and our shared future. Both characters are withholding, the facts about their lives are in constant flux, details change persistently but Rees and the company show immense courage in evoking each characters visceral need to connect; how desire can hold up a distorted mirror to ourselves and how sex can be used to make revelations both clear and ambiguous. Even though set in the present day the tone and aesthetic harken back to the 80’s and 90’s; Rees plays a very delicate game with the tropes and story beats she introduces in her text. Quite frankly if this play was written by a Cis-gender writer there would be very easy assumptions to be made about the motives of this piece, the dreaded word ‘problematic’ springs to mind. The works of David Cronenberg and Paul Verhoeven were evoked for me personally but Rees instincts as a transfemme writer and the intelligence of the creative team bring an electric, erotic charge that most works can only dream about. The fetishisation of gender and queerness has often been used in conjunction with violence and perversion for the titillation of the cisgender gaze, but Rees is working on another level.
Let’s just say the services of Intimacy Coordinator Bayley Turner are indispensable. Once again if I hear another person bemoan how the use of intimacy coordinators stifles a sense of danger or organic impulsivity I would once again refer them to this play. I’m not exaggerating when I say it ‘goes there’ and everyone involved has the skill to make it visceral and unnerving.
Kitan Petkovski’s production is scintillating in its psychological acuity, especially when utilising James Paul’s very clever projections and lighting design. Rees deliberately withholds certain facts from the audience; political turmoil that looks and sounds very much like our own, but the production allows the audience to fill in the blanks. Without too much textual exposition, Petkovski can focus on the stunning pas de deux of Dion Mills and Jay Gold. Dion Mills, one of my favourite local actors, is absolutely masterful as the mercurial Marcus and whilst its early days but I think this may turn out to be the performance of the year for me. One of the things I most admire in Mill’s performance is his physical and vocal unpredictability; his every inflection has the ability to thrill, chill and disarm. And my god does he come to play as Marcus, a libertine who thrives off sensual mind games and given Mills extensive personal charm and gravitas he frequently succeeds in seducing not only his co-star but most of the audience as well.
Gold, in their professional independent debut, gives a tense, reactive performance. They display remarkable presence and emotional insight in taking the audience through every single emotional beat of their characters’ experience with raw vitality. Rees displays a keen understanding of the headspace of young people today; the feelings of betrayal at the apathy of older generations towards climate disaster and civil rights and how it manifests as hopelessness, rage but also fear at their own capacity for rage and drive for change and retribution. Gold exquisitely portrays a very young person coming into their own sense of power in a fraught and dangerous socio-political environment. Give Djuna a few more years and she could be one hell of a femme fatale but what we see here is a chilling origin story. Gold takes us on those terrifying, traumatising, tentative steps towards coming into your own gender, personhood and sexuality. I’ve hardly ever seen that journey portrayed with such authenticity.
Given the rawness of the material the highly stylized production is tremendously helpful in giving us just enough distance to engage with the piece on a cognitive, not just somatic level. Bethany J Fellows hotel room set and costumes for Mills and Gold are fantastically trashy which combined with Tim Bosner’s lighting give us a multi-textual seediness that makes one feel dirty by association. The stage management team also very sportingly engage in some of the most innovative scene transitions I’ve ever seen. Many would do well to follow Kitan Petkovski’s example and really explore the deeper possibilities of their creative presentations.
Eva Rees has, in her own way, met the current cultural moment with sharp and furious insight. “In many ways the intention was to satirise what I saw as pervasive and ineffectual political positions; cynical inaction masquerading as moralistic (Marcus), the projection of political action onto individuated relations and identities (Djuna), or the soggy nihilism that deceives us into believing ours is a world not worth saving (them both). Against the backdrop of rising autocracy, the canary in the coalmine that is the erosion of trans rights, I feel the importance of sidestepping these political cul-de-sacs more than ever.” (Playwrights note). Given how well she succeeds it’s my opinion that she’s cementing herself as a vital storyteller. Djuna is a welcome reprieve from earnest, ‘respectable’ queer theatre; it’s messy, vicious and superbly fucked. I loved it.
Image: Darren Gill
