By Darby Turnbull
This review was written from a filmed recording of Lost Property’s November season at Club Voltaire
Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag is frequently cited as an easy point of reference when discussing millennial/gen z female centred comedy. However, her influence casts a long shadow over emerging female theatremakers, especially solo performance pieces. Waller-Bridge’s ingenious command of the form; self-deprecating, caustic observations about sex and intimacy as a forum to explore the complex anxieties, contradictions and doubts about being a woman (white, cis, upper middle class) in the 21st century where our ideas about gender, self-worth, relationships and desire is in constant flux. To my mind the greatest part of her legacy is the cultural validation to be messy, recognition that some views about ourselves and others are deeply ingrained, and you’re allowed to adapt in your own imperfect way to a deeper sense of understanding about your place in the world and still be a mess.
Lost Property, which recently had a short season at Club Voltaire is the brainchild of Tuia Suter and Amelia Dunn who share writing credit and act as Director and Performer respectively.
Set in that most Melbourne of milieus; a Yarra tram, a young woman confides to the audience that she’s ‘lost her vagina’ and is on a quest to get it back. What follows is a smart, sensitive treatise on how we relate to each other sexually and how utterly lost we are in the attempt. Dunn’s character, Alice fancies herself a people watcher; frequently offering wry, pithy verbal sketches about her fellow passengers but as her anecdotes around her intimate relationships with friends and lovers grow more in depth, she reveals an increasing lack of perspective on consent and sexual gratification.
An early highlight is a perturbing response to a friend’s description of an uncomfortable sexual encounter in high school with an offhand ‘just how it is’. It’s a piercing insight to the burgeoning exposure of the hubris of boys and men around anatomy, comfort and communication.
Dunn’s performance is an impressive mixture of fey repression and frenzied neurosis. She displays commendable skill in filling the space with her characterisation; her discomfort in her own skin and her palpable desire to escape from it. Her physicality is often at odds with her demeanour, a sunny construction of hyper femininity and soft eccentricity rapidly crumbling under the weight of her shame and remorse at being a passive witness to the alarming commonality at the humiliating violations that women endure. Dunn and Tiusa’s writing beautifully conveys the wretched detachment of the body freezing at the sight of something transgressive that everyone around seems to accept and the conflicting instincts to intervene or risk the ire of the herd.
I’ve seen a number of plays this year about the action (or inaction) of the witness and they’re part of an important collective statement on the importance of listening to your instincts when you see something wrong occurring and more importantly keeping the faces and personhood of the person wronged strongly in your mind and actually engaging with what your proximity to them actually means.
Lost Property’s inaugural season shows tremendous potential for development engagements. The story and the character are so resonant, and I can see future workshops and performances providing opportunities for snappier, more incisive dialogue, more specificity in characterisations and more nuanced world building which will only deepen the audience’s engagement with this vital story.
