Batshit | Leah Shelton
Leah Shelton’s BATSHIT was fast and frenzied. Inspired by Leah’s grandmother’s experiences of mental illness and forced medical treatment, the show was equally intimate and hard hitting. Kicking off with an ear shattering soundscape that was brilliantly timed with the lighting design, the precision of the scenographic elements were a highlight of the show. Another highlight was when we first met the performer, Leah, as she emerged from under the tv and began a movement sequence with frightful specificity. After this, Leah seamlessly slipped into a more stand up/ cabaret style, where she told deliberately below-average jokes with eyes that could kill and a laugh than continued long after the audience stopped laughing with her. This was our first taste of the craziness that we were promised with the show’s title; the rest of the show was a whole damn buffet.
While the eclectic use of forms made this show wildly entertaining, it also made it hard for me to connect to the character and the story. I hear this smashing of forms is characteristic of Leah’s work, but I found the cacophony of vox pox, voice over, physical theatre, audience interaction, singing, dancing, a live reel, a projector and a tv all within the same performance made it chaotic and hard to maintain connection. And I really did want to connect. The show was distilling big, important issues into a personal story, so I wanted to be part of this intimate telling. But the form changes at a rapid pace felt like a block for me to get invested in the story. This pacing could be due to the haphazard beginning of BATSHIT’s run at Brisbane Festival. With opening night being cancelled due to a burst pipe, the Thursday night was the first time this brand-new, tech-heavy show was in front of an audience. The pacing hadn’t found its rhythm, probably because it hadn’t yet had a chance to settle.
All this being said, I still thoroughly enjoyed the show. The way it investigated the relationship between femininity, motherhood and craziness over time was genius. In the vox pops from last century, the question was about housewives, because at that time, most adult women were housewives. In the modern day vox pops, the questions were less about mothers and more about women in general, specifically who we think of when we use the word crazy. Britney Spears came up a lot in the interviews, which I attribute to her iconic head shave. I just shaved my head and I kind of get it. To blatantly reject the femininity that is so violently thrust on you makes people wonder if you’re okay. To not play the part of the pretty quiet female instantly ruffles feathers. For Gwen’s grandmother, not having the right perspective about the joys of life as a housewife was grounds for a diagnosis of hysteria and forced medical treatment. It continues for women today; being loud, demanding and defiant gets you ridden off as crazy.
But the work of Leah Shelton and director Ursula Martinez are changing things. By showing us the history of ‘hysteria’ and describing the nuts and bolts of female craziness, they took the sting out of the loaded word ‘crazy’ and gave audiences a call to action. First, they asked that we recognise the powers at play when the word crazy is lobbed at a woman. And then, they demanded that women don’t let this label silence them. In the end Leah ran around the stage being noisy and big and hysterical. And when the lights went down, audiences didn’t call her crazy. They gave her a standing ovation.
