Crazy Fucking Bitches | A Little Life Theatre
I do love a real fresh work. The madness of women, and the discrimination they face for it, it’s not a new topic but one we will come at again and again until the trope no longer is true, so I was intrigued to see how A Little Life Theatre wanted to approach the topic. The work is very new, a first full-length version of earlier developments.
Presented as a series of vignettes, it was a mixture of physical theatre, elements of butoh, theatre team-exercises and contemporary dance, with just a touch of song and pre-recorded spoken word, the show was presented in a promenade that began and finished in the garden, with a foray into the lounge of the venue.
My initial impressions were very positive, welcomed through to the garden of Conspiracy House in West End, an apt venue for experimental emancipatory works of theatre. I loved the outdoor setting, the matching yet not matching op-shop costuming, the dirty feet and knees and the deshabille garden behind. I loved it especially for not being a theatre. I love to see works in the garden under the stars. We start by going back to the story of Eve and I liked seeing her in the garden, five Eve’s consuming perfect red apples in the lustful manner they deserve. This was powerful, this was strong.
The group scenes were beautifully composed and balanced, and fused into each new emotion authentically. The performers were a well-matched cohort equally committed to the presentation of each scene. It was powerfully presented, with each performer coming into centre stage in turn. A gruesome scene of multiple births and rebirths was fascinating to watch up close from the deeply intimate lounge room. I enjoyed the focus on physical performance with a lack of text, as this material can be so very earnest when it is scripted and performed. The five bodies moving in space, imperfectly perfect, were more than enough to sculpt the message.
What I wanted to understand more of was the Big Why, the Central Question, the What Do You Want Me To Feel. Me, the audience, and me, the older woman watching, and me, a once-young woman who also lives in this world of discrimination and my own madness and constant constraint and opportunity and intersection and dismissal.
In the show notes, it says that Crazy Fucking Bitches explores “the perceived intersection between women and insanity and how the idea of women being biologically wired for instability became ingrained in culture”. I don’t feel it quite got to that really bigger picture perspective. There were references to housebound wives with cooking and cleaning implements and children, and this began to feel a bit disjointed for me. Although there are many women in the world to this day who are oppressed or limited in their household duties, I didn’t feel that this was the story of any of these particular women. What was unclear to me was why they were championing this particular angle of oppression. What was this adding to that conversation of emancipation? The trope of madness limits women, but I couldn’t clearly see the connection between the housebound and the tradwife movements, and this cast.
I much more enjoyed the voiceovers in which specific manifestations of the cast were vocalised, where one young woman regretted calling her mother crazy, or where another learned not to use the word crazy as a casual conversational descriptor; these elements felt real, felt like a great teaching moment without being didactic. Here I began to understand the inception of the performance, and its reason for being, and why it was important to these performers to share this particular story.
Same with the Cool Girl scene, a uniquely contemporary slur, it was interesting from both a performance and a cultural aspect to see how young women unpack this. Young women are the most powerful tastemakers in the world, their opinions are of infinite interest and massive financial, cultural and political sway, and the more the show leaned into the casts’ own actual lived experiences and that of their cohort, the more it resonated with me.
