Sewer Rat Girl | Siobhan Gibbs
I have thought Siobhan Gibbs was cool ever since I met her in when I was in Year 6. Something that deeply irritated her younger brother who was actually in my grade and immensely popular. So, the chance to review Sewer Rat Girl is one I jumped at. Not only because I think she’s cool but because I thought it would be cute to see an artist born and raised in Mackay be publicly appraised by a reviewer who also hails from the area.
Sewer Rat Girl functions like an episode of Sesame Street except everyone involved is Queer and on MDMA. Sewer Rat Girl has a problem, she devises a less than optimal solution, executes that solution, and finally learns a lesson that enriches her and by extension us. It also comes complete with dancing cigarette puppets, fart bombs, and sexual spaghetti consumption – all of which make complete sense within the world of the Sewer Rat Girl. The entire performance is overflowing with chaos but it is a sort of unruliness that can only come with rigorous curation and planning. A personal highlight was a joke made about intermediality that made my HECS-debt a little more worth the trouble of paying it back.
The work’s silliness is the spoon full of go-go juice that helps the message of the work go down. We observe through layers of humour and glitter the journey of small-town dreamer coming to the big city and coming to terms with the realisation that life isn’t some coming of age movie. And they can’t “Rachel Berry” their way to success even if they are just as talented. Gibbs also confronts the woes of being an artist under capitalism, the pressure to develop a legacy as artist as soon as humanly (or rodent-ly) possible, and the path to self-destructive behaviour easily gone down when relying on external parties, constructs, or vices for validation. But it’s all silly and goofy and campy and fun so there’s definitely no need to worry, and no need to interrogate anything any further.
Gibbs is endlessly charismatic and roguishly hilarious in her performance as Sewer Rat Girl. She wins over an audience that was seemingly divided into two sects– those who had interacted with drag/cabaret before and knew they were allowed to interact and everyone else who sat quietly and watched in a very polite kind of way – in a matter of minutes. SReG (pronounced like Greg but with an ‘s’) Sewer Rat Girls’ deeply endearing side-kick (played by Esther Dougherty) wins the audience’s hearts without speaking a word – much to the disdain of Sewer Rat Girl. The duo’s chemistry is electric, and they harness that power for theatrical good (and little bit of theatrical evil too).
Don’t ask questions. Just have fun. Five stars. This is Sewer Rat Girl’s final advice to the audience regarding the wild experience of the hour of pure camp that is Sewer Rat Girl . And I have to agree. The work is chaotic, campy, and contemplative in a way that lets you know what the point is (spoiler alert: it’s “accept yourself and screw what other people have to say about your dreams”) without hitting you over the head with it or smothering it in layers of intellectual tomfoolery. On a personal note, it was a true honour to see someone I grew up admiring thrive in the Meanjin arts scene. It has provided renewed my hope in my own dreams and my drive to see them realised. And just in case you were wondering. Yes, Siobhan remains much much cooler than her brother.
