The latest chapter in her continuing fascination with pathology, psychosis, sick humour and sleazy soap opera is Shireen James’s new play Viagra Falls.
James is the writer/director of When Suicides Meet, a meditation upon the inner torment of Sylvia Plath, and Alice Threw The Looking Glass, a harrowing and gruesomely comic portrayal of a young girl’s devastation at the hands of her abusive father. She has steered her new play into similar thematic waters.
Set in an unsavoury tattoo/body-piercing parlour, the action revolves around four desperate lowlifes struggling for a chink of redemption in a world where life is little more than a cheap joke and dignity a foreign word.
Candice (played with schizoid intensity by Claire Bezuidenhout) is the disturbed schoolgirl who is being molested by her father. Rather than do the sensible thing and run away from home, she takes the dramatic route of having her vagina clamped shut by body-piercer Philip.
This is the rather risky premise upon which the play is based, but one that is unfortunately borne out by the reality of domestic violence. The most obvious question to ask a victim of such aggression is: “Why don’t you just get the hell out of there?”. Yet, depressingly, in most cases people lack the resolve and continue to endure their private hell.
Even so, James doesn’t treat her subject with heavy-handed moralising. Instead her characters exhibit a depraved kind of sarcasm that seems to be their last recourse to humanity. Though they all know their lives aren’t worth a tinned shit, it’s only their grim, gallows humour that they have left to preserve what’s left of their self-esteem.
Epitomising this idea is Sue (played to hideous perfection by Catherine Farren), the trashmouth mother of Philip and owner of the parlour. A whore with a heart of fool’s gold, her drunken, conflicted persona hovers between vulnerability and arrogance in a manner that overcomes any accusation of stereotyping.
Even in the play’s most shocking moments of graphic sexual violence, Farren raises a grimacing laugh with her character’s clumsy attempts at concern.
Though many find the concepts of rape and humour mutually exclusive, there is a kind of brutal charm in the final scenes. Even though they are too expediently resolved, they retain a certain rough integrity. After all, who failed to appreciate the comic aspect of Uma Thurman’s needle-in-the-chest heroin overdose in Pulp Fiction?
And for those who were rightfully wondering, the Viagra connection comes in somewhat tangentially via Thor, Philip’s macho friend with an ego significantly larger than his erection. Convincingly portrayed by Joe Carroll, Thor is the archetypal bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks, scheming to score with all the chicks but unable to get it up with his over-achieving wife. His dormant sexual energies awakened by “the Big V”, he rapes the unconscious Candice after having savagely ripped out her piercings.
Though the play is a somewhat confused tribute to family values – “blood is thicker than water” and all that – it is also a worthy effort to bring an altogether different class of character onto the stage. Though the refined theatre goer might frown upon it, Viagra Falls – despite its ideological uncertainty – succeeds as a wayward, fitful examination of a strange and difficult subject.
Viagra Falls is on at the KwaSuka Theatre in Durban until March 27