Charlotte Hazzard in War Crimes; photo by Tracey Schramm
War Crimes is the Australian leg of an international project entitled Documents of Poverty and Hope, featuring six collaborations from six theatre companies around the world. True to the themes of immigration and emigration, War Crimes features guest director Alex Evans from Pilot Theatre UK.
Set in an Australian backwater country town, War Crimes is a scintillating portrait of Australian culture which takes no prisoners, examining attitudes to sexuality, gender, xenophobia, peer pressure, and the schizophrenic dichotomy of urban versus rural life. The vehicle for this expose is the friendship of three girls, Jade (Charlotte Hazzard), Ricky (Holly Fraser), and Lara (Jane Watt), in their final years of high school. The girls are tighter than sisters, spending their days vandalizing school property, sneaking into nightclubs and getting buzzed. These are typical high-school friendships, rife with bullying, peer-pressure and one-upmanship but also held together with genuine love and camaraderie. They are confusing times and the cracks quickly begin to show.
A local boy is killed whilst serving in Afghanistan, sparking xenophobia and misplaced national pride. Ishtar (Odetta Quinn), an Iraqi migrant, is dating the hottest (white) boy in school, fueling jealousy from the others. Jade is gang raped by a bunch of soldiers, and later develops feelings for the androgynous Jordan (Hannah Cox).
This is not the romanticized portrait of country life that has become cliché in depictions of Australian outback. It is angsty and brutal, and suitably so – in a play performed by young people, targeted to young people, it’s refreshing to be allowed to be heavy-handed and unsubtle, and writer Angela Betzien has taken full advantage of this license. Betzien’s writing comprises of equal parts poetry and dialogue, yet never lapses into pretention (and this is owed to performance as much as writing). Inner monologues are delivered as stream-of-conscious style poems, rough and ready, with a rhythm that is unmistakably tribal.
The cast are enjoyable across the board. It’s hard to pick any outstanding performances here because the magic is in the ensemble as a whole. It’s exciting to see a young, all-female cast portray multiple characters within quite complex relationships. It’s a thoroughly organic and seemingly unrehearsed dynamic between the performers, which you rarely see among more mature performances.
Emma Reyes’ set design is DIY genius. A few cleverly folded bed sheets form the silhouettes of sand dunes in the background. At times it’s beach, other times it’s country desert. The parallels to the sand dunes of Afghanistan are unmistakable. A pile of bricks lies, much like the characters, half-arsed in the foreground, haphazardly marking a cave or a classroom with indifferent ambiguity.
The tribal theme is a steady constant throughout this work. It is never foregrounded, but it is everywhere – in the peer pressure in friendship, in how the town becomes united in hate as a result of grief – in how army culture encourages bonding and mateship in the most vile of ways – in how Jordan, Jade and Ishtar become united by the simple ritual of visiting a hidden cave. Central to this theme is a desire to belong, and War Crime intelligently explores the positive and negative consequences of this very simple human desire.
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
War Crimes
Writer: Angela Betzien
Director: Alex Evans
Cast: Hannah Cox, Holly Fraser, Charlotte Hazzard, Odetta Quinn & Jane Watt
An ATYP production
Presented in partnership with Pilot Theatre
ATYP Studio 1, The Wharf
15 July to 1 August 2015
