Special

Photo: Marg Horwell

Mary Helen Sassman plays Special. She is heavily pregnant, or, in the tragic nonce-world of the Rabble, a gorbellied woman whose time is come. She lives with her mother beside a great mound of painted sand, a kind of Beckettian mamelon. Her mother is Goldie, played with boxercising vigour by Liz Jones.

In between workout sessions, Goldie makes time to nag at Special for her apathetic and uninspired attitude towards impending motherhood. When Goldie was pregnant, she tells us, she was bare-back riding through the surf, right into her third trimester. Special doesn’t care. She sprawls on back, slovenly, wilfully dull-witted and generally antipathetic toward her mother.

Designer Kate Davis and director Emma Valente (also lighting and sound) locate this strange relationship in a grotesque space between the sacred and the profane, between the culturally sacrosanct institution of motherhood and the mundane reality of Special’s depression and confusion. The loose strips of white material that line the Courthouse walls suggest both the columnar verticality of an ancient temple and the fluttering white drapes of a modern hospital. The interior of this church-cum-sickbay is that of a luridly lit desert, as though figuring the epic journey required to traverse the space.

The sound design is particularly effective at conveying the instability of this space, from laughable effects-library coconut-shell hooves (another Beckett reference?) to immersive percussion and dizzying bells.

The performance is disposed as a surreal assemblage of remnant religious rituals from around the world, gathered up and blended through a series of discontinuous incidents. Sometimes these manifest as desperate kitsch where the nobility of the original ceremony proves irrecoverable, as with the American Indian headdress that Special wears. At other times, the rituals do carry an echo of their sacred origin, enabling a dramatic ascension that captures the esoterica of their domesticity in a lightning fist of illumination.

The discontinuity and surreal flourishes give the piece a rough and jagged edge, with the significance of certain gestures and references not being immediately apparent. To a certain extent, however, the strengths of the performance sustain the experimental style. There is a moving and consistent tragedy at the centre of this investigation which has a kind of grand pity about it: the breach which opens between mother and daughter. There is also a dark undercurrent to Special’s pregnancy, the implication that it was not consensual, which provides a suggestive psychological line.

Special is in some respects typical of the Rabble’s cryptic avant garde method, but it is also I think one of their strongest and most moving pieces, not least because there is a coherent and suggestive unity to it. I should point out, however, that in terms of staging, the arrangement of seating makes it is difficult for those seated at the back to see what is happening at the front of the stage during certain sections of the piece, something that could be perhaps addressed in future performances.