The Drowning Girls

From the moment you take your seat in the auditorium, Drowning Girls is a production that unnerves your every sense. The stage is bare except for three bath tubs filled with water, each one a strangely aligned symbol of private domesticity made all the more unsettling by their public display. The only sound to break the silence is the gentle lapping of water as it cascades down from pipes suspended high about the set; you can feel and even smell the moisture in the air, foreboding of something that weighs upon the room, waiting to make itself known.

The lengths to which the newly-formed Turtle Lab has gone with the plumbing alone in this production are telling of the care with which they have put Drowning Girls together. Most intriguing is how water is harnessed as the common thread binding together the story of three brides murdered at the hands of infamous serial killer George Joseph Smith in early 20^th century England. As the brides emerge from the bath tubs, wide-eyed and lungs heaving, they walk around with sopping wet clothes, throwing their waterlogged veils around to form puddles around the stage give off the unmistakable sense that something is deeply amiss.

Trapped within their watery surrounds, Rachael Dyson-McGregor, Zoe Ellerton-Ashley and Eloise Oxeas as the cast of brides set the story expertly apace, with each presenting a careful portrait of three different women in early twentieth-century London confined by the day’s gender inequalities in different ways. Wandering around the stage, the women retell their stories in a dream-like state, assuming the identity of different characters as if women possessed; one minute behaving like the poised ladies of their generation that they were and the next, running around like comical insurance salesman or, more chillingly, the deep-voiced man who killed them. Their performances are all the more impressive knowing they are either sitting in tepid bath tubs or trapped in sopping wet costumes throughout the performance without giving away even the slightest shiver.

One aspect that was left wanting was in the production’s use of sound, which was audible but barely noticeable at the beginning and then largely absent throughout the rest of the production. Given the subject matter, a more robust approach to sound would not have been out of place or would have at least countered the sound of goings-on from the theatre next door, which tended to break the spell the three brides had cast. Heart-warming though it is to see a play of such calibre in a local town hall, the auditorium was too humble a setting. Any future productions by Turtle Lab would be better placed in a larger venue, certainly if they are as ambitious and brilliantly executed as this.

The Drowning Girls interview