“Speaking as a non actor…” my friend began as we stood de-briefing over the roar of traffic after A GIRL IS A HALF-FORMED THING playing at Kings Cross Theatre. I knew what was coming and it’s as good a place as any to begin.
The play, ripped from the pages of the book by Irish writer Eimear McBride, is a marathon of learned lines: one performer, 70 minutes, barely a pause and words that jumble and fuss in an effort to make themselves understood. It’s impressive but it’s not the thing. The thing is how those words create a narrative, a gutpunch story that travels with an immense weight of harm, historic and present, to alert the future.
The stage is bare, soiled, a chair alone. The girl appears and her words jar as they tumble from her. We glean that she is speaking to someone – I was and you was – and there is a childishness in her. As the ear tunes in to the brogue and the intent and the people around her personified, we will live much of her life as she sees it.
Ella Prince is extraordinary here. Vocally pinpoint, she never allows the words to judder or fracture to staccato. Characters elide with a slight change of timbre and the use of eyeline. And the energy allies with the girl’s driving impulse to tell someone. It never flags. Prince brings the brutality through her small frame, singlet top shoulders slicing the narrative and gesturing sparingly below the waist. Early on when she is free there is exuberance but after the events of the text she increasingly uses energy to pull herself up to height or falls to floor to squirm in the relation of awful events.
Audiences should take the trigger warnings seriously here. Director Erin Taylor, anchors A GIRL IS A HALF-FORMED THING in the persona of the character but such is the troubling text of this production that I thought I was through the worst, only to be assaulted again by the events and themes of the work. There are phrases in the girl’s mouth that were spoken by others which make one feels struck, hit hard, by the forces around her. Personally, I was vivisected by one small, get out of jail, phrase spoken by her abuser.
Religious bigotry, parental neglect, sexual assault of children, fatalism are not darkened by the obscurity of the words. The production elements (Design: Isabel Hudson) work in harmony with the girl to light her way to expression early on and then to create the emotional resonances as the story is impelled to climax. Clemmie Williams’ audio design is spare and simple, often contrapuntal single notes which respond to and reflect the character. Violence where violence is called for but never discordant or distracting.
The lighting frames the story with a neon tubed square above the piled, squared off and manufactured dirt stage. Not a shadow to disturb the suspension of belief, that is no mean feat here. (Lighting: Veronique Bennett) The rest of the rig lighting is harsh and steel with some warmth from the birdies throwing upwards from the floor but the neon moves in mood with the character more than the piece. Vibrant and slightly glaring is the neon’s blue when she moves to the city and stark, white, iridescent it glows alone in the dark at times when she is most vulnerable. Occasionally it warms to a peach glow to light her moments of joy.
There is joy, there is laughter, and there’s a welcome wildness and revolution in A GIRL IS A HALF-FORMED THING but that is not the thing you and your friends will take with you into the street. Densely themed, flawlessly executed in a blazing single performance, it stands witness to the many of #metoo.
A GIRL IS A HALF-FORMED THING continues at Kings Cross Theatre [Facebook] until April 21.