Review: WANTON, Southwark Playhouse
A series of disconnected, intelligently written, disturbing vignettes
The following review contains references to sexual violence and violence against women
Much like Georgie Dettmer’s blockbuster debut play Are You Watching?, her sophomore effort Wanton begins and ends with childhood, and the messages women receive from a distressingly early age. A group of primary school girls do cartwheels and put on costumes in the playground – except most of them are dressed as murdered historical women. Thus begins a series of disconnected, intelligently written, disturbing vignettes.
While Are You Watching? dealt chiefly with what it means to experience sex through a screen, Wanton, performed by the Oxford School of Drama’s newest graduates, engages with how violent pornography might affect its viewers further down the line. A throughline is traced from the girls in the playground, to Jack the Ripper’s victims, to modern reality TV, that lays bare how the repeated sensationalisation of violence against women affects those women’s sense of self.
At the crux of this play, though, is a scene where female victimhood is left much more ambiguous. A man and a woman (James Baranowicz and Joeley Anne) meet for a one-night stand, which starts as a carefully choreographed routine of flirtation. It quickly devolves, though, into the woman goading her date into violent rape play, her body already caked in fake blood. Her motives and true identity are initially unclear, while a technician lurks with camera equipment in a cupboard.
Anne and Baranowicz’s understated performances capture the couple’s mutual wariness, and leave us in doubt as to who exactly holds the power here, until an outlandish twist turns the entire dynamic on its head. Elsewhere, a similarly difficult set of sexual mores is on display in a scene set at a fictional Jack the Ripper Museum, where an uneasy romantic tension develops between a guide and an actress dressed in a bloodied petticoat (in a head-scratching choice, the script uses a pseudonym for the Ripper victims, rather than their real names).
Dettmer’s vignette structure, more meandering than in Are You Watching?, potentially overcomplicates matters. A sideplot featuring a ballerina and her archetypal stage mother experiencing medical misogyny introduces themes that stray too far from Dettmer’s central arguments, and makes her analysis less focused. The play is also about a third too long, and essentially repeats the earlier one-night stand scene – when we already know the twist – as though the first iteration had been too subtle in its messaging.
But director Sammy J Glover also uses the play’s complex structure to their advantage. The vignettes run uncomfortably into one another, and bloodied corpses are often left lying onstage between scenes, leading to several striking visual tableaux. Cleverly placed transitions between vignettes make us complicit as viewers of this violence – in many ways, this is a piece about how women choose to perform their own violent suffering for an audience, hammered home by several characters being out-of-work actors.
Dettmer is often contradictory in her ideas, and seems to want to write several plays at once, moving on too swiftly from her moments of lucidity as a writer. But Wanton is a strong second effort, that continues to establish her gift for creating theatre that challenges and unsettles rather than preaches.
Wanton runs at the Southwark Playhouse Borough until 29 August
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