Reviews/Fringe World Festival/Theatre

Hot-headed mix of profanity and poetry

28 January 2021

Kim Kirkman praises the well-drawn characters and the clever and evocative writing in What of It.

What of It, Rebecca Fingher with Lazy Yarns ·
State Theatre Centre, 27 January, 2021 ·

Adidas-clad, foul-mouthed and working class, Dax, Luck, and Corey brawl, shag and never cry. They’re anger addled, drug fuelled and adolescent. They’ll sexually harass you from across the street, and kick your head in to steal your shoes.

They’re also women, and the performance centres on this delicious subversion of gender stereotypes.

Funny, crude, and sometimes unsettling, What of It tackles rivalry, rage and violence in a story of three young women hell-bent having one last big blowout before the end of the world. Multiple facets of a roiling conflict between new-kid Lucky, alpha-dog Corey and ambivalent Dax give depth to characters that might otherwise come off as one-dimensional translations of well-known masculine tropes.

The performance fills the stage with a freewheeling energy charged by the characters’ frequent loose-limbed gyrations to brash British hip hop, comic stretches of dialogue, and deftly choreographed sequences moving actors’ interactions in a dance-like harmony.

Actors Anna Lindstedt (Dax), Courts Cava (Luck) and Rebecca Fingher (Cory) channel an edgy, wolf pack dynamism, lobbing dialogue and hostility back and forth with an unpolished synchrony. Their fast-paced enactment travels from salons and nightclubs to street corners and basements in a vivid rendering of addiction, bullying, neglect and disadvantage that is at once darkly humorous and sharply sad.

But the beauty of What of It is less what the performance is saying than how it is said. Fingher’s writing is evocative, clever and unpredictable, lending itself to dialogue that collides and ricochets among the characters, slipping fluidly between caustic, rapid-fire interchanges, lyric narration and rap.

Freezing at 5am under a flickering streetlight, as the sun rises over “blistered buildings” Corey dreams of “waking up in warm love”. And in the punches not thrown and the invisible lines crossed, What of It threads a nuanced reflection on the messiness of being human through its hot-headed amalgam of profanity and poetry.

What of It is on in the State Theatre Centre’s Rehearsal Room 1 until 30 January, 2021.

Pictured top: Anna Lindstedt, Rebecca Fingher and Courts Cava in ‘What of It’. Photo: Samuel Gordon-Beuce

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Author —
Kim Kirkman

Kim Kirkman studied journalism and community development, and has worked across the state as a reporter and story gatherer. She loves food and fiction writing and hearing other people’s stories. Always up for a challenge, the monkey bars are her favourite part of the playground.

Past Articles

  • Taking it from the streets

    Can the havoc and exhilaration of graffiti survive relocation into a gallery? Kim Kirkman heads to the Art Gallery of Western Australia to find out.

  • Freshly hatched statements

    Newly graduated artists take a lively approach to the dilemmas and delights we currently face, in the latest iteration of PICA’s “Hatched” exhibition, writes Kim Kirkman.

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