CONSUMED brings together three imaginatively queer, gory short plays at Camden People’s Theatre
“Did you know your body can’t tell the difference between real laughter and just making laughing noises?”
You suspect Halloween must be approaching when plays start to boast of drawing “attention to the grotesqueness of mind and body” but queer collective Dreambite are looking far beyond imported commercialism and cheap scares here with CONSUMED. A triptych of short plays unashamedly explore queerness and feminity in their messy, uncontained states, a kind of horror that derives its strength from just how real it could possibly be.
Writer/producers Katrina Bennett, Lydia Sabatini and Clare Stenning, along with director Nell Bailey, offer up three distinct works which ricochet from substance abuse to fever dreams to auto-cannibalism. Throughlines are very much in evidence though – a surrealist bent to the storytelling, a shrewd study of the complicated reality of existing in a female body in contemporary society, a fluidity that is unafraid to tackle theatrical norms.
Stenning’s Gummy Gummy hits hard with a stark look at how Naomi’s relationship with weed is increasingly affecting her relationship with her girlfriend June. Nusrath Tapadar’s Nay is happy just do nothing but get high and though she’s initially showing willing to do the things June is encouraging her to do, from laughing yoga classes to just having a shower, things quickly devolve. The use of internal monologue is chillingly well employed here, genuinely terrifying at times in showing how delusion can be so easily masked.
Bennett’s Lucid is more playful as Mabel’s life is taken over by the disorientating and downright filthy sex dreams she is having about her flatmates. Her grip on her own very reality is challenged by these all-encompassing fugue states and so she’s forced to go full-on Carrie-from-Homeland to try and recall the recurring details from rashes to sandwiches to sheer sauciness, and investigate – if she can – just what is going on. Sophia DeCaro leads this play with real vivacity.
Sabatini’s You Are What You Eat rounds things out with this solo performance which both introduced me to the concept of auto-cannabalism and gave me the extreme ick. As a piece of body horror it is highly effective but it is made more disturbing by the disarmingly conversational performance from Stenning’s protagonist whose reasoning and rationale almost convinces you that this isn’t too far-fetched. Altogether great, gory fun, and a shoutout too to supporting player Hugo Papiernik whose intensity in Gummy Gummy may very well haunt my dreams.
