A Moment On The Lips (Mad March Hare Theatre Company
in association with Sydney Independent Theatre Company) runs at the Old Fitzroy
Theatre from 25 March – 12 April 2014. By Jonathan Gavin, directed by Mackenzie
Steele.
I loved this play from the moment I read the press release.
A show that focuses on the bonds between women – sisters, friends, lovers –
with an all-female cast? Oh yes. Oh HELLS YES. That is something I am
immediately interested in. These are the types of relationships that are
desperately under-explored. And call me selfish, but as a twenty-something
woman, I am totes going to be into a show about other young women. Strange, I
know.
So perhaps I went in with crazy high expectations, but A
Moment On The Lips really bummed me out, because I did not get what I
wanted from it at all.
There was a line at the end where one of the characters
demands of the others, “so what are we going to do now? Sit around and think up
clever new ways to be awful to each other?”. I thought that that pretty much
captured the whole play. This was a show that basically revolved around women –
sisters, friends, lovers – being awful to each other.
Two points. 1) I do not believe that characters have to be
likeable for a show to be good. (Which is lucky, because none of the characters
in this show are.) 2) I firmly believe that women can be and often are awful to
each other. I’ve been awful to other women. Other women have been awful to me.
It’s a thing that happens.
But OMG, the women in this show were SO UNRELENTINGLY awful
to each other. And that was the problem. You couldn’t understand why they hung
around each other: why the friends stayed friends, why the lovers stayed
lovers, why the sisters kept talking to each other. You never, ever understood
why they couldn’t stay away from each other. And I mean, sure, there are
terribly unhealthy relationships where you’re bad for each other and mean to
each other and still can’t stay away. But not every friend is a frenemy. I feel
like A Moment On The Lips was shooting for “complex, messy female
relationships” but ended up at “women being bitches to each other”.
This play didn’t ring true for me at all. Not that every
play about young women should, like, replicate my life, but there was very little
in here that resonated with me. Take, for example, the character of Rowena
(Lucy Goleby), who is a PhD student writing a dissertation. That is not so far
from my life. That’s something I recognise at once. But when she starts talking
about her thesis, she’s immediately told to stop by the people that are
supposed to be the closest to her. That is exactly the opposite of my
experience. If people care about you, they’ll listen. Even if they’ve heard you
talk about it a million times. Even if they think it’s boring.
That’s quite a specific example of a broader problem with
the play. The dynamics of the female relationships just weren’t… right. This is
one thing that I think Lena Dunham’s Girls does very well: while some of
the characters can be totally unlikeable and are often terrible to each other,
you still understand why they hang out with each other. Hannah and Jessa, for
instance, have both been narcissistic and self-centred and showed little care
for the feelings of others, but you still understand a) why their friends are
still friends with them, and b) why they are still friends with each other. For
all its other faults, this is also something I think Sex and the City
did reasonably well at. Teen girl drama Pretty Little Liars has four
girl leads, and while it has a spectacularised hyperbolic storyline, it is
great at female friendship and its complexities. I didn’t find that in A
Moment On The Lips at all, and it made me so, so sad.
The character I was the most engaged with was Emma (Claudia
Barrie), probably because her relationships were the most complex and nuanced.
She was the only one I really believed felt genuine affection for her friends:
one of the play’s most accurate moments came, I thought, when she lied to her
artist friend Victoria (Beth Aubrey) about liking her exhibition when she’d
actually hated it. Her storyline, however, which involved her being stalked and
almost murdered by someone who had seen her on TV, did not ring true. Other
storylines did – the selfish Victoria reliant on her career being funded by her
older sister Jenny (Sarah Aubrey), and being resentful when that money was
taken away – but the relationships felt so one-dimensional that the story too
became unbelievable.
I think the problem was that we don’t see any of the
characters being really genuinely nice to each other until right at the end of
the play. And that is just not how female friendship works. Sure, sometimes
friendship is performed, but most of the time? Women like hanging out with
other women. Genuinely. Really. For me, my female friendships are the most cherished
relationships in my life. And if you’re going to do a show that centres around
the bonds between women – whether they’re sisters, friends, or lovers – the
pleasures of those bonds are something that need to be recognised.
