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THE BLEEDING TREE
THE BLEEDING TREE, Griffin Theatre Company at the SBW Stables Theatre, 6 August-5 September 2015. Photography by Brett Boardman: above - Shari Sebbens, Paula Arundell and Airlie Dodds; right: Paula Arundell.
Angus Cerini’s 2014 Griffin Award-winning play tells of both a dream fulfilled and an unfolding nightmare. In just over an hour of brutal and beautiful poetry, revenge and redemption, laughter and horror, Paula Arundell, Shari Sebbens and Airlie Dodds weave a dark web around the unsuspecting viewer.
They are the mother and two daughters whose lives have been made violently, unspeakably miserable for as long as they can remember. The perpetrator is the man of the house, a drunken bully whose rage at his own inadequacies has aways been taken out on them. Except on this night when, without prior consultation, each of the women take a hand in ensuring he will beat and rape them no more.
Once upon a time revenge was simply one of the juicier elements of life, but in recent times it has become unfashionable, unacceptable, non-PC and so on. The Bleeding Tree strongly suggests otherwise and the logic and reasonableness is hard to go past. We learn through fragments and flashes of memory related by the girls and their mother just how irredeemably vile was the man of the house.
Played out in a cloaking of darkness and pools of light (Verity Hampson, lighting) on an awkward, angular construction painted as pink floral swirls on which they tentatively move, barefoot, (design Renee Mulder) Cerini’s play begins as it means to go on. “Girls I think your father’s dead.” says Arundell in flat tones. The two girls immediately back her up: “I knocked his knees out,” says one. “I conked his head,” says the other. “I shot that house clown in the neck,” Arundell finished, underlining, matter-of-factly, exactly how she feels about her actions.
A bleeding tree is the big one, in a paddock or cattle yard, with a suitable horizontal branch where a carcass can be hung and butchered. In this instance, there is no butchering to be done, only a tense wait of three hot days which is how long it will take the body to disintegrate. During those days they are visited by a few neighbours and what might be expected to happen when they work out what’s happened is not what happens.
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When postie-policeman Steve arrives there is a pivotal moment when Arundell challenges him: when she was bruised and battered and the girls terrified people did nothing because “it was none of your business”. Well, she says eyes ablaze, “This is none of your business.” And Steve understands and colludes.
The way the play unfolds, the women demand collusion and understanding of the audience too. The grisly poetry of what is happening (so much more visceral and powerful for being spoken rather than shown) is both shocking and seditious. It’s also leavened with wry humour and made thrilling by Lee Lewis’s tender yet unflinching direction and the riveting performances she draws from her three actresses.
There is something very wrong with the term “domestic violence” – it not only lets the perpetrators off the hook but also the community at large. It is neither domestic nor is it confined to violence. Unless your head is in the sand you will know that close to 60 women have been killed this year alone by their partners or ex-partners and despite mouthy platitudes from politicians, that’s not going to change any time soon.
Why do we let them get away with it? Why do we collectively turn our heads? Instead of the abstraction of “domestic violence” how about family murder, family GBH, home homicide – anything but a euphemism that allows the bashers, beaters and killers to flourish. The Bleeding Tree is a remarkable work that entertains, terrifies and subverts. Recommended.
