Bold statement on female empowerment

Let me finish

Blue Room

3.5 stars

REVIEW WILLIAM YEOMAN

Watching the unfolding news relating to US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and the women accusing him of sexual assault, it’s hard not to think it’s business as usual in the world of (sexual) politics. But what does this have to do with ordinary, 20-something women living in Perth? Nothing. And everything.

Written by 2017 WAAPA graduate Charlotte Otton — last seen at the Blue Room in Rorschach Beast’s Hive Mind — directed by Phoebe Sullivan and performed by Otton, Ana Ika, Angela Mahlatjie, Izzy McDonald and Jess Moyle, Let me finish is billed as a work which “destigmatises the messy stories that lead to female self-acceptance and sexual empowerment”.

The series of well-performed monologues, dialogues and ensembles interspersed by less well-performed a cappella songs is by turns funny, serious, fast, slow, loud, quiet, sharp, blunt, expansive and intimate.

Expletives abound but true extremes are absent, boundaries gently pushed rather than smashed.

There are awkward dance floor passes and subsequent discussions in the girls’ toilet.

Tinder dates cancelled in favour of real tenderness. Partners’ bad behaviour called out or ignored and harrowing tales of unwanted sexual advances or worse. Cringe-worthy “diversity” casting and stories cut off and resumed as a spotlight flits from one woman to another — “Let me finish!”.

Both in the conception and the execution, to what extent craft concedes too much to carelessness or is artfully absent is debatable.

Otton has a background in improv but this quality feels contrived. For example, one wishes the casts’ responses to audiences’ choices of written-out and displayed phrases to riff off were extemporised rather than prepared.

The most effective parts of Let me finish are those apparently autobiographical interludes where the cast sit and, one by one, describe the circumstances surrounding photographs of themselves taken at different stages during their growing-up.

It’s genuinely beautiful, beautifully genuine and worth the ticket price alone.

Let me finish runs until October 20.