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Suzy Storck has never been in control of her life – her every move has been dictated by other people: her mum, her partner, the kids she didn’t want. In French playwright Magali Mougel’s darkly whimsical drama – translated by Chris Campbell – we first meet her, drunk, surrounded by toys, in her isolated house in the Pyrenees. It is the middle of some yet-to-be-explained domestic tragedy: the kids are locked in their room; their father, Hans Vassily, has stormed off somewhere; her mother, Madame Storck, turns up at Suzy’s door and slaps her in the face.
As the play progresses it loops back and we see some turning points in Suzy’s life. Her first meeting with Hans when they both worked ‘in chicken’, and his clumsy, grotesquely earnest courtship of her. A weird job interview in a kids’ shop, set up by her mother, in which Suzy tersely demands the owner tell her what she wants her to say. Hans impregnating her; not rape, but not really what she wanted.
It is a peculiar play, in which nothing very nice happens, but it often happens relatively amusingly, with the characters and Theo Solomons’s Chorus offering blithely detached commentary on the often distressing action.
Caoilfhionn Dunne’s Suzy is fascinating, her performance somewhere midway between a growl, a scream and a despairing smirk. It is, undoubtedly, a razor-sharp study in the means by which women’s roles are allotted to them by a society unconcerned by what they want or need. It is also a frank look at the horrible strains that can come with parenthood.
Nonetheless, I found Jean-Pierre Baro’s terse production somewhat clinical. I think it’s mostly because Mougel offers so little suggestion that another life might have been possible for Suzy. That’s probably the point, but there is no real hint of potential in her – one senses the playwright can relate to Suzy’s misery but has little fondness for the woman herself. Nor is she under any obligation to have any. But there’s something a bit clinical about it, a sense of the short play being an intellectual exercise that bristles with anger but lacks compassion, instead relying on a black and whimsical sense of humour to fill the gap. Still, it’s affecting, with a runaway train momentum as its tragedy picks up pace, and there’s little denying that a play about society’s systematic coercion of women has rather grimly found its moment.