There are plenty of audience members who will tell you they found Sydney Festival’s divisive production of Daughter deeply upsetting and distressing. You could see them emerging from the theatre after a performance, looking more than just “confronted” but genuinely shaken and disturbed.
Some criticised the festival for not providing enough information to audience members about intensity of the show’s content and its relentless depictions of misogyny and violence. The festival certainly isn’t making that mistake with Deer Woman, a solo show about a Blackfoot woman seeking vengeance for the murder of her younger sister – and the 1,600 other Indigenous women recorded as missing or murdered in Canada in recent decades.
There are the regular content warnings online and outside of the theatre, but things go even further than that: an usher tells every audience member as they walk in that there’s extreme violence and descriptions of sexual violence.
Without a doubt, this is often tough to watch. The ongoing cruelty and horrors that the young women in Lila’s story are subjected to will start to you weigh you down, and by the bloody final scene, there’s a decent chance you’ll feel a little woozy.
Whether the festival needs to go quite as far as they do in terms of content warnings is another question, but at least they’re looking out for their audience.
Not that you ever feel unsafe in the hands of actor Cherish Violet Blood and playwright Tara Beagan, who weave a tale that’s brutal and uncompromising, but with surprising warmth and a fair few laughs. To say the character of Lila is tough is a massive understatement. When she was a very young girl, her mother – who’d done far worse than turning a blind eye to what the men in her life had done to Lila – skipped town abruptly, leaving her daughters to be raised by their father. He taught them the ways of the wild, and they learnt how to hunt and slaughter deer. Eventually Lila joined the army, but when she was deployed overseas something horrible happened to her younger sister Pamela (or “Hammy”, as she affectionately called her).
Now, she’s finally found the man who killed Hammy – at a vigil for lost Indigenous women, of all places – and has a plan to exact her revenge.
You get the feeling that Lila never wanted to be quite this “tough” – you can tell there’s a deep well of love and feeling under the surface – but the violence of the world has left her with no other option.
It’s a brilliantly structured monologue, tracing Lila and Hammy’s life and the traumas they’ve suffered, slowly ramping up over the course of the play. But it’s punctuated with lightness – just when the darkness starts to suffocate – and evocative prose that brings Canada’s wilder corners to life on stage.
Violet Blood is an engrossing narrator and a wonderful storyteller; Lila is delivering her confession down the barrel of a smartphone lens so the world will understand this act of vengeance. Her face – heartbroken and furious – is projected in close-up onto two canvas sheets hanging to either side.
Most of what happens in this play is painfully real. We know things like this happen to women – and disproportionately Indigenous women and women of colour – all over the world. Something like this happened in Melbourne on Wednesday night.
But what happens in the final moments of Deer Woman is more of a fantasy. It’s violent and stomach-churning, but perhaps the only way we can really expect people to respond to the enormous pain and heartache caused by an ongoing crisis of violence against women.