Suzie Flack (Lauren Richardson) has been playing footy since she was three years old. She’s great at the game and she wants to dominate it. Yes, there’s AFLW – everyone says to her, “there’s a women’s league now” like maybe she doesn’t know about it – but Suzie wants to be at the top. And for better or worse, that means playing with the men.
And so in Fierce, a trenchant, unblinking stare of a play by Jane E Thompson, that’s exactly what Suzie does. Recruited by AFL legend Corey Anderson (Martin Jacobs) and placed on a men’s team at the top, Suzie is faced with exhausting, interminable challenges. There’s the casual misogyny of the men on the team. There are the desperately upsetting comments from Twitter trolls. There’s Melanie (Chantelle Jamieson), wife of one of Suzie’s teammates, with whom she shares an attraction. There’s also a male escort (Felix Johnson), because Suzie is in the public eye and trying to figure out her personal life, and that’s a whole other nightmare.
But Suzie isn’t just football and her boxing regimen and sport in general. Her father (Jacobs again), a retired footballer, is old and unwell, and naturally his care falls to Suzie. Put simply: there’s a lot on her plate and in a destructive world, even a premier athlete like Suzie is perceived as falling short: as a woman, as a footballer, as a human. This is a play about how we are all affected by the way our society is structured and how are bodies are regarded within that structure, and that means that this is necessarily a play about how impossible it is to live in this world without running into the sharp edges of the boundaries we’ve built for each other. We see it in Suzie, yes, but we also see it in her teammates, hemmed in by expectation and behavioural norms. No one can survive happily like this.
Fierce invokes your fight-or-flight response by aiming its focuses first at bodies (especially Suzie’s) and then radiating outwards, heightening the senses. Suzie spends nearly the entire play in situations that could be threatening or harmful, and as an audience member (presumably more so for anyone who isn’t a white man, those who have learned to look for the danger signs), your heart leaps into your mouth and stays there. The alarm bells are everywhere: when she’s cornered at training. When a man saunters into a women’s bathroom, clearly following after someone who is drunk and in distress. When a married woman touches Suzie’s arm in public and it means something. When Suzie is expected to be silent and she rejects that expectation.
The great success of this production of Fierce is that director Janine Watson isn’t telegraphing these pressurised moments; she doesn’t underscore them with overly obvious blocking or musical stings. Every day, seemingly innocuous situations can escalate into violence without fanfare. Watson knows this, and she presents this fact with an honesty that’s staggeringly casual. This approach elevates Fierce from a strong work into one that upsets the gut. Watson presents each moment as part of life, safe until it isn’t, because that’s the reality of living under scrutiny in a devalued body.
As Suzie, Richardson is strong, defensive and affecting. The supporting cast – particularly Jamieson’s turn as Melanie, the married ‘WAG’ (the ensemble, except Richardson, play multiple roles) – are in great form, rounded out by Zelman Cressy-Gladwin, Stacey Duckworth and Andrew Shaw. A highlight: one group scene takes a thrilling turn of camaraderie into choreographed dance.
This world comes alive against Melanie Liertz’s minimal, adaptive set. Projections by Genevieve Muratore draw home both Thompson’s dissection of our dissection of female bodies and the suffocating ubiquity of online hate; comments line the walls and floor, pulse against Suzie’s muscular frame. Lights by Kelsey Lee and Ben Pierpoint’s per-usual well-judged composition and sound push and pull like waves over Suzie; together, they illuminate the sting of this lived experience.
Suzie is inimitable, and the world doesn’t know what to do with her. Fierce sees this, and its anger is written with clear-eyed precision. We should hold that precision close and recognise it: the better we can see the world we live in, the better – and more thoughtfully – we can move within it.