This is not a review...it's a Planet of Incels
SLUTNIK 2: Planet of the Incels is a sequel to a 2022 hit and the second in a proposed five-part series. I review its opening, mid-season and closing performances with responses from its writer.
SLUTNIK™ 2: Planet of the Incels ends with a conversation between a cyborg and a cannibalistic lesbian. MOTHERBOARD and 3122 Florence are aboard the Mothership hurtling through space. They’ve just experienced something horrific. 3122 Florence’s ‘mother’ was assaulted and killed years ago on a ‘distant planet’. Through 'new technology’, they’ve just lived through her memories of the experience. Still reeling, they start talking about trauma and what it means to live through it, share it, and represent it. What does representing trauma accomplish ‘other than continuing to harm each other?’, Florence asks.
It’s a good question. I scrawled it into my notebook the second time I saw the show part-way through its two-week season at Theatre Works in St Kilda last month.
I love opening nights. Apart from the free booze, they’ve got a palpable air of anticipation - equal parts vibes and charcuterie. Lobby conversations are energetic, or tensely muted. There’s Cameron Woodhead in his statement Naarm-black long coat making a swift exit. There’s Giselle Nguyen walking to her tram, shaking her head. There are stakes to having an opinion here. The spectre of future reviews loom over the theatre lobby. We’re all critics; we’re all guessing at the criticism to come.
But opening night has not been a thing on Broadway since the 70s. It is a signal for the lifting of an embargo on reviews now rather than any strictly observed ritual. Critics come to the final few previews instead. Hugh Jackman received flack when he asked theatre critics to attend opening night of ‘The Music Man’. Preview performances, Jackman’s demand implied, are different. Last month, another Aussie actor, Anthony LaPaglia laughed his way through his demand for critics to review a mid-season performance of his run as Willy Lowman in The Death of a Salesman at Her Majesty’s Theatre. We know that show’s change between previews and opening night; and between opening night and closing, or mid-season shows. Actors settle into their performances over the season, lighting cues get slicker and set changes more seamless. But that’s not a reviewer’s problem, or not to an extent. We’ve got editorial interests to worry about and theatre company’s have their marketing to consider. Who's going to read a review about a show part-way through its season? It’s part of a critic’s skillset to predict how a show might develop over its run, to make allowances for opening night mishaps or the possibility of improvement. What might a mid-season performance look like, we ask. But any mention of the possibility that a show might settle during its run is only ever theoretical; it might get better (that this possibility brought in as a way to theorise improvement makes it read as a qualification to a negative review more than an earnest investment in asking how a show might improve and in what ways).
I saw SLUTNIK™ 2: Planet of the Incels three times; opening night, mid-way through its season, and closing night. I wanted to see how the show changed and developed over its season and to ask how these developments could contribute to my criticism. In many ways it was the best show I could’ve chosen to ask these questions.
In 2022, the first SLUTNIK™ dropped us into a spaceship in search of a lesbian utopia with an all-female presenting crew called ‘The Sluts’. A Barbarella-esque love child from writer Flick, the show hit a sweet spot between campy irreverence and social commentary; flipping from scenes of aerial cunnilingus, to fiery take-downs of reproductive injustice and misogyny. But as far as word-of-mouth reception was concerned, audiences seemed divided about this high-energy intergalactic romp.
Obsessed with this in here because one thing that absolutely grates me is that as a writer and very verbal theatre critic (my publication? the foyer xx), I continue relentlessly to try and encourage brutal honesty about my work from others. I feel like I speak constantly of my thick skin and desire for people to be honest… and NO ONE SAYS THIS TO MY FACE. Aside from Tansy (director) and Enya (dramaturg) when we get together post season to talk about all the issues and potential improvements, it’s really hard to get this unfiltered feedback from the gen pop. Which is hard when I’m then relegated to hearing it only via reviews that sometimes use clickbait-y takedowns with no backing rather than igniting an in depth conversation. #notallreviewers but goodness for all the valid and useful critique I get there’s an equal amount of confusing and unbacked (and sometimes factually incorrect?) statements that contribute to the negative rep that critique has. This write up is the closest I’ve gotten to a detached but personalised and direct response. I don’t know how to fix that and this note isn’t relevant to this overall write up but it’s an experience that feels more stark in contrast to what we’re doing here.
People would speak admiringly of its many bombastic dance sequences, or the show’s tongue-in-cheek pastiche when it chose to lean into it, but they had problems with the script’s dense language and at times verbose commentaries. For all its charm, there was a sense that SLUTNIK™ was trying to cover too much. Still, its glittering spectacle, powerhouse creative team, and firm grasp of its audience made it a runaway success. A return season at Melbourne Fringe 2022 sold out, spurring enough hype to fuel Flick’s ambitious plan to develop five more - the SLUTNIK™ Theatrical Universe.
I sit down for SLUTNIK™ 2: Planet of the Incels (late and sweating after tram delays) just in time to hear a welcome via the overhead speakers: ‘Greetings Sluts and people who wish they were Sluts’. It’s a nod to an audience familiar with the franchise. On opening night the audience giggled with recognition and familiarity. It was followed by a three-minute long content warning: fatphobia, queerphobia, racism, slurs, references to sexual assault, violence, descriptions of violence, references to self-harm, strobe lights and sexual references. On opening night the audience giggled nervously before they fell silent.
The mid-season performance was closed-captioned; audiences were dead silent reading these warnings roll out on screen. On closing night, the audience was drunk and chaotic, whooping and cooing before they too grew still - anxious trepidation quickly replacing their curiosity. The lights went down. A recording of panicked breathing, scuffling and grunts of pain filled the vacuous Theatre Works. ‘You need help’, a robotic voice declared. ‘Stop recording’, a breathless voice interrupted her. The air was uneasy; every night, the audience would tense, a bit confused. It’s the recording of the aftermath of a brutal assault. But we don’t know that yet.
By opening night I actually hated this verbal list but was too caught up in my own ethics about being hands off. I regret keeping the audio in, Tansy and I both cringe about it in hindsight. We had signs on the doors, warnings online, and the way we dealt with the content was not (in my opinion) at all triggering.
This week I watched a filmed version of Ivo Van Hove’s award-winning staging of A Little Life. Hanya Yanagihara’s 2012 novel birthed the idea of the trauma plot: a trope of the 2010s that seemed intent on wedding characterisation to traumatic backstory. In the four-hour A Little Life, the thankless Jude is assaulted, maimed and abandoned; his partners die or throw him down stairwells, his father figures abuse him. On stage, it’s more or less the same. At this point, the title is so ubiquitous with trauma that any content warnings are tautological, self-evident (the show’s website offers extensive content warnings and ‘post-show support resources’, the movie doesn’t bother). But the stakes feel inevitably higher in a theatrical context. It’s easy to put a book down when you need to; it’s harder to leave a theatre. Scenes of self-harm are impressive in their stage craft, but unflinchingly gory. That seems the point - to test the audience’s limits, to take them to the edge of their threshold for withstanding trauma and so connect them to Jude’s suffering (??). The filmed version felt safer, more contained. I felt more like a voyeur of this audience’s discomfort. In the corner of the Cinema Nova screen there’s a woman recoiling, just behind Jude’s shoulder there’s a teenager with their hand over their mouth. No one walked out of the film. When it ended many people were crying.
Is asking audiences to watch particularly traumatic experiences on stage doing anything ‘other than continuing to harm each other?’ Does the future of theatre lie in offering audiences a way to resolve traumatic experiences, escape them or grapple with them head-on? We could ask which audiences, in particular. We could ask how these experiences are represented on stage, or should be, or what one understands as traumatic. Part of the push for what Maggie Nelson describes as an aesthetics of care in ‘On Freedom’ - in contrast to, say, a Theatre of Cruelty - in recent years is a sensitivity to, and re-examination of, the question of trauma as it is represented on our stages. What do theatre makers owe their audience when depicting trauma? How can we create theatre that doesn’t wed its effectiveness to replicating the experience of trauma while still allowing space to understand and contend with traumatic experiences? Maybe it’s time to retire ‘trauma’ as a term completely (pause keeping the score for a second) and ask more specific questions about theatre’s relationship to violence, gore, sexual assault, especially when it’s centred around minority groups or when it seems to fit into and perpetuate certain frameworks of power and marginalisation etc.
Slutnik 2: Planet of the Incels is interested in these questions of care and harm, and their relationship to theatre. But it struggles to marry these interests to its other lofty thematic, formal and conceptual aims. As its title suggests, it’s a show also interested in Incels; that subculture of men connected by their perceived unattractiveness and an often violent belief that women - and feminism, writ large - is the cause for their personal failings and society’s problems. Against the backdrop of this community, the show explores masculinity, the ways in which hate propagates, men are radicalised, and how women navigate the threat of male violence. It also takes the form it uses to represent these issues seriously, showing a dedication to the Sci-Fi genre and in particular to the erotic Sci-Fi comedies, and retro-futurism of the 1960s and 70s. Admirably, it tries to do and say it all - give searing commentary on all these issues while still offering a thrilling theatrical experience. But it stretches itself thin in the process.
The story goes that Florence (Sara Reed) is re-living the memories of her ‘mother’ (also played by Sara Reed), who landed on a Planet (Planet EV2) in search of resources decades ago. She is joined by Motherboard (Matilda Gibbs). From there they encounter a group of men - Eliot (Ben Ashby), Elon (Michael Cooper), Neo (Ethan Morse), Ben (William Strom) and Jon (Benji Smith). They’re Incels, but that means nothing to Florence who has been living in a Sapphic utopia. They’re also dressed as technicoloured cowboys (Emily Busch’s costume design is spectacular). They play on Florence’s ignorance, telling her they’ve been unfairly imprisoned in a dome by ‘evil lesbians’. It’s a lie; the dome is a rehabilitation centre and soon enough their deceit grows violent.
Slutnik 2: Planet of the Incels is a hard show to write about, mostly because its writer, Flick has an eagle-eyed attention to detail. Repeat viewings revealed only more depths, more details and more questions. It is often overwhelming. On opening night, I walked away disheartened, giving up when an Uber driver asked me to describe the show (God, me too). Plot, I felt, was far too often sacrificed to character’s introducing and then explaining complex details about the SLUTNIK™ universe - its technologies, its history and the problems it faces, or even laying the groundwork for shows to come. To summarise the show’s final scene to open this newsletter, or even describe its plot to my Uber driver, I had to cut many such details: the individual tenets of Incel culture that each character represents, the process of their rehabilitation that it describes in detail, the intricacies of the ‘Memtech’ technology used to relive the experience that drives the plot, or the ‘moral clause’ that Motherboard turns off to explore each Incel’s dream. Those who haven’t seen it will have questions reading this - what is a ‘moral clause’ and why does Motherboard explore these dreams? What tenets of Inceldom, exactly?? That’s part of the script’s problem - that every detail is not just specific, but implicates a whole world of other themes, ideas and rules for us to understand it and why the scene references it or the plot requires it.
The irony is that despite these details there are still many unanswered questions. I still don’t know why Florence doesn’t leave when a group of lesbians come to pick up a ‘recovered’ Incel. I still don’t understand how this Incel, Neo, was rehabilitated. Or why Motherboard couldn’t save Florence. I have no doubt that the team will have an answer (Always, LOL) or that there will be a line somewhere in the script I didn’t catch. There are half-answers I could offer, but they require the kind of insularity of a rehearsal room - an awareness of the rules and intentions that make conversation about a show interesting, but rarely the experience of watching it. Even after three shows, I didn’t know what detail, subplot or richly drawn thematic thread was most important to my watching.
A part of me wants to say - because that’s your choice! Live theatre is all about the audience, so my job is to balance what I wanna do and how I wanna do it, with how an audience receives it.
By closing night I chose to give up and just vibe (LOL). But then, lack of clarity still compromised the emotional payoff of the show’s final act when the assault occurs and Florence is left grappling with its horrors. While she’s grappling with having effectively re-lived her mother’s trauma, the scene tries to give audiences a key takeaway or thesis. It is quickly tied in knots in an effort to find one that can accommodate the sheer scale of concepts and plots that came before it.
Some context: SLUTNIK™ 2 only recently adopted this ending. Earlier drafts ended with a revenge killing spree; MOTHERBOARD repeating history by violently massacring all of the incels, seeing this as the only viable way to keep us safe. Senseless violence begets senseless violence etc. But, over the past year or so, I’ve found several depictions of violence or the lives affected by it to increasingly exasperate me. I think that if you’ve not sat through a retelling and felt that feeling… of having your story stolen and reworked for someone else’s ego, then you’re likely sitting there wondering what they’re talking about. I decided that it would be clear for those who tell those stories, and those who hear them, and I didn’t much care about anyone else. They had dancing and lifts and spectacle, but that last moment was not for everyone. It used to be four times the length but it all was saying the same two things, so I cut it down into what I perceive to be a neat request of ‘storytellers’.
These are some of our most critically rigorous, and considered theatre makers (see a show with Tansy Gorman and Flick and watch them diagnose its issues within an inch of its life Guilty!). I have no doubt that they know many of these criticisms already. SUPERNOVA (a SLUTNIK™ story) will be a Wattpad story (available now), perhaps the perfect medium to allow their dedication to rich detail play out without compromising plot or characterisation.
It’s not that this team are ignorant of the script’s faults, but that they so often answer criticism within the script itself. Reed is an incredibly charming and capable actor but her character is too often a prompt for others to explain the plot and the details deemed important for our ability to follow it. Early on and Motherboard offers her the chance to scour her impressive stores of data to bring up results on ‘men’. It’s a funny line, contingent on an audience who knows what she would find - namely, knowledge that would make her get the fuck off that planet immediately. But Florence’s reasoning for not taking Motherboard up on her offer is thin. She’s ‘tired’, she tells us. Really, she denies the offer because the plot requires her to.
The line is only necessary to resolve a plot hole; to pre-empt an audience who might ask: ‘why didn’t Florence just ask Motherboard about Incels?’ But this is a retro-futuristic world where Incels wear multi-coloured cowboy suits and lip sync to Queen. It’s a line that shows a lack of trust in its audience, and in the ability for us to accept style over clarity. In effect, the script directs us to notice these plot holes and so evaluate whether they are resolved well enough. Do we accept Florence being ‘tired’ as enough justification? Would we even have thought that her not asking Motherboard was a plot hole if the script didn’t draw attention to it? It’s emblematic of the show’s tendency to focus on plot-issues or logical fallacies and overexplain them as if doing so resolves the issue or frees the plot to continue unabated - explicit self-awareness as an answer to a plot-hole rather than a reason to restructure or rethink the plot. Or, alternatively, to instead lean into its style in a way that trusts the fact that in the end, the audience is not trying to poke holes in this story. We want to trust this writer and just accept the plot and its characters as they tell us we should. The audience SLUTNIK™ seems to imply is one that takes the show in bad faith, actively trying to critique it and find contradictions. Ironically, its dedication to pre-empting this mode of engagement means that it ignores the plot points and ideas that we actually did need explained to us.
An issue with my ability to think on my feet and have answers for almost-everything, which I have only realised to be a habit worth critically evaluating because of this paragraph right here!!!, is that often if there’s an issue and I can answer it… I will do it in the script! Rather than backing down from the plotpoint… if I can answer a question with a logic befitting the existing text, which I can almost always do because I’m a fast thinker, I’ll just add in the clarification. I’ve always thought about it as a strength of mine… but in real time as I write this response … when I think about it, it’s… a bit… lazy. I let myself be lazy because no one has called me out on the fact that my ability to argue and justify just about anything allows me to do the lazy thing of just adding preempted justifications regarding complications. I just want to put it in writing here because this is just a !!! such a moment that perfectly encapsulates why I so desperately and earnestly want more criticism.
Florence’s ignorance becomes increasingly untenable and the script wastes time trying to justify it. ‘They’re a different culture than us’, she declares in answer to the Incel’s blatant misogyny. Taken on their own, there is a logic to the arguments she uses. But it still locks her into constantly justifying the illogical actions the plot asks of her, or asking her scene partners to explain details that can do it for her. It detaches us from our lead character in the process, so much of her characterisation lost to exposition and only draws attention to these inconsistencies and plot-holes. Reviewers described Reed’s performance as ‘suitably ambivalent’ or ‘confused’ - suited, ultimately, to what the plot needs. That by closing night Reed was able to give an impression of depth to her underwritten character should be applauded. Whether with a little kick of her purple heels or a heart-wrenching sob, her performance closing night rose above the script.
I’ve thought about these responses a lot. The descriptions of her characters as ambivalent or confused were ... okay so, not to pull the misogyny card, but… how was a character written to be watching their mother’s death in real time ambivalent? Who fought against 20+ years of suppressed information just to live out a death, ambivalent? The stakes couldn’t be higher. As for the interactions with the incels… Because this character was someone who wasn’t familiar with the sexism we know and love today™, doesn’t make her ambivalent, it just means she doesn’t know to fear it yet. Ambivalent and confused? It feels condescending. Do we call Sherlock Holmes confused? Poirot? Are these male detectives confused because they’re not sure who the killer is yet? Leading men can be ‘straight’, leading women have to be the ‘ingenue’, the ‘rebel’, etc etc). Because this female character was taking us through a story that wasn’t about womanhood in an overt way, I think that people’s (mainly men’s) expectations and understanding of leading women were challenged. Underwritten? The whole thing was hers.
Early on and Motherboard describes SLUTNIK™ 2 as if ‘Terrey Pratchett wrote a spaghetti western in Vegas but grew up a lesbian in the 2010s watching drag race’. I managed to catch the line in the second show when I could read it on the closed-captioning screens on either side of the stage. It’s smart - wry and playfully referential, and Matilda Rose Gibbs delivers it with the perfect robotic monotone (as the in every show, Gibbs was an absolute stand out). It’s also coyly self-aware, nearly meta-theatrical; a knowing wink to an audience the show rightly understands to be its core fanbase: queer, young (possibly Pratchett fans).
No one knows their audience better than the SLUTNIK™ team. They know their fans lapped up the first show’s dance numbers so they made them bigger, louder and hornier. ‘Theatrics permitted’, Motherboard declares before being lifted up in a Christ-like tableau for the spectacular opening performance of ‘It’s Raining Men’. Choreography by Mia Tuco was a stand out every night; tight lifts, well-rehearsed ensemble sequences. From an Incel strip-tease to Queen’s ‘Break Free’, a romantic comedy montage underscored by Madonna, to a dreamy club night, audiences lapped it up (helped by suitably bombastic, danceable sound design from Jack Burmeister). We are told early on that, like the first show, we can film every number. Once again, audience experience is front and centre.
But overtime, the show feels limited by its own predetermined idea of its audience - constantly pre-empting our criticisms and trying to fulfil our impression of what constitutes a SLUTNIK™ show. The script is constantly on the backfoot defending itself, fearful that we might be confused, that it might be misread as sympathetic to Incel culture or harmful by shining a spotlight on its less-than palatable language, behaviours and beliefs.
For me, the community of incels was most interesting, the idea that these boys are brought in because they’re lonely. That’s what’s so scary about it… radicalisation only needs isolated and lonely people. This version of the script lost that crucial element and we knew that a bit late. Also contributing to that is that I had multiple dramaturgs and one of them, that was quite crucial to supporting and defending these parts early on, was not able to be present during the final months. It really shows in the cut of the script. That’s the tough thing about an independent budget is that you have people where they can be there - but this is a big note I had for myself during the run and is something we for sure need to work back in elegantly.
There are explicit references to the harmful rhetoric and beliefs that characterise Incels, but they’re confusing tonally. Most notably, the show has made it impossible to understand why Incels exist in the first place, taking their specific vernacular in earnest, or with a wry tone that emphasises its ridiculousness; answering the potential harm of its lexicon by playing it for laughs or in a way that exaggerates it to the point of appearing completely unreal. I’m sympathetic to the difficulties of trying to use Incel-language without being harmful, or theatrically dry, but I think the show would’ve been better served by focusing on a smaller group, to allow it space to make sure we don’t only watch Incels in these overexaggerated or tongue-in-cheek ways.
Incel culture a community built on a toxic form of solidarity and comradery, but it’s solidarity nonetheless. Its nihilism, self-hatred and misogyny comes out in self-ironising shit-posting, pseudo-self awareness and a misguided, but intimately felt sense of not belonging that this online community resolves, however problematically. The group of Incels in Slutnik bully each other incessantly, showing very little understanding or empathy for one other (they also, despite being imprisoned in a dome, have access to their phones). Representing them in this way felt too easy. These characters were so unreasonably and unrelentingly jerk-ish that it seemed impossible to understand why this community was formed in the first place. It seems to insist that we dislike them on moral grounds as well as just as people; a fear that any positive depiction of the community or the relationships it actively fosters between its members would be read as endorsement. It’s another example of the show implying an audience that is trying to catch it out, to attack it for appearing sympathetic to Incels or anything other than completely dissenting. Let me be clear, Incel culture is morally reprehensible and actively harmful. But part of why it is so insidious is the way it masks as an answer to male loneliness, insecurity and deeply felt alienation (no matter how unreasonable) and, in many ways, offers it in a community that has a approach to supporting each other. How much harder it is consider the harm it perpetuates by showing us the complexities of its appeal for these men.
Neo (Ethan Morse) is the one Incel that manages to be rehabilitated. In a climactic monologue halfway through the show, we are shown the moment he was taken to the dome. The moment, in other words, when he became an Incel. ‘Fuck you Mum!’ he screams, again and again, as he tries to play a game. It’s a grating monologue that tells us nothing about his anger, only that he has it, while recycling some common tropes that emphasise Incel’s as pathetic but not necessary pitiable. Despite the melancholy compositions from Jack Burmeister that underscore his flashback, there was little tangible reason for his outbursts and little real stakes behind his constant declaration that he ‘would kill’ himself. Morse is wry and sarcastic but his performance is too acerbic to offer much in the way of emotional payoff. There is a sense that he is intentionally unlikeable, but this doesn’t account for the fact that his sarcastic delivery compromises the emotion this scene attempts to achieve. The exception to this came on closing night when Morse traded in his barrage of screaming for something quieter and more reflective. His change in delivery came off the back of a Relaxed performance during the day that forced many of the performers to pull back their more aggressive, and often one-note, deliveries for something more restrained. The effect was spectacular. Though the script still doesn’t explore the reasons for his anger enough, Morse’s delivery offered a glimpse into a real, albeit fucked up, inner world. Our empathy here didn’t necessarily mean we understood Incel culture and so forgave it its faults, rather it allowed for a more affecting representation of the tragedy of seeing disenfranchised men who think Incel cultures offers a reasonable answer or cure. To my mind, the restraint Morse showed was a director’s responsibility to facilitate in the first place.
I agree, the restrained performance was golden. This moment in itself could be an entire article. The first journey is from writer's intention to director/actor decision in the rehearsal room, there’s always a gap there (more often for the better when I hand over to Tansy, without a doubt). The second journey is from locked direction in rehearsals and tech, to what an actor chooses to do in front of an audience. I think it would be unfair to speak only to my observations of those journeys with this specific moment, but it’s definitely an example of how everything on stage has different intensities from different hands!
The closest we get to a more considered engagement with the insecurity and self-hatred that brings many to become Incels comes in the form of a long monologue about ‘bone smashing’ (an at-home violent form of self-improvement often using a hammer, and making a comeback on Tik Tok). A character stands beneath towering TV screens (Tansy Gorman and Harry Dowling’s Set Design is another example of the show’s seamless technical design). He is holding a hammer while these screens display comments and posts that attack for being fat and ugly; that command him to ‘take the Black Pill’. It feels like another broad stroke display of Incel lexicon, more interested in it being explicitly harmful than perhaps offering a more complex glimpse into the solidarity achieved in these circles (are these comments coming from other men with similar insecurities?). But to resonate with this sequence we need to jump over the theatrics that has put this character in a sleeveless fringed vest. In other words, we need to ignore that he’s just like super hot (respectfully) - a far cry from the ‘disgusting’ ‘pig’ these comments tells us he is.
I can’t speak to casting, but I’m sure Mr. Michael Cooper will enjoy the compliment! As for the moment… Again, journeys! Responses to the way we dealt with lexicon are varied and of great interest to me. There was a time where we were going to put the Neo/MOTHERBOARD learning earlier, and then have the AV show definitions, but then test audiences enjoyed not knowing so we threw that out. During the season that was the opposite experience of others who were confused. Can’t win ‘em all I guess! My filter for deciding on that moving forward is whether I want this to, in line with verbatim text, be a factual and documentarian exploration of incels, or whether I throw stuff out and say ‘it’s a camp sci fi!’ and allow us to let them be what we need them to be for plot.
The ‘Spaghetti Western’ line comes after Florence questions the aesthetic the show uses to represent its Incels: fringed pants, ankle boots, bright ten-gallon hats. The show makes explicit its spectacle as an answer to representing trauma; these ‘Theatrics’ afford Florence some distance, enough to choose when and if she proceeds forward to relive these memories. Reed attacks her for this fact in the final monologue - a searing takedown that has a powerful metatheatrical resonance and remains emblematic of just how conceptually rich and theatrically powerful the show can be. But these theatrics are not just used to complement this idea. After this scene of ‘bone smashing’, Florence asks Motherboard: ‘But he’s not ugly?’. Motherboard explains. It’s a scene that revisits the show’s tendency to stage self-criticism as a plot-point. But no matter how you cut it, it doesn’t quite jell. The show’s theatrics were put forward as a way to help Florence cope with the traumatic events in this memory. But why does she need this guy to be hot to do that? The rules of the show’s metatheatrical conceit buckle under the weight, and actor Michael Cooper struggles to deliver the scene convincingly. When the final scene asks if theatricalising trauma does anything ‘other than continuing to harm each other?’, the question is overshadowed by this inconsistency. What does this show understand as harmful, exactly? And how does it understand its own spectacle, or want us to?
Again, as I opened… harmful (in my view and therefore the show’s view) is appropriating someone else’s trauma in order to be a relevant storyteller. And, again, I knew this wouldn’t necessarily be clear for everyone but I wasn’t too fussed on that. I can clarify now, after all, and I wonder whether that will make any retrospective difference for you? Onto the next one!
It was hot on closing night of SLUTNIK: Planet of the Incels and Theatre Works was almost full. After the Relaxed Saturday matinee performance, the cast had settled into their characters. The show’s technical design, already relatively seamless on opening night, was a well-oiled machine by closing; scene transitions, blocking and entrances moving with an alchemical harmony that was almost dance-like. Tansy Gorman’s eye for arresting tableaux and her ability to direct sight lines despite the screens warring for our attention was on full display. That Gorman blocks the complex power dynamics of every scene in a way that allows us to understand how characters relate to each other before any line is spoken remains a directorial skill more akin to a superpower.
The audience matched the cast’s energy in spades. Closing night audiences are often chaotic, but a SLUTNIK audience is really something else. Groups of mates whooping along as Incels in full riding chaps and golden undies mime to Queen, filling the space with horny laughter as cyborgs chuck men around the stage. It’s electrifying. And then, by the show’s end, the electricity pivots. Though I wasn’t alone in struggling to feel the emotional payoff of the show’s final scene, there were some in the audience who did. And who, whether sniffling or dabbing at tears, found care in the people around them. Heads resting on shoulders, tissues passed between rows. There was a display of community that cared for and pre-empted harm in a way that the show encourages in the process of exploring and grappling with what it means theatrically.
When Slutnik returns - on Wattpad or stage - I hope it goes ham. I hope it leans into its spectacle with hopeless abandon and gives its audience more autonomy to read into its deeper conceptual or thematic resonance as we see fit and to trust us to model the kind of care it introduces.
really enjoyed this Guy (and flick). Great read.
Thanks for the considered write up and triple show attendance! You're fab.