“Moments of genius…and of uncertain meaning”
What can you take from a mystery that isn’t solved? Do you always understand what people say? Or do we impose our own meaning?
In Lippy, contemporary theatre company Dublin’s Dead Centre’s story of four women who starve themselves to death, we are presented with a jigsaw of facts. It is up to us to play the detective, figuring out what is real and what is speculative.
The binaries of good and bad are problematic when trying to pinpoint the artistic and cultural merit in Lippy. It had moments of genius, moments of beauty and, well, moments where no-one was quite sure what was going on.
Although attempting to give voices to the voiceless, the performance failed to subvert the normative role ascribed to women. The fragmentation of their bodies and their lack of literal voices left me irritated. If we weren’t going to hear from these women directly, just what was the purpose of this performance?
There were elements of humour, and these came as a welcomed relief to the stylised images of mental illness performed on stage through the physicality of female bodies.
Lippy essentially left me confused, not more aware, unable to quite figure how I felt or how I was meant to feel. Nonetheless I left intrigued. It’s evocation of these real women urged me to discover more. Their story, although questionably displayed on stage, lives on through our continuing questioning.
Leyla Bumbra
“Mesmerising…but confusing”
Lippy, by Dead Centre, might have been the hit of the Dublin fringe last year. But it confused me. Described as a play recounting the story of the collective suicide of a group of sisters in Ireland, I was expecting a sombre story of a tragedy but that’s not what was delivered. I’m none the wiser about the how and why of the sisters’ suicide but I think that might have been the point.
What starts off as an interview between witnesses turns into a voice over as we see snippets of what occurred when the four sisters locked themselves in a room and decided to die. Everything is quite disjointed; there isn’t a huge amount of coherency between the conversations the women are having and the way in which the eye witness describes it. Music and visuals are employed well with some striking vocals and mise en scene which eventually reduce down to simply a huge pair of lips talking at the audience.
It would be wrong to say I didn’t enjoy the play but I’m fairly certain I didn’t wholly understand it. There was something quite mesmerising about one massive mouth holding an audience captive at the end but it’s hard for me to recall now what it was talking about. I think there was a purpose to it all, I’m just not sure what it was.
Anna Baillie
The Young Critics saw Lippy at the Citizen’s Theatre. The run is now finished. For more Citizens productions see: www.thecitz.co.uk
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