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Showing posts with label sexual abuse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sexual abuse. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
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Firebird is utterly brutal. Playwright Phil Davies, a native of Rochdale, unflinchingly examines the notorious sex trafficking gangs that exploited children in his hometown up until a couple of years ago.
The story is a sprawling web of misery, blame and institutional incompetence - so Davies zeroes in on one girl: 14 year old Tia (Callie Cooke). She's a lonely foster child from a miserable estate, and finds herself groomed for sexual slavery by the manipulative AJ (Phaldut Sharma).
The five scene play chronicles their meeting on a rainy night in a kebab shop, her repeated gang-rape at the hands of his friends and her frantic efforts to communicate what's happened to a sceptical police officer. Wrapped around this purestrain misery is the shaky friendship between Tia and fellow 14 year old Katie (Tahirah Sharp), who gradually understands why her new friend is such a "weirdo".
Cards on the table here: nobody who buys a ticket for Firebird is going to have a particularly nice night. This is hardcore misery and believe me, I know it when I see it. When I don't have my arts critic hat on, I work in law and I've participated in many trials studded with acts of unbelievable cruelty. I've watched testimony from traumatised victims of rape, seen stomach-churningly grisly crime scene phones and listened to a 999 call in which a woman gets beaten to death while screaming for help that never comes.
It's the kind of stuff that leaves a mark on you. Firebird does too. The obvious counterpoint to that is that a trial is real life. Can any piece of theatre, no matter how good, really compare? But Firebird reverberates with journalistic verisimilitude: if you're familiar with the case you'll recognise the loosely fictionalised elements strewn throughout the script. If you're not knowledgeable about it you instinctively sense that you're watching a close re-enactment of something that happened.
It felt real.
Alarmingly so.
Davies' excellent writing accounts for a decent portion of this, displaying a hometown familiarity with cadence and dialect that gives the play credibility. The rest is primarily down the heartbreakingly raw Callie Cooke, who gives hands down the best performance I've seen in the last six months.
Her greatest accomplishment is maintaining Tia as an individual throughout the entierty of her ordeal. Crucially the character is both a) genuinely pretty funny and b) one of the most realistic teenage girls I've seen on stage lately. She's stroppy, smart-mouthed but, despite her protests and occasional drunkenness, is clearly a child. Cooke brings an innate charisma to the stage: a quality that makes the sustained scenes of violence, manipulation and police negligence hard to bear. She's, in a word, fantastic.
The visceral quality she brings has a startling effect on the audience. Director Edward Hall makes the smart decision to stage it in the round. This not only induces claustrophobia, but allows us to see the faces of the people sat opposite. I saw members of the audience openly sobbing, gritting their teeth with anger and, most commonly, turning their heads away, unable to continue watching.
For my part I felt a sense of miserable inevitability during the opening scenes, then straight-up gut-churning horror followed by outright anger that this could be allowed to happen. It's the kind of play that makes you want to stand up from your seat and berate the characters.
This anger spirals across the perpetrators of Tia's nightmare; the Asian men bringing to life what was hitherto the racist daydream of teenage white slavery and taking their religious subjugation of women to its sadistically psychopathic conclusion. It extends to the authorities: a police force that really couldn't have given less of a shit about teenage girls' rape accusations (yawning through their interviews), on top of a background of defunded and demoralised local governance that appears to have written off these estates and those that live in them.
Finally the play reaches a kind of moral precipice, staring down in judgment at a society that would prefer to sweep unpleasantness like this under the rug. And so what if a few working class women's lives are destroyed in the process?
Firebird casts a daunting shadow over practically everything else on the London stage right now: a sturdy reminder of what theatre is capable of and what it can do that other storytelling media can't. If this were a TV drama: most would turn it off. If it were a film: most would quietly leave.
But once you've sat down in the basement of Trafalgar Studio there's no escape and no changing channel - you're sitting through this nightmare to the bitter end. It's depressing as hell and will spoil your evening, but Firebird is absolutely must-see theatre.
Friday, February 15, 2013
Friday, February 15, 2013
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In 1961 psychologist Stanley Milgram devised an experiment to measure willingness to obey authority. The volunteers for the experiment were asked to quiz a person hooked up to an electro-shock generator. Every time the person being questioned answered incorrectly, the volunteer would be instructed to give them an electric shock, increasing in voltage for every question they got wrong. A third person, a scientist, kept instructing the volunteer to shock the subject, even as the volunteer feebly protested. As the shocks increased in voltage, the subject began to scream in pain, or bang on the walls. If the volunteer wanted to halt the experiment, the scientist ‘running’ the experiment would verbally prod them saying phrases like “The experiment requires that you continue” or “You have no other choice, you must go on.”
If the volunteer subject repeatedly stated his desire to end the experiment, then after four verbal prods the experiment was halted. If they chose to continue, the experiment ended with the volunteer administering a massive 450v shock three times in succession, with no response from the subject, who the volunteer could expect to assume they have killed. Milgram and his colleagues expected a tiny percentage of volunteers to progress beyond 300v shocks, yet to their surprise 65% of the subjects administered the final ‘fatal’ shocks. These volunteers were barbers, telephone workers, salespeople and businessmen, ordinary people who were apparently prepared to kill on command for $4.00 (plus 50c carfare).
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| Dreama Walker as Becky |
It’s impossible not to think of the Milgram experiments during Compliance, a film that shows us men and women meekly submitting to assumed authority and sexually abusing a teenage girl. The film is set in a generic KFC/McDonalds-alike fast food restaurant called ‘ChickWich’. In the middle of a busy day the manager, Sandra (Ann Dowd) receives a phonecall from a man identifying himself as Officer Daniels. He explains that one of her employees has been accused of stealing from a customer, and gives her a vague physical description. Sandra identifies this ‘thief’ as Becky (Dreama Walker), and summons her to the managers office. The vast majority of the rest of the film takes place in this office, as, under telephone instruction from 'Officer Daniels', employees and friends strip, humiliate, sexually abuse and rape Becky.
Of course, 'Officer Daniels', isn't a police officer at all. The whole thing is an impossibly cruel prank phone call, a term that barely seems able to cover the scope of what happens. As you watch these fast-food workers abandon first their autonomy and then their morality you begin to wonder just how moronic these people are. The call begins plausibly, but by the time you’ve been instructed to bend a naked, crying teenage girl over your knee and spank her surely - surely - you’d think something was up?
The apparent stupidity of these characters is immensely frustrating, but you have to watch this with the knowledge that all of this really happened. The first image of the film is: “INSPIRED BY TRUE EVENTS”. The white on black text takes up the entire screen, as if to impress the truthfulness of the film upon us from the very beginning. That the film rigorously sticks to the facts is key to what makes Compliance worth watching, and more importantly, means you’re able to watch it without feeling like you're getting prurient voyeuristic thrills.
I wasn’t particularly looking forward to seeing this film. I was already familiar with the incident it dramatises, and having done some cursory research I was worried it was going to be uncomfortably exploitational. I got an email prior to the press screening informing me to “please note that this film contains scenes of forced nudity, sexual manipulation and implied sexual violence. I wouldn’t recommend it for a Valentine’s Day date movie.” I reckon I’ve got a pretty high tolerance for watching disturbing films, but frankly, the idea of sitting through what sounded like a 90 minute rape scene on Valentine’s Day didn’t exactly fill my heart with joy.
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| Ann Dowd as Sandra |
Fortunately, Compliance treats its subject matter with careful sensitivity. Dreama Walker’s Becky is an attractive woman, but watching her shivering and naked under cold fluorescent light makes you feel guilty for not looking away. The humiliations she endures are never framed to arouse; they focus on hands pressed against greasy floors, her tear-streaked cheeks or the cardboard boxes of branded condiments around her.
To some degree it’s arguable that Zobel has shot the film to make us identify with Becky. I think it’s a little more complicated than that. It’s easy to forget that ‘Officer Daniels’ never sees what’s happening, he’s left to imagine everything, constantly asking for descriptions. The audience becomes his eyes, dispassionately observing the events. Most of the characters in this film are so blindly moronic in their devotion to authority that’s it’s difficult to sympathise with them. Worryingly I even found myself getting a little frustrated at the passivity of the victim. All of this leads to ‘Officer Daniels’ being the only person who knows as much as we do, making the audience queasily complicit in his crime.
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| Set designers! There are other colours than blue and orange! |
But it’s the restaurant manager Sandra that becomes the most complex character. Expertly played by Ann Dowd, she embodies much of what Compliance is trying to tell us about the dangers of submitting to authority. In most circumstances she’d seem perfectly nice, if a little dull, but her critical flaw is the notion that being polite and pleasant is enough to get through life and that questioning authority is inherently a bad thing. In the rigid hierarchy of fast food this mindset works well. At the start of the film we see her pointedly telling her staff that they need to stick to ChickWich operating procedure to make it through the day. Worryingly, we also catch her shooting annoyed looks at Becky, raising the disturbing point that at least subconsciously she wants to see this girl being taken down a peg.
As the abuse gets worse, Sandra’s position becomes more entrenched. She strips a clearly distressed Becky, apologising to her all the while but never once considering that she could just not strip her. She willingly deludes herself into believing that leaving a naked Becky alone with a man she barely knows is the sensible thing to do. In the disturbing epilogue to the film we see Sandra being interviewed about her complicity in Becky’s abuse. She considers herself absolved of responsibility, slipping into easy, mindless small-talk to try and deflect questioning away from disturbing questions. Clearly she has learned nothing.
It’s incredibly tempting to condemn Sandra outright(and, by extension, the real woman she’s based on), but what both this film and the Milgram experiment demonstrates is that a desire to submit to authority is a very human trait, one that to some degree is present in all of us. What Milgram realised, and what the events of Compliance demonstrate, are that when ‘normal’ individuals feel they have surrendered responsibility for their actions to an authority figure, they can be made to do the most monstrous things. Though Compliance may be almost documentarian in its rigorous approach, the restaurant setting also serves as a neat microcosm for society as a whole. Sandra is a perfect example of someone who has completely surrendered herself to a series of stacked systems; the franchise rules for operating her restaurant; the wider corporate environment of fast food and the justice system. Her decisions are not her own: she doesn’t think about her actions, she just follows set procedure. And as the film effectively demonstrates, when someone exploits their knowledge of those procedures and systems of authority, they can get Sandra, or anyone for that matter, to do almost anything.
Despite my misgivings going in I quickly began to, if not enjoy, then appreciate Compliance. It’s coolly and intelligently directed, making excellent use of what I assume is a relatively limited budget. There’s too much blue and orange in the set, prop and costume design but aside from that the film conjures up a believable corporate environment from thin air. All the performances are great, a few bordering on brilliant. The sense of tension and dread once the phone rings rivals anything I’ve seen lately, and the film just about sustains it throughout its perfect, concise 90 minute running time. It’s not a movie for everyone, but as an expose of the dark side of normality it’s succeeds brilliantly.
So, go and see it. No, really, go and see it when it comes out. You’d better do what I say or I’m going to have to call in my superior. You’ve got two choices here; go and see it, or there’ll be trouble. And you don’t want trouble right? Of course not, you’re a good person. So go and see it. Trust me.
****/*****
‘Compliance’ is released 22 March 2013
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