A game of powerplay and manipulation, SPENT interrogates how gender influences our judgement, blurring the lines between victim and perpetrator.
With alternating genders in each performance, SPENT asked how we perceive power, control and abuse through the prism of gender.
The performance of SPENT I attended involved the role of A, an ‘up and coming exec’ played by Nikoletta Soumelidis ( female) and B, ‘ A struggling artist’, played by Charlie Collinson (male).
With a clear discrepancy in their financial success, I expected the story to involve A having all the power.
Yet this was far from the truth. B won’t let A go to Japan, he goes through her phone, he psychologically tortures her, weaponizing his mental health against her. A is not without fault either. She emotionally cheats on B and doesn’t take into account his trauma from his childhood spent in hospital with leukaemia and consequent distance from his Mother. But would these be perceived as faults if the genders were reversed? Would A have been seen as so ‘insensitive’?
Nikoletta Soumelidis’s writing expertly captured the small variants and manipulations in human behaviour, sparking conversation and reflection.
SPENT asked pervasive questions, combined with beautiful physical movement directed by Lauren Lucy Cook exploring bondage, the couple’s sexual dynamic and the interconnection and addictive nature of pleasure and pain .
A and B are in a state of toxicity, bought to life with high levels of anguish and pain by the actors. In all this darkness, moving between the present and past in a series of vignettes, I felt slightly disorientated and a need for more tension to spur the characters on and the relationship into action.
I would have loved the chance to have seen the gender swapping incorporated into one production. SPENT is an incredibly powerful concept that the writing carries brilliantly, despite a slow moving and time-consuming reality.