Part primary school disco, part Hunger Games
In Perfect Dead Girls, a new performance co-created by its cast, Elizabeth Robbins and Chelsea Grace, with movement direction by Steph Austin, we enter a liminal space between life and death – but one where the judgement of society still looms over everyone.
Two girls are trapped in this space – one, a peppy perfectionist with a psychotic edge, and the other an Avril Lavigne-esque emo who refuses to recount how she died. Both know they need to escape this room to move on, but neither knows how they should go about doing that. Over the course of the 50 minute piece, they career from choreographed dance to C’est La Vie by B*Witched, to rehearsing their own funerals, to full throated breakdowns, negotiating their relationship to each other in this space.
The piece is jam-packed with intense and thought-provoking commentary on what it means to be a girl in modern society, and especially a dead one. It touches on the suffering Olympics when the girls fight over who has had the most difficult time in life (and death), body image, and the inherent competition women are placed into by simply both existing. It makes the penultimate scene, where one is granted the chance to leave, but only by abandoning the other, gut-wrenching, as we see the other girl descend into madness and violence in her desperation to figure out what she is missing.
The stand out performance for me was definitely Elizabeth Robbins in this role, covering her desperation and fear with Britney Spears and glitter. The final scene, where she moves to the front of the stage, eyes sunken in shadow, and asks (threatens?) the audience to “tell me you love me”, was equally haunting and thrilling. The way she bounces back and forth between her bubblegum persona and twisted inner self, covering her slip ups with a “I’m sorry… I didn’t mean it”, kept the audience guessing throughout.
Chelsea Grace’s role as an emo teen wasn’t given as much pathos, and often felt reduced purely to Scottish stereotypical jokes. All we know about her is that she is a victim, and loves Irn Bru and Evanescence, all of which we might have guessed from the off. She never reveals any depths to her, except a hatred of shallow sentiments. I wish she had had a moment to speak directly to the audience as the other character did, and I wish she had a line half as revealing as the other girl telling us that she had pulled off her suicide perfectly first time, so as to not make a mess.
The show manages to cover a great deal of ground, thanks to its device of playing a fast-forward sound effect while they place themselves for the next scene – almost as if the audience are bored spectators waiting for some more drama. There were a couple of moments that I did hope had lasted a little longer, such as the aftermath of an attempted strangulation to the tune of Toxic, but it did give the show great pace and humour overall.
There are a thousand reasons this show is relevant to nowadays, despite being set in the Y2K era, and it leaves you buzzing with thoughts and questions. It could use a little more humour, and a little less therapy-speak (which seems incongruent with the setting of two teenage girls in the early 2000s), but in terms of impact this is a show that punches well above its weight.