Belvoir’s new show is a five-star tour de force … and very funny

THEATRE
SNAKEFACE
Belvoir Street 25A, April 11
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★★★

Aliyah Knight, playwright and performer, is already on stage as the audience files into Belvoir Street’s downstairs theatre and is still there when the lights go up. It feels like there is nowhere else to go.

Just a scrim at the back (used to project text, sometimes readable, sometimes censored) and a block of stone – which turns out to be clay – centre stage. Music fills up the remaining space, enveloping and energising a young queer figure of colour as they spin, sway and groove.

A coming-of-age story, a myth, a fever dream and a mystery: Snakeface is written and performed by Aliyah Knight.Credit: Abraham de Souza, Fruit Box Theatre

Snakeface is many things: a coming-of-age story, a myth, a fever dream and a mystery. Its title references the murderous, snake-haired Medusa of Greek myth. Knight’s imagination transforms Medusa into a victim, made into a monster by sexual violence. This becomes a springboard into the mind and body of a woman whose transformation is anything but mythical.

There’s a gritty, joyful authenticity about much of Knight’s script, which captures the wide-eyed curiosity and liminal sensation of a life-hungry teenager. They watch two beads of sweat running down a naked man’s chest and wonder which wins the race; they catch eyes with a stranger in a bar and hallucinate with pleasure.

There’s poetry in the prose of the young woman’s words, and it clashes with the ugly words jumping out from the poetry projected on the backdrop. Knight delivers it all with fluency, flipping from chatter to chant in a sustained monologue, which I would be fascinated to read.

Words, however, are only one of the layers: Snakeface is a physical tour-de-force from the comfortable groove as we walk in, to the sticky, icky mess of intimacy. The clay bench quickly leaves its mark, at first just pale grey dust on dark skin, then, as Knight digs deeper, becoming dripping gobbets of who knows what, caking their skin, embodying the disgust and rejection of their white lovers.

Growing up black and queer is messy and violent and sexy and tragic. The way Snakeface tells it, it is also very funny, with good solid belly laughs to leaven a tough story. And while the ending is not exactly happy, it is joyous.

Knight has created a hugely impressive, hugely affecting piece of work in collaboration with Fruit Box Theatre’s brave team of creatives, which includes access and wellbeing consultants to manage the show’s confronting themes.

Belvoir Street Theatre’s 25A program starts from virtually nothing: a space, a shoe-string budget, a great idea. It throws independent theatre a lifeline by offering the downstairs theatre for no cost to a carefully curated line-up of emerging creative teams.

Snakeface is the first of seven new works this year. It’s going to be hard to beat.