Ferocious, foul-mouthed and funny – rapper Barkaa is a powder keg

Barkaa
Oxford Art Factory, November 2
Reviewed by JAMES JENNINGS
★★★★

There was a period in the late ’80s and early ’90s when the biggest rap acts on the planet – artists like Public Enemy, N.W.A, Ice-T – were overtly political, addressing everything from systemic racism to police brutality in fiery, culture-shifting tracks like Fight the Power, F--- tha Police and Cop Killer.

Modern mainstream rap may be more focused on materialism, but politically charged music still exists in certain pockets of the hip-hop world, including Australia’s thriving Indigenous scene, which includes Nooky, 3%, Briggs, A.B. Original, Baker Boy and Barkaa, aka south-west Sydney’s Chloe Quayle.

Barkaa has done it tough and comes out the other side.Credit: Tristan Edouard

On stage, Malyangapa and Barkindji rapper Barkaa has a powder-keg presence and is politically outspoken from the outset, urging us to throw our middle fingers in the air for OUR Lives Matter, a song dedicated to a family member who lost his life while being held in police custody (“We still gotta fight ’cause coppers keep taking lives/I’m sick of it, sick of being traumatised,” she raps with a raspy intensity).

No dark secret is safe from being dragged into the light for examination, including the Stolen Generation (Bow Down: “They used to beat ’em and then rape ’em and they took they kids/Go on, tell me why I ain’t got trauma in this life I live”) and disproportionate Indigenous Australian incarceration rates (Division: “My people making up 28 per cent of these prisons/We make up 3 per cent here in this population/While the other 97 per cent under the ground missin’” ).

To her credit, Barkaa isn’t afraid to shine that spotlight of truth on herself, either. She references overcoming drug addiction, stints in juvenile detention and losing (and later regaining) her children. She takes great pride in overcoming obstacles that would prove insurmountable for many. “When you speak your truth – the good, the bad, all of it,” she tells us, “people can’t tell you nothin’, ’cause you’ve got nothing to hide.”

Yes, there are bangers galore given extra oomph via a live drummer and guitarist playing along with the DJ, but it’s that sense of authenticity – coupled with a joyous celebration for culture and love for Mob – that prove to be the night’s greatest triumph, with the ferocious, foul-mouthed and funny Blak matriarch Barkaa giving us her all. Long may she reign.

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THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES
The Old Fitz, November 3
(Until November 23)
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★½

What an ending!

Written by Joanna Murray-Smith (most recently, Julia), The Female of the Species had an auspicious beginning, too, opening in the West End after a 2006 Aussie debut and earning an Olivier Award nomination. It did not fare so well in America: a New York Times reviewer panned it as “rancid”, “shrill”, and “anti-female”. I may have enjoyed that review a little more than the play – but this Rogue Projects reprisal directed by Erica Lovell is still outrageous, silly, glittery-eyed fun.

Although inspired by a real-life incident in which Germaine Greer was attacked by a 19-year-old in her home, the play is wildly improbable. A caricatured farce, it sends up one of the failures of the early feminist movement: the mass collateral that was risked when the rhetoric of “thought-leaders” became divorced from reality, theory from feeling.

There is a lot going on in The Female of the Species, starring Lucy Miller as Margot Mason. Credit: Noni Carroll

Instead of The Female Eunuch, our feminist “legend” Margot Mason made her name in the ’70s with The Cerebral Vagina. Lucy Miller is a hoot in the role of this flamboyant, overweening, incorrigible narcissist; a sham revolutionary whose war cries to womankind swung with whatever was happening in her life while writing (advocating sexual liberation then celibacy; motherhood then child abandonment). Her next book is overdue – but for once, Margot is out of ideas. Which is the very moment when payback for her old ideas walks through the door with a gun.

Young “homicidal maniac” Molly Rivers (Jade Fuda) is soon joined by Margot’s daughter Tess Thornton (Lib Campbell), who is too exhausted by early domesticity-bound motherhood to care much about the situation. Especially when she overhears the epithets her mum has been using to describe her in class (“traitor”, “loser”, etc).

The pair bond, and then Tess’s husband Bryan (Doron Chester) and her recent taxi driver Frank (Joe Kalou) add to the muddle. These two represent extreme versions of masculinity as it’s been challenged by feminism: one a bumbling dullard who worships his unsatisfied wife; the other a muscular neo-masculinist. Both are supremely confident oafs – who the young women alternately find incredibly hot.

The gun bounces between them before the late entrance of Margot’s long-time publisher Theo Hanover (Mark Lee), who sees the entire schemozzle in printing presses and dollars.

There’s a lot going on in this play – a paternity mystery, a mother’s suicide, forgotten children. Its unsubtle, veering humour doesn’t always land, but with high-gusto direction and a solid cast, the satire can leap up to give a satisfying sting.