By Cameron Woodhead
THEATRE
Runt ★★★★
Fortyfivedownstairs, until March 7
The air in the room is stale and thick with haze. Centre stage, a shin-high circle forms a dwarfish arena – empty, except for a canvas sack suspended ominously from a rope. Blackout. A sickening thud. The lights come up and the sack has fallen. It begins to move: a twitch, a jerk, then more desperate, the thing inside wild for freedom, thrashing to escape.
Nicci Wilks in Runt at fortyfivedownstairsCredit: Pier Carthew
So begins the new one-woman play from Patricia Cornelius, and the scene serves as a wrenching encapsulation of its themes.
No sooner does the titular runt emerge than she mewls for sustenance and howls wordlessly with unmet need. The nexus between animal and human, between weakness and cruelty, is established with desolating force.
Performer Nicci Wilks embodies a creature shaped – and twisted into fury – by poverty and abuse.
A long list of the runt’s sisters and brothers invokes both Darwinian behaviour and the fecundity of animals. “The rich get richer and the poor get – children”, as the old song goes, and the psychology of dispossession starts at the breast: an inability to suckle, a failure to thrive.
Wilks’ physical performance conveys a trapped animality: her runt is prone to futile scurrying, moving round the arena like a rat in a cage, which makes the animal cruelty she glories in committing a more devastating Catch-22.
I was reminded strongly of a real-life instance of animal cruelty I once witnessed – that man was enjoying it, too, no hint of shame.
And as the runt works herself into an aria of rage at her lot, her true vulnerability reveals itself.
Wilks refuses to let you look away from that kind of Hobbesian darkness. She is emphatic in elaborating the resonance between the cruelty her character perpetrates and the treatment she has received.
And as the runt works herself into an aria of rage at her lot, her true vulnerability reveals itself. Her rhetoric is idle. The powerlessness which consumes her leads full-circle – she will inevitably crawl back into her sack.
Perhaps there is more black humour to be excavated, a more complex reckoning with the psychology of disempowerment, though it would need to be done in a way that doesn’t let the (largely bourgeois) audience off the hook.
Yet between Susie Dee’s direction, Cornelius’ writing and Wilks’ uncompromising performance, Runt confronts you with transfixing dramatic art – the sort of play you watch, only to find it watching you right back.