Sydney Reviews

No contest. Little conflict. Playwright Emilie Collyer’s Contest seems to be on the defensive rather than the offensive throughout its seventy five minute run. Set entirely on a netball court, Contest appears to be about competition within the team rather than a cohesive team building – singular contemplation rather than a group allegiance.

“Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.”, ends an early scene, a chorus of disappointment, dissolution, disapproval, an embarrassment of bitches, by a collection but not a collective.

Contest pivots on vignette rather than a running narrative game. There’s lots of offside, monologue before a pass, frequent enough to foul a dramatic goal.

Producer/Director, Kirsty Semaan teams with Movement Director, Amelia Pawsey to blend stylised movement and raw physicality to produce some of the shows more viscerally visual moments and two hands clapping kudos must go to composer/sound designer Charlotte Leamon, for the aural specs.

A quintet of characters played by a committed cast, Melissa Jones, Willa King, Suz Mawer, Emma Monk and Lana Morgan create a cohort of women who collide rather than coalesce even though they share common grievances and frustrations.

Rivalry, suspicion or timidity trumps intimacy, passes at candour heightened by dialogue are softened by soliloquy. Internalising tends to dissipate the drama and denies any oxygen to humour, an ingredient this play is sorely in need of.

Contest is less a story of connection, than the extraordinary endurance of women against expectations of gender assignment, body type and beauty myth. Instead of solidarity, this squad fragments, leaving each team member to face a certain solitude.

Without consolidation there can be no victory.