Theatre: Sisterhood of the Travelling Lightly

By Courtney McManus and Hannah Quaden
Crash Theatre
Directed by Ella Cooke and Hannah Quaden
Designed by Megan Mak
Performed by Stella Banfield, Courtney McManus, Clea Purkis and Shannon Rogers
Blue Room Theatre
May 16 – June 3

The enigmatically titled Sisterhood of the Travelling Lightly from Crash Theatre is very much a traditional Blue Room show, and that, for me at least, is a very good thing.

Perth’s hub of independent theatre is at its best with stories by and of young people in recognizable situations and settings, dealing, or sometimes, not with their emerging world and themselves.

Sisterhood tells the stories of four friends on the eve of graduating from Uni; Bree (Stella Banfield), Nic (Courtney McManus), Georgia (Clea Purkis) and Holly (Shannon Rogers) gather at Bree’s place to celebrate and reminisce about their intertwined lives since they stumbled across each other by sheer school assembly alphabetical order (they’re all ‘Ps’) through the highs and lows of adolescence and beyond.

The cast work well together, and their characters are nicely contrasting: Holly is a bombshell, but wounded by her parent’s split when she was in just Year 7; Georgia is intense and had battled bulimia through high school; Nik is loud and careless, harbouring an infatuation that is going nowhere; and Bree is all heart and soul, but struggles with the realities of work and the getting of it.

All of which makes a strong foundation that promises impressive and enjoyable theatre.

Unfortunately it’s too far between cup and lip for Sisterhood. The show’s clunky structure moves back and then forward in a series of scenes focusing on each character in turn, but the transitions lack fluidity.

In part this is due to arduous and largely unnecessary scene changes during which the cast cavort around the stage in what seems to be an attempt to distract us from the stage business around them.

Even more unnecessary, and, frankly, plain silly, is the device employed to move the characters through time, a mysterious joint a hit on which somehow instigates the relocation in space and time.

Inevitability, with its interruptions and artificiality the narrative ran out of steam, and the final story of Bree and her job-hunting seemed more like an attempt to shoehorn a misfortune on her in the absence of anything more meaningful.

All these are roadblocks to appreciation of Sisterhood’s considerable insight into the lives and relationships of young women, of friendships, how they can be frayed and repaired. 

It could be well worth Crash Theatre taking the time and effort to set Sisterhood’s qualities free from the encumbrances that currently constrain it.