Review: SHIT doesn’t quite make the jump from theatre to film
Written by Patricia Cornelius, directed by Susie Dee and Trudy Hellier
Review by Ceridwen Bush and Charlotte Smee
Back in 2015, Patricia Cornelius’ critically acclaimed play SHIT took to the stage as part of Melbourne Theatre Company’s Neon Festival of Independent Theatre. In 2022, Cornelius and long-time collaborator Susie Dee took their production and adapted it into a film of the same name with the help of Trudy Hellier. Much is the same as the stage production, including the cast (Nicci Wilks, Peta Brady and Sarah Ward) and Cornelius’ poetic approach to the everyday speech of lower-class Australians, but unfortunately, this new form means that SHIT loses much of its original impact.
Like the play, the film follows three women, Sam, Bobby and Billy, who use “fuck” as their adjective of choice. Writing in 2015 of the Melbourne production, Cameron Woodhead described them as “the kind of women you’d shy away from on public transport”. The film takes this description and runs with it, showing them being silently threatening on a Melbourne train on their way to a party, between scenes in which they are locked in a wire cage inside a warehouse — swapping stories of sexual abuse, violence, bouncing between foster homes, and the internalised misogyny they experience in a world that’s relegated them to nothing more than pieces of shit.
Taking something from stage to film is notoriously difficult, particularly because moving something into the world of film imports a whole new set of references that are wildly different to the theatrical frame of reference. Woodhead praised the stage version of SHIT because it “rip[ped] away in emphatic fashion the middle-class blinkers that often confine our vision of mainstream theatre,” and Alison Croggon (on page 268 of Remembered Presences) similarly declared it “elegantly raw, [and] poetically devastating”.
Almost eight years later, sitting in the red plush seats at the Dendy cinemas in Newtown, the “raw” and “unseen” stories of SHIT are a bit less raw, and even less unseen. The griminess of the film comes from the same (or very similar) characters and the same story that Dee and Cornelius were telling on the stage. Where we still haven’t really seen many of these kinds of characters on Australian stages, we have seen plenty of them on our screens. Both the UK and US versions of Shameless (2004 and 2011, respectively) and Skins (2007 and 2011) are incredibly popular with critics and audiences for their “raw” and “touching” portrayals of poverty, so too the portrayals of gritty drug dealers and their friends in Breaking Bad (2008), Narcos (2015) and Weeds (2005). In 2015, SBS Australia also screened the documentary series Struggle Street, a look at life in Mt Druitt which was described as “complex and nuanced” (Michael Lallo).
That’s not to say that we don’t need to see more stories about the intersection between class and misogyny, of which SHIT is still a useful example. The film’s best scenes are the ones that focus on the dialogue between the three women, and the relationships between them that slowly reveal their determination to survive despite everything that’s against them. There’s no sense of pity here, and the way they speak to each other is at once intelligent and abrasive. But where “a narrative begins to emerge” (Croggon) in the play, the film falls into the trap of showing too much detail and robbing us of the chance to imagine something much worse than what we see on the screen.
A stripped-back and realistic approach to SHIT starts to threaten our suspension of disbelief, with cinematography that leaves much to be desired. Mid shots and wide shots reveal the set – a wire cage in an abandoned concrete warehouse. Instead of giving the suggestion of a prison, like Marg Horwell’s design in the play, this warehouse is endless and empty. The closed cage puts the characters on the inside, and us firmly on the outside. Some shots are presented as if through a security camera, adding another layer of distance. Part of the magic of Cornelius’ theatre is the physical and otherwise closeness we feel with her characters. With the film’s distance between us, we start to ask ourselves the wrong questions, like who has put these women inside this cage? Who is watching them? Why are they here and not in an actual prison?
The scenes that intercut those inside the cage have little to no dialogue, instead focussing on the trio’s journey to a party, then a violent incident at that party, and a following incident that the women have presumably been locked up for. It gives a glimpse of the outside world that has contributed to the way they treat themselves and each other. The film’s most shocking moment comes when Billy, and the rest of the party, watch a man (Sam O’Reilly) beat his girlfriend (Emilie Bloom) while the party continues. These scenes feel like a different film, partially because they are directed by Hellier and the cage scenes are directed by Susie Dee, and seem like they could tell a similar story on their own. This means that the cage scenes lose some of their impacts because we are seeing the literal depiction of something that has already been shown in a poetic way.
While SHIT is still “alive to the structural injustices of the society in which we live” (Croggon), this film version doesn’t do enough to bring it into a world where we are almost inundated by “raw” and “gritty” depictions of poverty and the consequences of late capitalism. Too realistic to be poetic, and too poetic to be completely realistic, the film needs a more poetic, subtle approach to really set itself apart.
SHIT had its Sydney premiere at the Inner West Film Festival on 1 April 2023. Find details on the festival here, and the film here.
Ceridwen loves things that are disgusting. She talks really fast and doesn’t mind a space balloon in the park. Find her ranting and raving on Instagram @scrridwen.
Charlotte is the editor of Kaleidoscope Arts Journal, a little enby and a big mess. Their friends regularly worry that they might overdose on theatre.
This review has been generously donated by Ceridwen and Charlotte.
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