Venue: Sydney Opera House (Sydney NSW), Aug 15 – 19, 2018
Playwrights: Zoë Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor, Natalie Rose
Director: Zoë Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor, Natalie Rose
Cast: Zoë Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor, Natalie Rose
Images by Jacquie Manning
Theatre review
Three goddesses are afloat in white robes, eternal but not quite ethereal. Zoë Coombs Marr, Mish Grigor and Natalie Rose’s Ich Nibber Dibber features quick-fire conversations between old friends, natural and very candid, as though a verbatim recreation of private moments, collated over two or so decades. Confidences between close friends that are never meant for public consumption, bawdy and reckless, occupy centre stage to claim a position of dominance for the oft-neglected notion of female subjectivity. It is an exercise in rejecting the gaze, and of women asserting a perspective that is wholly about self-determined existences.
Audacious in its imagination of a post-feminist era, its accompanying politics are confident but subdued. Instead of overt investigations into meanings of gender, the play emphasises its comedy, and through that brazen attitude of subversive recalcitrance, Ich Nibber Dibber encourages us to laugh on our own terms, and by inference, to laugh at patriarchy. The show is thoroughly amusing, with its creators proving to be highly persuasive presences, as they jubilantly perform their defiance.
The women are unequivocally real, but they are also otherworldly, with a circularity to their experience of time that offers a glimpse into a future universe beckoning us to catch up. Michael Hankin’s set and costumes, along with Fausto Brusamolino’s lights, orchestrate this magical encounter between profane and divine, presenting imagery that reminds us of the transcendence we are all capable of. Music and sound by James Brown facilitate our connection with the storytellers, and then disturb our peace to keep us thinking.
It is believed that male desire in all its forms, have determined how we conceive of ourselves, but what had seemed inescapable, can now be put through a process of reconditioning. To extricate our own desires from those of the other, is likely an inexhaustible task, and because a woman’s work of resistance is never done, it is that ongoing project of continual redefinition and ever new formations of identities that can lead us to greater autonomy.
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