August 10, 2006
Murray Bramwell

Tough Girls
Written by Melissa Reeves
Composed by Irine Vela
Vitalstatistix and Deckchair Theatre

Waterside, 11 Nile Street, Port Adelaide
August 9. Tickets $ 15 – 25. Bookings : 8447 6211
Until August 19.
WA Season Deckchair Theatre,
Victoria Hall, Fremantle
August 23 to September 2.

Tough Girls, the new chamber musical from Adelaide’s Vitalstatistix (in co-production with WA’s Deckchair Theatre) asks some interesting questions about the criminal underworld. Such as, when the blokes are out being bad, how much do their women know about it ? According to Melissa Reeves the answer is – quite a lot. Organized crime is an equal opportunity employer.

Inspired by the Melbourne police and gangland killings which erupted in the 1980s and reached epidemic proportions in the new century, Reeves’s Tough Girls are called Ella and Vivien, although they bear a passing resemblance to members of the notorious Pettingill family, particularly matriarch Kath and her daughter-in-law, Wendy Pierce. Director Maude Davey reminds us that Reeves has woven a fiction – and so it is, complete with songs, jokes and some grim conclusions.

The scene is a caravan park and designer Cath Cantlon has created two caravan shells like cutaway parentheses at each end of a raised catwalk. Cooped up in one van is Ella (Eileen Darley), the gangster’s moll in white mink, ushered into the first stages of the Witness Protection program and under the watchful eye of Constable Irene (Caroline McKenzie). In the other is the vengeful mother-in-law, Vivien (Jacqy Phillips) intent on preventing Ella’s plan to testify against her son Bernie, while the junkie street kid, Luce (Rhoda Lopez) runs between the two as the unreliable messenger.

Tough Girls is an ambitious mix of satire and social comment and it carries far too much expository freight for its seventy minute ride. Reeves has a creditable abundance of ideas but this hampers the production’s effectiveness as a musical. Its gritty elements (and strong dialogue) are often neutralized by the tenderness of Vela’s tunes – and although complexity and paradox are intended themes, Maude Davey has not quite found a workable theatrical context for them.

There are clever insights – such as when Darley’s Ella swaps her outfit for Irene’s uniform, underlining both the co-dependence of cop and criminal and the porous ethical boundaries between them. Irine Vela’s songs – for instance, Too Young to Die and They Show no Mercy – emphasize the futility of vendetta and the plight of the vulnerable, like Luce (played with well-judged pathos by Lopez). But it is precisely the absence of ambiguity in Jacqy Phillips’ bravura turn as the brutal Vivien that finally gives things some vividness and edge.

This production is enjoyable, but only a tentative success without more fluency and definition – and it is not helped by the cavernous acoustics at Waterside. Tough Girls still needs some tough love.

The Australian, August 10, 2006.