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Mary (Hayley Squires) is walking home after a night out dancing, and finds herself sexually assaulted. PC Moody (Daniel Mays) arrives at her home to take her to the station to make her statement, where she meets Mary (Zowe Ashton) who shares her name and her experience of sexual assault. While the insensitive and slightly sinister Moody hangs around keeping them company, a group of female voices recite some baffling questionnaire forms, some grim statistics and the general foreboding nature of the female experience.
The best viewing experiences can catch you by surprise, something you weren't aware of that sucks you in with a magnetic grip. And so was my experience on my first holiday in several years, as I found myself in a Premier Inn room with no Virgin Media box, doing what I usually don't do watching late evening terrestrial TV. And so this empowering short play, adapted from a stage play of the same name, about violence against females reached out and grabbed me, and left me determined to give it a more detailed, in depth second viewing.
The subject matter is one of the grimmest and most uncomfortable of all things to admit is rampant in our society, but that doesn't mean it's any less necessary to highlight. And so it's wonderful we have such wonderfully natural, humanistic actresses such as Squires and Ashton in the primary roles, who come off as unsettlingly convincing, while Mays's everyman persona also gives him that wolf-in-sheeps-clothing feel of most real life monsters. The female voices create an unnerving effect by speaking all at once, reenforcing the power of their words, delivering a shattering monologue involving true life tales, interspersed with grim statistics. "What is it that makes us so fu*king killable?" they wail at one point, perfectly justifiable given everything they've read off.
Some things don't need a feature-length running time to hit hard, a shorter, more directed effort can be just as effective, which this uneasy but powerful piece perfectly proves. ****
Mary (Hayley Squires) is walking home after a night out dancing, and finds herself sexually assaulted. PC Moody (Daniel Mays) arrives at her home to take her to the station to make her statement, where she meets Mary (Zowe Ashton) who shares her name and her experience of sexual assault. While the insensitive and slightly sinister Moody hangs around keeping them company, a group of female voices recite some baffling questionnaire forms, some grim statistics and the general foreboding nature of the female experience.
The best viewing experiences can catch you by surprise, something you weren't aware of that sucks you in with a magnetic grip. And so was my experience on my first holiday in several years, as I found myself in a Premier Inn room with no Virgin Media box, doing what I usually don't do watching late evening terrestrial TV. And so this empowering short play, adapted from a stage play of the same name, about violence against females reached out and grabbed me, and left me determined to give it a more detailed, in depth second viewing.
The subject matter is one of the grimmest and most uncomfortable of all things to admit is rampant in our society, but that doesn't mean it's any less necessary to highlight. And so it's wonderful we have such wonderfully natural, humanistic actresses such as Squires and Ashton in the primary roles, who come off as unsettlingly convincing, while Mays's everyman persona also gives him that wolf-in-sheeps-clothing feel of most real life monsters. The female voices create an unnerving effect by speaking all at once, reenforcing the power of their words, delivering a shattering monologue involving true life tales, interspersed with grim statistics. "What is it that makes us so fu*king killable?" they wail at one point, perfectly justifiable given everything they've read off.
Some things don't need a feature-length running time to hit hard, a shorter, more directed effort can be just as effective, which this uneasy but powerful piece perfectly proves. ****