★★★★½ A brutal but ultimately touching portrait of femininity from the lowest dregs of the underclasses.

Fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne
May 7, 2016

We’ve all seen women like the three protagonists of Patricia Cornelius’s unapologetically frank play, SHIT, currently showing an encore season at Fortyfivedownstairs hot off the heels of its sold-out premiere run. They are the kind of women we see slumped in the street mid-afternoon with an open tinny in their hand, glaring with a defiant, threatening intensity at anyone who dares to make a sideways glance. The type who scream blue-murder at strangers on the tram, their faces permanently contorted into a hateful, thuggish sneer, weathered beyond their years by alcohol, drugs and violence.

We may not readily admit to being part of a class hierarchy in our enlightened, modern society, but we’re complicit in it nonetheless through our feelings towards these people. We hate or pity them, and we do it openly. Whether or not we are willing to admit it, deep down we consider them a blight on our cosmopolitan lifestyle, a drain on our resources, an undesirable element we want gone. And we feel this way, rightly or wrongly, because innately we believe that we are...