Stop Girl
Writer: Sally Sara
Director: Anne-Louise Sarks
Belvoir Street Theatre
March 20 – April 25, 2021
In Stop Girl award-winning journalist and foreign correspondent Sally Sara offer us a semi-autobiographical story of grief and guilt, trusting that we will respond with understanding and compassion. Directed with integrity by Anne-Louise Sarks, the play offers a moving validation of the concept of moral injury.
We first encounter Suzie (Sheridan Harbridge), an apparently unflappable correspondent in war-torn Kabul, filing a report under a doona to dull the impact of gunfire and explosions. She deals with her panic-stricken friend Bec (Amanda McMahon) who is in Kabul to write a story about Suzie, with her mother (Toni Scanlan) on the phone and anxious about her safety, and cheerfully telling her cameraman Atal (Mansoor Noor) that the Taliban will shoot him and not her as he is Afghani and they need her to advertise their exploits to the world.
Suzie presents as a strong, indomitable woman who believes in herself and in the value of her role as observer and recorder. She is unshakable in her journalistic conviction that to survive the killings and horrific maiming she witnesses on a daily basis she must “never connect”. However, she is aware that there is a conflict between what she knows is happening and how the news reports are sanitised – her inner doubt suggested through the lack of synchronisation between her image as it appears on back projection and her real life figure as she is filmed.
Harbridge is consummate in conveying Suzie’s professional hardheadedness yet giving the impression that somewhere she is carrying guilt. The strangely prominent tap on the bare back wall serves to suggest that “a little water” will not easily clear of the moral angst she may be feeling, and it is not a surprise to us that on her return to her home in Sydney her confidence begins to falter.
For the very many who have returned from war, coming home is the beginning of a new battle – to fit back into a friendship and family world that has undergone change, to live an ordinary life after living a life of heightened awareness, to feel passed over in the workplace and finally have time to allow grief for the horrors she has seen and been powerless to prevent to surface. Above all, she feels guilt at having failed her profession and her own deeply-felt commitment to the injunction to give honour to the dead.
Sara does not overwhelm us, fortunately, with the full gamut of Suzie’s breakdown. Intermittent flashbacks re-enact the gradual dissolution of Suzie’s ability to deny the moral injury which lies at the heart of the play and which she finally reveals in an intensely emotional scene. Harbridge’s desperate clutches at her head as if to stop the frantic working of her mind and the vulnerability of her crouched figure are deeply touching as we recall her confident stance amid the explosive turmoil of the opening. We ought not to want more.
While the play belongs to Harbridge she has excellent support from McMahon as her warm-hearted BFF who can tell her some hard truths, from an affable Mansoor who offers her the wisdom of optimism, from Deborah Galanos as a persistent psychologist and from Scanlan, perfect as her mother, Marg. While Marg is initially a little obtuse, when she and her daughter are both stripped of familial subterfuges, she offers a possible way for Suzie to find absolution.
The play moves at a fast pace, helped by the appealing way movement from scene to scene is very much in the style of movie jump cuts. The stage setting is minimal and all white which suits both the starkness of a war-zone and Suzie’s sense of isolation on her return. The gravity of the play’s themes is leavened by some very funny dialogue particularly at the expense of the Women’s Weekly, the dogs of Potts Point, cushions as décor (and metaphors for future happiness) and the correct outfit for cleaning the bath.
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