Storked

Storked is, as the program blurb says, ‘a series of vignettes’ – here, that is, short scenes and sketches about aspects of female physiological and psychological experience – with the exception of the horrible pain of endometriosis – they are unignorable and inevitable.  Not for nothing was menstruation alone called ‘the curse’ but here - as it seems to me - playwright Myf Hocking extends the concept of ‘curse’ by declaring in her program notes that Storked is about ‘monogamy, pregnancy, parenting, and the chosen family’. 

Hocking, with director Maude Davey, has assembled a brilliant cast to fill out the range of roles required.  Besides Hocking herself in key ‘representative’ roles, there’s the whacky comedy duo of Teo Vergara and Elliot Wood, plus magnetic, multi-talented Milo Hartill, and the always irresistible, sly but dangerously subversive Kikki Temple.

In its way, Storked is an angry cri de coeur at the vagaries of the female body and what’s expected of it, assumed about it, and the person inside it attacked for not fitting the stereotypes or the preordained roles: Wife, Mother, carer, breeding vessel, doomed to suffer pain, bleeding, invasive surgery, et al.

Storked addresses as much as what is just there in the female body – uterus, fallopian tubes, ova – and you’re stuck with it – as the attitudes and assumptions of the medical profession, the courts and the patriarchal structures of society in general.  (Let’s not drag ‘capitalism’ into this as well – it’s a fashionable idea, but patriarchal structures are hardly confined to capitalism, neoliberal or not.) 

Amongst the vignettes, is a particularly central, pointed and chilling medical consultation in which an obdurate doctor (Temple) refuses a hysterectomy request from a patient (Teo Vergara) on the basis of ‘what if you change your mind’ – i.e. decide on ‘motherhood’ later.  It’s not just the denial of choice here, it’s the denial of female experience and the stonewalling refusal even to listen...  

Hatred and rage at the body takes the extreme form, in another sketch, of the helplessly frustrated woman wanting to claw out her insides...  Or there is the woman simply standing there as menstrual blood trickles and floods down her leg.

Several cast members take a turn as the ever-present Stork, standing by, waiting to pounce.  In a very entertaining but disconcerting passage, Elliot Wood is a tired Stork, delivering babies willy-nilly, informing the recipient ‘You’ve been storked.’  Don’t ask questions, the Stork doesn’t know; it just delivers – and you’re stuck with whatever comes...

But not all scenes or sketches are successful.  Despite the contribution of dramaturg Bridget Balodis, the variety of styles, the abrupt transitions between, and the too insistent emotional repetitions, don’t always gel into a coherent whole.  Hocking in a child’s wading pool, in underwear, being watered by Vergara with a watering can rather lost me.  Perhaps it’s dangerous to get too abstract or poetic when forceful agit-prop is your aim.

There are certainly instances here of brilliance, of hilarity, of insight and satire – some performed with excellent physical comedy and timing, others with passionate seriousness.  Maude Davey’s sure hand is in evidence here.  But for greater impact (especially on cis-males) perhaps what’s needed is a purposeful edit and a structure linking the scenes that work per se into a piece that develops into a visceral, no escape, in-your-face shout.

Michael Brindley