Is this womanhood?
Can you imagine how it would feel to live in constant pain? H Sneyd’s just RED is a remarkable study in pain, perseverance and community. We are plunged into Sneyd’s lived experience, interspersed with recorded testimonies from people living with endometriosis, PCOS and adenomyosis, a format that makes the texture of life with chronic pain deeply felt.
Image Credit: Esther Keeley
Sneyd’s command of the stage alone for just RED’s 40 minute runtime is nothing short of a feat. Cycling through visceral honesty, glib humour and acute physical anguish, the emotive experience that Sneyd relays is unparalleled: the audience were hanging on to her every word. I also commend Sneyd’s fluency and versatility in swapping between roles, playing between herself and myriad characters with ease. This visual ploy never felt absurd or unconvincing, rather Sneyd portrays the worrying mother, inept general practitioner, sleazy man and austere customer with uncanny accuracy. We are never left unmoored in this cacophony of voices, guided with precision and momentum by Sneyd’s charismatic performance.
The intimacy of the spare set, coupled with the small space of the ADC’s Larkum Studio allows for the mood to oscillate between cosy, or at least familiar, domesticity and sour claustrophobia in a matter of seconds. Sneyd’s frenetic energy fills the space and demands that the audience not look away. The performance is grounded in the immediacy of real life settings that make it impossible not to experience a deep empathy, whilst the lighting forms the intimacy of the bedroom, the long night of chronic-pain-induced insomnia.
The production employs the tacit power of imbuing horror in the banality of the lived experience, and credit must go to the cohesion of the sound and lighting practitioners (Amelie Charlton, Gemma Stapleton, Katie Stapleton, Nandinee Thatte). After an initial blip, their orchestrating of the dramatic interjections of voiceovers created a mood that felt earned and resonant.
Image Credit: Esther Keeley
And yet there’s something perversely beautiful about it. Something so grotesquely feminine about pain.’
Sneyd’s just RED is a profoundly necessary piece in contributing to a growing awareness of endometriosis, and the medical malpractice that it so often entails – the average waiting time for diagnosis is over 9 years, we learn, and a common treatment option actually voiced by medical practitioners is pregnancy. This blatant dehumanisation, pathologizing veneer and systematic neglect of female pain is portrayed as it is, as endemic and expected. Bringing these voices together serves to make them that bit less isolated and frustrated in their attempts to be understood and taken seriously.
The production doesn’t shy away from the bare and visceral truth of living with this debilitating condition, yet simultaneously, Sneyd’s project affords the dignity of exposition. Sneyd’s just RED manages the paradox of being itself a comedy that depicts the failure of dark humour, self inspective of its acknowledgement that there is not always a joke, or indeed flowery parable, to be derived from acute pain; sometimes endometriosis is ‘just red’. Nonetheless, Sneyd is tersely funny, her quips and anecdotes landing with aplomb, and her vitality carries us along from retching over the toilet bowl to dancing extatically within moments. What a show, and what a performance.
Image Credit: Esther Keeley
4.5/5
Just RED is showing in the ADC’s Larkum Studio from the 6th to the 7th of November. Catch its last night and grab your tickets here!
This production is suitable for ages 16 and over.
Featured Image Credit: Esther Keeley
