$5.40 – $15.00
“All locked away, you said, no one can hold it against you once it’s all locked away.”
London, 1848. Six women have been given a second chance. Their pasts behind them, they have been promised a clean slate on the other side of the world, in the new colonies of Australia.
Sealed off from the outside world, they cook, they clean, they sing, they sew – they practice the art of being female while they wait for their new lives to begin. But as the date of departure draws near, the women begin to wonder what reinvention will cost them. What will such promises make them do? And what about the fall yet to come, the tumble down the edge of the world to a far-away continent...
Inspired by the history of Urania Cottage, a home for “fallen” women founded by Charles Dickens, this imaginative new Australian work asks what happens when the promise of a clean slate is built on silencing the past – and what it takes to break that silence.
PDF Program for ///Fallen/// by Seanna van Helten, presented by She Said Theatre at fortyfivedownstairs, 2018.
"Silenced stories will out, in some way, and so much of the tension created in this superb production is in the power of the unspoken. We see the workings of the construction of the ideal feminine woman, so dependent on form and lies and silence."
"Seanna van Helten’s play takes aim at the silence. It’s alive to the paternalistic blinkers of the enterprise but more interested in going behind the curtain of history to imagine these women’s lives, and to capture the complexity of this novel, all-female institution in action."
"Few works on major Australian stages are asking audiences to consider women on their own terms, in their own words."
"The way [the characters] are moulded into becoming more ‘feminine’ and thus more acceptable to society resonates still, and as a piece of history directly related to Australia, Fallen is fascinating.… an intriguing subject and a beautifully staged play."
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