Blood Relations (Review): An Axe-cellent Feminist Take on America’s Favourite Murderer Muse
Pamphlet of the Borden murder trial, sourced from Wikimedia Commons
3.5/5 stars.
Contains spoilers; contains mentions of murder, misogyny, homophobia.
It seems Lizzie Borden will never rest peacefully. Her legacy has been bloodily tainted since the alleged murder of her parents, of which she was acquitted in 1892. These supposed murders, consisting of two axe killings, received mass media attention throughout the United States when the trial took place. The press that critiqued Lizzie continued to torment her for the rest of her life, as she was continually vilified for being a malevolent murderer, a woman, and for her speculated queer identity.
Lizzie continues to have a significant presence in contemporary American popular culture, featuring in famous children’s rhymes, with lyrics including: ‘Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave her mother forty whacks’. She has also been the subject of many biopics, of numerous true crime podcasts and, my personal favourite, was the inspiration behind Maddie Ziegler’s creepy dance competition solo, literally entitled ‘Lizzie Borden’, in a Season 6 episode of Dance Moms.
Nonetheless, as Sharon Pollock’s 1980 play, Blood Relations, demonstrates, not all adaptations of Lizzie’s life have to be bound to the conventions of this century-old misogynistic myth.
The play opens in 1902, at a tea-time conversation with a ‘modern-day’ Miss Lizzie (Holly Varndell) and her lover, The Actress (Irisa Kwok), in which The Actress asks Miss Lizzie, ‘Did you do it?’ ‘It’ refers to the murder – the painful bane of Miss Lizzie’s existence.
Miss Lizzie seems initially hurt by this familiar, villainising line of questioning, but ultimately suggests the pair should play a game. This ‘game’ consists of her playing Bridget, her old maid, and The Actress taking on the role of the Lizzie of 10 years prior. The underlying intention behind this game seems to be to offer her lover (and by extension the audience) a peak into her psyche in the period leading up to the murder and perhaps, in this way, an answer to her (and our) burning question. Did Lizzie do it?
This play-pretend ensues with the introduction of the rest of Lizzie’s family. The oppressive family atmosphere is instantly suffocating, with Mrs Boden (Miranda Evans) smugly demonising Lizzie at every turn, and the sternly played Mr Boden (Stefan Tuchel) being too engrossed in his newspaper to properly care for his daughters. Lizzie’s neglect and isolation is immediately made evident.
The Corpus Playroom is a perfect space to emphasise this stifling environment. It strengthens the intimacy of the domestic war taking place and the seating, snugly encasing the stage, allows Irisa Kwok and Holly Varndell to seamlessly switch in and out of each time frame, by sometimes sitting in the audience to look out and comment on the action unfolding before them.
Irisa Kwok plays a wonderfully brave and determined Lizzie. She is the only character strikingly dressed in black. This foregrounds her as being the visual focal point and also marks her out as being the rebellious ‘black sheep’ of the family. Kwok brings a great tenderness to Lizzie’s most emotional and shouty moments, which could have easily been overacted and tiring. These more tender moments are where the play really shines, including when Lizzie finds herself alone with characters like her ‘fat cow’ nemesis, Mrs Boden or her annoyingly saintly sister, Emma (Emma Kentridge). They reveal to her the reasoning behind their selfish survival tactics or their feelings of powerlessness. These scenes show us that while these women are complicit in Lizzie’s pain, their behaviour is primarily dictated by the misogynistic society they inhabit. Ultimately, they are not the cruel plotters Lizzie makes them out to be, and are mainly as miserable as her, just as Emma tells Lizzie: ‘What can we do?’
This more combative Lizzie is beautifully contrasted with Holly Varndell’s more thoughtful and older Miss Lizzie. Miss Lizzie’s pain and distance from the events that took place is made clear in Varndell’s calm characterisation. Varndell and Kwok also treat the queer aspects of their characters’ relationships very sensitively and subtly.
The play does have some unpolished aspects, the main one being the some of the cast’s shakey Massachusetts accents, which stabilised a little as the play progressed, but still comically pulled me out of the drama at crucial points. There were also moments of awkward line delivery and a couple of inelegantly shuffly transitions, but these last two elements, were, no doubt, more products of opening night nerves than anything else.
Beyond a handful of slightly unpolished moments, Lily Isaacs and Tasmin Jones’ Blood Relations remains a worthwhile and interesting play. In their adaptation, they move beyond answering the predictably sensationalist question: ‘Did she do it?’; as they explore and linger on a far more interesting idea: ‘Why would she have done it?’
The closing scene is particularly poignant in its answer to this question, as after having acted out the killing of Miss Lizzie’s parents, The Actress asks Lizzie once more: ‘Did you do it?’ To which Lizzie replies: ‘No, you did.’ As we are plunged into the darkness of the Corpus playroom, the more unhinged members of the audience (I include myself in this grouping) are perhaps left asking themselves, given Lizzie’s circumstances, could I have done it?