The Bleeding Tree review

From its first utterances, spoken with venom by a mother and her two daughters gathered around the body of their family patriarch, Australian playwright Angus Cerini’s three-hander confirms itself as a strikingly unusual and gripping piece of theatre. Directed by Sophie Drake, this UK premiere of a play first seen in Sydney in 2015 is a dark and grisly anti-fairytale delivered through profound, poetic writing. It’s a timeless story of women escaping domestic abuse and tensely waiting out the consequences. 

While universal in its themes, it’s set in the Australian outback, a landscape suggested by the scorched red sand of Jasmine Swan’s set. Over the stage hovers a curling, oppressive blue wave. Could it be grief about to come crashing down? It’s more likely relief. Up an invisible tree is the decomposing corpse of a man who made his family’s lives a violent, miserable living hell. Mum (a tough-faced Mariah Gale), Ada (an embittered Alexandra Jensen) and Ida (a gentler, upset Elizabeth Dulau) are hurling insults at his body as they try to come to terms with what they’ve done, and why they did it.

Cerini drip-feeds the events surrounding the murder in abstract fragments. A jump back in time takes us to the scene of the crime, where the three women narrate their efforts to fell their abuser with the blow-by-blow intensity of football commentary – except that Cerini’s writing is far more potent than anything you’d hear on a sporting pitch. Sometimes spoken in rhyming couplets and often interwoven with Australian slang, it’s vivid, exquisite and intense. 

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