Pig Girl

The play premiered in November 2013 at Theatre Network in Edmonton. It was directed by Bradley Moss and starred Nadien Chu, Brian Dooley, Elinor Holt and Randy Hughson.

Now available at Playwright's Canada Press.

Pig Girl - Finborough Theatre, London 2015

The Public Reviews

By Alex Ramon, on January 13, 2015

The plays of Colleen Murphy have become something of a staple of the Finborough’s programming over the last few years, resulting in the playwright’s tenure as Canadian Writer-in-Residence at the theatre in 2011-12. The last work by Murphy to be staged at the Finborough (albeit all-too-briefly) was Armstrong’s War in the summer of 2013. This was an intimate and incisive two-hander about a Canadian Girl Guide assigned to read to a soldier hospitalised following an injury incurred in the Afghanistan War. Ignited by captivating performances from Jessica Barden and Mark Quartley, Jennifer Bakst’s frills-free workshop production was simply beautiful, and delicately lit up every nuance of the drama to create a deeply humane and poignant duet.

Though retaining something of that play’s intimacy, Murphy’s latest work, Pig Girl, is a very different proposition indeed to the emotionally complex but comparatively consoling Armstrong’s War. Pig Girl is a bruising, intense and thoroughly disquieting work that proved deeply divisive upon its world premiere at Theatre Network in Edmonton, Alberta in 2013, where, as well as praise from some commentators (the play won the Carol Bolt Award), the piece found itself taken to task for everything from exploitative violence to appropriation of voice.

Part of the controversy that Pig Girl stirred up in Canada was due to its inspiration in real events: namely, the murder by a man named Robert Pickton of a large number of mostly First Nations women in British Columbia. While Murphy has stressed that the play is “a work of imagination,” its basis in the Pickton case isn’t hard to see. Still, the harsh denunciations that Pig Girl received from some quarters in Canada seem misguided. For, in Helen Donnelly’s gripping production at least, the play looks nothing less than a deeply feminist, profoundly political work, whose critique of the apathy of the authorities in dealing with the disappearances of girls from marginalized groups communicates clearly and urgently.

The play is constructed, essentially, as two interwoven two-handers. Murphy juxtaposes the torment of a woman held in a barn by a volatile captor with the ordeal experienced by the woman’s sister, as she attempts to convince a police officer to begin the investigation of her missing sibling. These two separate male/female encounters posit a parallel between the horrific crimes occurring in the barn and the wider cultural abuses of a society that seems indifferent to the fate of drug-addicted sex workers, especially those from non-white backgrounds.

Alert to the ever-shifting rhythms of Murphy’s language – which is sometimes beautiful and poetic, at others intensely ugly and visceral, but always rich in evocative detail – Donnelly’s production doesn’t flinch from the play’s discomforting elements. In the tiny confines of the Finborough, the play’s intensity level is high to say the least, enhanced further by a superb sound design by Fred Riding (snorting pig noises and the sounds of lashing rain provide the least welcoming of introductions even before the production begins) and Nic Farman’s crepuscular lighting.

The absence of names for the characters – identified simply as Dying Woman, Sister, Killer and Police Officer – immediately announces their status as archetypes. But the purpose of the piece is to go beyond such simplistic formulations and to reveal instead the particular histories of these individuals. Just occasionally, the writing resorts to cliché: I could have lived without the hackneyed revelation of the Killer’s own background of abuse which pins his pathology on (wouldn’t you know) a monstrous mother, even if this perspective does get nuanced by another character later in the play.

But, for the most part, the character dynamics are fascinatingly and sometimes surprisingly developed, and Donnelly gets committed, powerful performances from her first-rate cast, with Kirsten Foster as the fierce woman fighting for her life, Damien Lyne as her insidious tormentor, Joseph Rye as the policeman who ends up as haunted by the case as the victims’ families are, and Olivia Darnley, radiant with conviction and concern as the sister battling the apathy of the system in her attempt to discover her sibling’s fate.

It’s not a show to dispense much in the way of New Year cheer, then. But Pig Girl is a potent, provocative play, one that’s turned, by Donnelly’s fine production, into a requiem of sorts.

PIG GIRL To 16 February

5-0 to the Finborough with protean Canadian playwright.

By Timothy Ramsden, on 11 January, 2015

Thanks again to Neil McPherson’s Finborough for championing Canadian playwright Colleen Murphy. Ignored elsewhere throughout Britain, this is her fifth play here. Each is serious, riveting and deeply involving.

Murphy’s work is refreshingly unpredictable. Themes and story develop organically, while each play carves-out its own style and manner. She is a keen observer, a shrewd and independent-minded analyst. And a terrific writer, with unshowy. economical dialogue, and tightly-structured action.

Pig Girl shows she keeps up with the news, too. The play grew from reports of a Canadian pig-farmer eventually identified as a serial killer. Building tension, never sensationalising, or exploiting the suffering of the victim she shows – a bright student sunk into drug-addiction and lured to the farm by promises of new pharmaceuticals – Murphy gives depth to each character.

She deserves a sensitive, perceptive director. And has one in Helen Donnelly, helped by Nic Farman’s lighting, its patches of brightness in the day-world of the (half-)Sister and policeman, initially bored then increasingly guilty at his lackadaisical response to search requests and expert theories, bordering a nocturnal half-dark for captive and killer.

Here, Zoe Hammond’s set uses farmyard mess and machinery to create an atmosphere of secrecy and threat in a small space (the production plays on the narrow space allowed by the Finborough’s other current show). Whether Olivia Darnley was deliberately half-avoiding the spotlight, or whether that was a matter for adjustment after this Preview performance, it intensified the sense of unease, underscoring Darnley’s urgency.

Donnelly also orchestrates Fred Riding’s sound-score, key to the play’s development of interior feeling as Murphy skilfully combines an edge-of-seat thriller element with a voyage into characters’ psychology, in part exposed through sounds conjured in troubled minds. Action and character analysis usually clash. Not here, as Murphy develops a double sense of time, the intense farm scenes contrasting the law’s delays in taking anything approaching action.

The male actors do well enough. But the play’s heart lies with the sisters and, contrasting Darnley’s urgency, Kirsten Foster’s determined prisoner, holding to her identity by defiance and insistence, is an unpitying, selfless performance in a remarkable evening.

Pig Girl, Finborough Theatre – Review

4 stars - A chilling and unsettling story that is brought to life admirably.

By Emily Pulham, on 15 January 2015

Pig Girl at the Finborough is a story that builds on (and draws heavy influence from) the true-life murder of a great number of prostitutes in Canada at the hands of a man who was went un-pursued for a long time owing largely to police indifference to the missing women.

Two narratives take turns telling their version of events. On the edge of the stage stand a worried sister of a missing prostitute and an uninterested and overstressed policeman as they go back and forth over his reluctance to take the missing woman case seriously. In centre stage we have a scene from a dirty barn – scuffed dirt and rock floor, bins of junk adorn the floor, and an abattoir hook eerily swings from its chains. In this scene we have an abducted prostitute and her unhinged and creepy kidnapper.

It is absolutely, categorically, not easy viewing. There are some scenes that enact sexual violence, and they are extremely difficult to watch. I felt my own skin crawl every time the killer so much as touched the Dying Woman, and this performance does not sugar coat anything – the violence is not shielded from the audience.

There are some unimaginable horrors being brought to life for this performance, and Kirsten Foster is without question the girl to bring them to life. She is outstanding in this macabre role. Her screams are blood curdling, and she puts in an incredibly physical performance as the abducted prostitute. Her pain is worryingly believable, and her role in the finale is equal measures intense and tragically beautiful.

Another winning bit of this performance is how multifaceted the majority of the characters are. The sister, the dying woman and the police officer all have many sides each bringing something to the table to enrich the characters. Olivia Darnley is wonderful as the concerned sister who stuck to the straight and narrow; she’s determined, sympathetic, and immensely likeable.

What’s also interesting about the performance is how the two different narratives are moving at completely different speeds of time. One narrative takes place over years, and is cleverly marked as such with monologue diary entries. The kidnapping narrative covers far less time, but the suffering experienced seems to have lasted for years.

There is little to be improved on here, but some lines are fluffed on occasion (which do not seem to be part of characterisation) and I’m not sure if the haunting, recurring knocking which tortures the police officer is as relevant and meaningful as the sister hearing telephone rings at every turn. The police officer as a character overcompensates for how the killings have affected him, but his torment does not seem as valid as the physical and mental torment of that of the sister.

There is no happy ending to be had for this performance, but the ending is moving, powerful, and the cherry on top of an incredible performance from Kirsten Foster. This is an extremely difficult play to watch, even from a safe distance – but it is a powerhouse of a performance, and gives a strong, brave, and concise voice to victims of a madman who was left alone to kill for far too long.

Theatre review: Pig Girl

By nick730, on 18 January 2015

It seems like at least half the theatre bloggers in London are still eagerly awaiting the return of Armstrong's War, which far too few people got the chance to see in 2013; in the meantime we can make do with the Finborough giving over its Sunday-Tuesday slot to another Colleen Murphy play. Pig Girl is a much darker affair though: In Zoe Hammond's design, to stage left and right we have a Sister (Olivia Darnley) on the phone to a Police Officer (Joseph Rye) about the disappearance of her troubled younger sister. She's not the first drug-addicted prostitute to go missing from Vancouver and rumours of a serial killer have been rife for years, but there hasn't been a single piece of physical evidence so the police can't even officially open an investigation. These phone calls to the police take place over several years, during which time a picture slowly starts to build of what's happening to the missing women.

These scenes alternate with the action centre stage, which takes place over a much shorter period: In a remote barn the Killer (Damien Lyne) has hung the Dying Woman (Kirsten Foster) from a meathook and proceeds to abuse and murder her.

The above summary pretty much covers all that happens in the play but Pig Girl rarely feels like its story is stalling. The central scene of torture and death is of course pretty hard to watch, but Murphy's structure that plays out the two sides of the story in different time frames shows the Sister, in her desperation even to get confirmation of her sibling's death so she can at least have closure, going through a much more protracted form of torture of her own.

With strong performances from all four actors, Pig Girl even lets us in on some of the traumatic background of the Killer, while the initially callous-seeming Police Officer seems to crumble emotionally as the years go by almost as much as the Sister; the possibly-imaginary knocking at the door he starts to hear, as a combination of guilt and ineffectiveness start to get to him, contributse to Helen Donnelly's production having some of the feel of an unbearably dark thriller. It's not a comfortable watch, but it's often a powerful one.

Review: Pig Girl, Finborough Theatre

“Turn your head and you’ll see me”

By Ian Foster, on January 13, 2015

Colleen Murphy’s Armstrong’s War remains one of the best new plays I’ve seen in recent years and that it hasn’t returned to these shores since its initial Sunday/Monday run at the Finborough in 2013 is an absolute travesty. In the meantime, we do now have the opportunity to see another of Murphy’s plays – 2012’s Pig Girl – which comes freighted with a different sense of expectation, as its premiere in Edmonton, Alberta was mired in controversy and sparked fervent protests at its perceived cultural appropriation. (An excellent précis can be read here.)

The play was inspired by a horrifically true story of a Canadian pig farmer and serial killer who was convicted of six murders but implicated in dozens more – his preferred victim being sex workers of aboriginal descent, a section of society too easily ignored and neglected, allowing him to literally get away with murder. Murphy depersonalises her story though, elevating it to near-mythical status in order to give a voice to the thousands of women, so many of them nameless, whose lives have been impacted by senseless violence.

So we become witness to an elongated scene of torture and murder as the merciless Killer strings Dying Woman up on a meat hook to meet her inevitable fate. And at either side, we see her adoptive Sister trying her damnedest to convince Police Officer that her sibling is a genuine missing person and that any sex and drugs in her life shouldn’t negate that fact – we see Sister’s battle for the truth stretch over nearly ten years. Unsurprisingly, Pig Girl is a brutal watch and Helen Donnelly’s production never lets us sit easily, rightly so given the violence so unflinchingly portrayed.

And Murphy also maintains a niggling discomfort in showing how all four lives have been irrevocably shaped by traumatic events. Kirsten Foster’s Dying Woman has a near-impossible dignity within her desperation, Olivia Darnley is devastatingly effective as the Sister who still lights a candle every year and Joseph Rye’s rage against his own police system is again well done. The introduction of the Killer’s voice (Damien Lyne), detailing his own abusive childhood, forces tough questions though about ideas of victimhood and the cycle of abuse, rather than directly addressing the misogyny it has inculcated. It is searching, if occasionally a little too static, writing – hard work but in a good way.

Running time: 85 minutes (without interval)

Colleen Murphy's Pig Girl at the Finborough Theatre

A very intense and relevant play.

By Carolin Kopplin, on 14 January 2015

A young woman has disappeared. Her worried sister tries to file a missing person report with the police - to no avail. The police have better things to do than search for a prostitute, possibly a drug addict, who might or might not have come in harm's way and who will probably turn up eventually anyway. Meanwhile the young woman is held captive by a deranged pig farmer who has no intention of letting her go. She is supposed to share the fate of the other women who have been trapped by him in the barn. Although the young woman is subjected to terrible abuse and torture she won't give in and keeps hoping against hope that her sister will find her and save her life.

This is the European premiere of Canadian writer Colleen Murphy's unsettling play, which was first presented as a rehearsed reading during the Vibrant Festival of Finborough Playwrights. Based on true events, the play gives a voice to all the women who have been subjected to violence. No matter how much pain she has to endure, the trapped woman in Murphy's play refuses to be a helpless victim - she will not give up. Neither will her sister, who keeps returning to the police station until her missing person report is filed and police officers begin searching for her sister.

Murphy's characters are not individuals but representatives of their kind who are called Dying Woman, Killer, Sister, and Police Officer, which already gives away the ending. The Killer is a delusional misogynist who thinks that "People with vaginas are very dangerous" and therefore feels compelled to rid the world of them - after getting as much out of it as possible. The Dying Woman fights bravely for her life. She tries to make the Killer see her as an individual to dissuade him from killing her. Her strategy is mirrored by her Sister's attempt to make the indifferent Police Officer, who is overworked and understaffed, see the missing woman as a person of value, an individual who is loved and appreciated by her family. But it will take nine years before the police have gathered enough evidence to reach a conviction of the serial killer which might or might not bring closure for the relatives of the missing women.

Helen Donnelly's production shows 80 minutes of suffering and abuse, interrupted by scenes between the Sister and the Police Officer. Kirsten Foster gives a very strong and intense performance as the Dying Woman who will attempt anything to survive her ordeal. Damien Lyne convinces as the delusional Killer, who is suffering from a childhood trauma for which he compensates by torturing tied up women, enjoying every single minute of his short-lived power over another human being. Olivia Darnley and Joseph Rye are very good as the Sister and the Police Officer - the persistent relative who won't give up on her sibling and the indifferent bureaucrat who sees his priorities anywhere else but in finding an indigenous prostitute.

In 2014, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police released a report that found 1, 181 cases of murdered or missing indigenous women in Canada since 1980. There has not been a national enquiry as yet.

---

"There’s an enterprise of extreme and disturbing audacity going on at Theatre Network at the moment. It’s a new Canadian play. It plays with explosives, not just stage smoke, in a manner of speaking. And whatever you think, in the end, about its grasp, it’s unafraid to get its fingers blown off.

After all, with Pig Girl, by the evidently fearless Colleen Murphy, we aren’t presented with serial killing as some abstract pattern of destruction, or exploration of deep cultural failure. No, we’re watching a woman on a meat hook being butchered to death by a maniac in front of our eyes. The play, thoughtfully and artfully written, has its Shakespearean complexities as it sets about trying, with mixed results, to turn a savage crime story with its message that butchering people is monstrous, into a full-fledged tragedy of loss. But centre stage, presented with extraordinary and unflinching stagecraft by Theatre Network director Bradley Moss and two of the bravest actors anywhere, Pig Girl is one long, graphic, horrifying live death scene.“

Liz Nicholls, Edmonton Journal, November 2013

To read the full interview, click here.

---

"…Pig Girl is a raw, teeth-gritter drama about missing women and murder and the failures of bureaucracy to prevent both of those things. It's ugly stuff, both in terms of on-stage violence and in exposing the nightmarish frustrations of bureaucracy's blind eye to high-risk lifestyles. It's watching the worst-case scenario of a missing-persons scenario played out as someone desperately hopes against that worst-case scenario.

On its less physical level it's about, as playwright Colleen Murphy quoted in an interview last week, letting the dead speak. And Pig Girl's strongest resonance is there: Dying Woman gives a life and a humanity and a vibrancy to the lost, nameless women that were never identified. We're shown a fictionalized, composite one, of course, but that doesn't lessen the potency. In Pig Girl, the ghosts of the unaccounted for, and the people who wait for them, are haunting.”

Paul Blinov, Vue Weekly, November 2013