’Cause he and Lulu are holed up in a bank bust that’s gone all wrong

And they’re surrounded

He’s gushing up blood something awful

And Lulu is crying, shrieking

And he puts a bloodied finger to Lulu’s lips and says

‘Shh, baby-doll. We gonna be just fine.’

And she laughs despite herself, at the sheer absurdity of his false optimism

And before he kisses her with what they think is his final breath (but it’s not ’cause you fast-forward four years and she’s waiting for him on the hood of a dusty Chevy outside of prison before they speed into the sunset listening to Guns N’ Roses)

He says

‘Dying don’t mean a thing with you in my arms, Lulu baby. I’d go to hell and back and think it a privilege… as long as I got you.’

And he knows their love is fiery hot and true

And that she’ll wait for him forever.

THE END

Griffin Theatre Company presents

the Sydney Premiere of

BEACHED

BY MELISSA BUBNIC

SBW Stables Theatre

19 July – 31 August

Director

Shannon Murphy

Designer

James Browne

Lighting and AV Designer

Verity Hampson

Composer and AV Designer

Steve Toulmin

Dramaturg

Kit Brookman

Assistant Director

Liz Arday

Stage Manager

Benjamin Brockman

With

Gia Carides

Arka Das

Blake Davis

Kate Mulvany

PLAYWRIGHT’S
NOTE

We hate fat people. I mean, we REALLY hate fat people. If you want to cut someone down, you don’t call them a ‘tall fuck’, or a ‘poorly dressed fuck’ when ‘you fat fuck’ is a viable option.

The extraordinary number of TV docos focusing on super morbid obesity capitalises on this hatred. We know it’s wrong to laugh at freaks so we dress up the content as ‘medical interest’. And while dwarfism, Harlequin’s disease, conjoined twins – the sheer variety of human diversity – may fascinate (and disgust) us, we don’t hate them the way we hate the obese because they are not to blame. We figure they lucked out in life’s genetic lottery whereas fat people choose to eat cake.

We’ll forgive people their addiction to heroin or gambling. There’s something about that behaviour that makes sense to us. Drugs are pleasurable. Winning is thrilling. But we don’t understand why people eat to such excess that they die, encased in a prison of their own flesh. We all eat and yet only some people become super morbidly obese – so the fault must be theirs, for lacking self-control, being indulgent, being lazy.

The largest members of our society are most likely to be among our poorest, chronically under-employed, and least educated. It’s a perverse inversion of the fat landowner and starving peasants dichotomy. In some ways, the demonisation of ‘fat’ is the demonisation of ‘poor’.