Lovely Lovely Sometimes Ugly

Four Plays

Patricia Cornelius

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781760623203
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Drama

In Lovely Lovely Sometimes Ugly, a collection of four plays by one of Australia's most fearless playwrights, Patricia Cornelius displays all her skill, wit, beauty and anger, and serves them up like a still beating heart on a chipped plate.Cornelius's signature grungy poetic style is at its finest in the early play Love, a brutally beautiful journey into the emotional core of three broken souls in a broken world.In SLUT, a short, sharp stab into the heart of internalised misogyny, Cornelius explores the life and perceived crimes of Lolita, a schoolgirl whose sexual confidence both frightens and fascinates her peers. In The Club takes us into the adrenalin-fuelled, macho-pumped world of professional footballers and its intersection with slut-shaming and issues of consent.And in the sweeping, Lorca-inspired The House of Bernadette, the family of women left behind after the death of a patriarch is a goldmine of female desire, sexual repression, and individual compromise.[Her work] channels the power of resisting received literary tradition in order to open up a space where the lives of characters on the margins can become vessels of universal truths. Windham-Campbell Award judges.

ACT ONE

SCENE ONE

It’s hot. Very hot. A great brooding silence fills a large white-tiled room stained by red dust.

An enormous fan moves laboriously overhead.

Outside, bells begin to toll.

Five women, BERNADETTE and her four daughters—ANGELA, MARTI, MAGDA and ADELE—dressed in funereal black, appear in a line-up of cell-like rooms.

One weeps piteously. MARTI.

They disappear.

PENELOPE enters. She makes a beeline to a table laden with food. She stands at the table and at regular intervals stuffs sausages greedily into her mouth.

PENELOPE: Two hours of unbelievable bullshit! About the virtues of Tony Alba! You’ve got to be kidding! Virtues? Tony? None. It got interesting when Marti fainted. The only one who loved her father, which isn’t surprising because he was such a shit. I’m starving! I could think of nothing except these sausages and that’s not what you should be thinking about at a funeral, even if it is Tony’s funeral, and I knew later Bernadette would be watching me like a hawk. What you going to do now, Bernadette? Stuck with four girls. Four ugly girls. Four of them. Who’d want that? Especially Angela who’s old and got no tits. But here’s a twist, Angela might be coming into some money at least. A lot of it. A great big fat trust fund and all for Angela. Angela. Rich. That’s a switch.

She checks the door before shoving another sausage into her gob.

How I’d love to tell Bernadette what a tight-arse, mean-minded bitch she is. I’ve been your friend for forty years, Bernadette, and worked my guts out helping you with the house. Forty years washing your sheets, forty years eating your leftovers, forty years of looking after you and the kids, and you’re that tight. She constantly reminds me that I’m here at her mercy, that I’m lucky she and Tony took me in and if they hadn’t I’d probably be on the street. Yes it’s true, I had nowhere else to go, but I didn’t expect to be treated like your servant, Bernadette, and I didn’t expect to put up with Tony feeling me up every chance he could get!

MARIA: [within] Bernadette!

PENELOPE: Shit! I hope you’re still locked up.

MARIA: [within] Bernadette!

PENELOPE: [shouting] She’s coming!

She shoves another sausage in her mouth.

She’s coming alright, with that cold little smi...