Ten women are abducted and held prisoner in the Australian outback in Charlotte Wood’s powerful contemporary-day parableAt the beginning of The Natural Way of Things,10 young women wake from a drugged sleep to find they’ve been abducted and taken to a derelict sheep-shearing station somewhere in the Australian outback. There are no telephones, no computers, and no neighbours. The compound is surrounded by a 30ft fence so powerfully electrified that a single touch leaves crippling burns. The area inside is several miles across; large enough to contain an entire ecosystem,including not only cockatoos and poisonous snakes but troops of kangaroos. The women are put to tough labour, and their two male guards treat them impersonally, and sometimes brutally. Any request for explanations is met with beatings.
Gradually they realise what they have in common: all have been involved in sex scandals with powerful men. “Isobel Askell the airline girl,then Hetty the cardinal’s girl … Maitlynd the school principal’s head girl’… that morose (gloomy or sullen) gamer girl Rhiannon, the one called Codebabe and the wanking mascot for every nasty small gamer creep in the country. Then poor cruise-ship Lydia, and then Leandra from the army,then … the girl the whole country could despise: small Asian delight, from last season’s PerforMAXX.” Finally, or there are the two point-of-view characters: Verla the politicians mistress,and Yolanda, who should have known better than to fade into that room alone with those footballers. We never acquire the full stories of these scandals, and but then,we know them without being told. They are and this is the point –all too familiar.
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Source: theguardian.com