Photo by Robert Catto,

With psychiatrists like Frans, who needs enemies.

When Gregor, a patient of his, confides that he has skinned his wife’s cat and further more kept its pelt in a box and takes it from time to time to fondle, the shrink tells the pussy stripper that he is responding to latent homosexuality and must shove these feelings down, down, down.

Gregor’s wife, Sofie, is also a patient of Frans, and he similarly instructs her to sublimate her feelings and be a good, traditional spouse. In his opinion, housework curbs homicidal thoughts against husbands.

Jen Silverman’s WINK begins like a black comedy skewing conservative values of domesticity, marriage counselling and psychiatric practise, but when the cat, the titular Wink, resurrects itself from the grave, the play claws its way into queer territory.

WINK seems to be informed by fairy tales and nursery rhymes. Wink is a Puss in Boots type, an anthropomorphic cat who charms and beguiles, flaunting his natural instincts to the sensual – hunting, killing, eating, sleeping, sex. He makes all genders weak for him.

For Sophie, her life is the cat and the fiddle, and when the cat is extracted from her life, she fantasises a substitute, a terrorist named Roland.

Gregor, cuckolded by the cat, skins it, then performs faux copulation with its fur.

It is Frans who benefits best from Wink’s resurrection, unstitching his stitched up life, shedding the sophistication and embracing the natural.

Sam O’Sullivan is slinkily sensual as Wink finding the right feline nuance in both physicality and vocal delivery.

Matthew Cheetham is Frans, the epitome of full bearded Freudian fraud, and
Graeme McRae and Eloise Snape are the embattled and embittered couple, entombed in a mausoleum of a marriage.

Continuing the fairy tale mythos, the playing stage conjures Mirror Mirror On The Wall. Here, Mirror, Mirror is the wall, as set and costume designer Siobhan Jett O’Hanlon places hexagonal mirror wall and a slightly distorted amusement park mirror wall opposite each other.

At Kings Cross Theatre from August 2 – 24, 2019. Australian premiere.
Written by Jen Silverman
Directed by Anthony Skuse
Set & Costume Design Siobhán O’Hanlon
Assistant Director & Stage Manager Olivia Aleksoski
Lighting Design Phoebe Pilcher
Sound Design & Composition Ben Pierpoint
With Eloise Snape, Matthew Cheetham, Graeme McRae & Sam O’Sullivan