AustLit

'An uncompromising cinematic slap to the face from co-directors Trudy Hellier and Susie Dee, and writer, celebrated playwright Patricia Cornelius, the shattering new Australian conversation-starter SHIT is a psychological drama which unfolds over one long night of incarceration in a bleak holding cell.

'Caged for hours on end, tough-nuts Billy (Nicci Wilks), Bobby (Sarah Ward) and Sam (Peta Brady) slowly, uncertainly reveal their stories to each other. Theirs are stories of a lifetime of violence, of abuse, and of institutionalisation, and they’re all told with unsentimental, sometimes comical, and often gut-wrenching insight.'

Source: Inner West Film Festival.

'Two women, two plays, two powerful voices.
'This double volume pairs powerhouse playwright Patricia Cornelius, in collaboration with Susie Dee and Nicci Wilks, with rising star Benjamin Nichol in two searing monodramas about women who are dispossessed and dismissed.

'In RUNT, Cornelius, Dee and Wilks have created an expansive work about the runts of this world—the lesser, the weak, the insignificant, the 'unders'. Runt, a small woman who has endured nothing but misery, toughens up to face her oppressors and fight for equality and decency. But just as she starts to sense greatness rising in her, something shifts and she feels the dirt sucking her back in.
'[Cornelius's] art has a conscious rhythm, poetry and structure that make other writers seethe with envy. Her language doesn't sound naturalistic but when it's spoken by an actor, it sounds like it could never be anything but their voice.' —Time Out

'In kerosene, Nichol's unlikely protagonist Millie yearns for love and acceptance, finding instead rejection and humiliation at every turn … except from her sad, soft old grandfather, and her best friend Annie. Millie shapes her loyalty to Annie into a bond that burns hotter than any romantic furnace. Life sends them on different paths, but when Annie turns up bruised and bloodied on the doorstep, Millie sets out to honour her childhood friend in the only way she knows how: revenge.' (Publication summary)

'Animal is a dark horror, a minute tale of epic proportions. In a remote town, two sisters hover on the edge of society. Dominated by their destructive mother and muted by the secret of a father not long buried, they begin a relentless quest to prepare for the predators circling outside.

'Through heightened physicality and visceral splendor, Animal explores the circumstance we are born into, the cycle of violence and examines how these deeply imbedded patterns can change or be broken.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.