SRI LANKA PERFORMANCE

Girls at Checkpoints was a coruscating and deeply unsettling examination of sexual violence in conflict, showing how warfare enables and fosters the assault of women as tactical strategy or as a by-product of the brutalisation that infects all members of the community. This performance saw Piumi Wijesundara and Ashling O’Shea, supported by Ewout D’Hoore, alternately play two journalists aboard a bus held at a military checkpoint, two little girls routinely abused by soldiers on their way to school, and a retelling of the infamous story of Krishanti Kumaraswamy, a 19 year old Tamil school girl who was raped and killed by six Sri Lankan army soldiers as she returned home from sitting her first A-Level exam paper…

The assured and pared-down writing of Ruwanthie de Chickera of Stages Theatre captured the age and vulnerabilities of the characters, cleverly diverting us away from the brutality of the attack on the younger characters by letting the assault on the Sri Lankan journalist stand for the trauma inflicted on all of the women in, and beyond, the story.