Lost Property: A 4-Star Review by The Nerd Party
Lost Property, co-written and directed by Tuia Suter
Lost Property is a darkly comic, boldly original tale of trauma, pleasure, and reclaiming the body.
Lost Property by Amelia Dunn and Tuia Suter is a bold, darkly comic exploration of trauma, pleasure, and the female body, where Alice's missing vagina becomes the surprising heart of a raw, inventive theatrical journey.
Read The Nerd Party’s Review here: The titular lost property is, in fact, Alice’s vagina and it is one that has lost all feeling, pleasure, and arousal. It’s a bold, funny, and unflinchingly vulnerable framing device that sets the tone for a play which is at once darkly comic, deeply personal, and sharply inventive.
Amelia Dunn’s Alice is on a tram journey, a neat narrative vehicle that mirrors her own path through life. The tram stops become metaphorical story halts and flashbacks to sessions in therapy, sexual encounters that range from empowering to awkward and abusive, and the fragmented experiences that have shaped her relationship with her own body. The choice of the tram works beautifully with the constant motion, fleeting stops, individuals entering your world and capturing the messy, nonlinear way memory and trauma resurface.
What could easily slip into heaviness is instead held with charm and wit. Amelia Dunn delivers a kaleidoscope of characters, shifting with ease between voices, bodies, and moods, her performance both raw and very playful as she navigates vulnerability and humour with equal force.
Alongside Dunn, co-writer and director Tuia Suter helps transform Alice’s vagina from an absence into a presence. Through inventive storytelling, language, and even a surprising masked appearance, Alice’s lost property becomes a character in her own right that is sometimes comic and others tragic. It’s a piece of theatre that leaves you considering the body not only as a source of pleasure and pain, but as a storyteller of its own right (see review here).
