Snakeface (Belvoir 25a) ★★★½

Written by Aliyah Knight. Fruitbox Theatre. Belvoir 25a. 8-27 Apr, 2025.

Poetic and visceral, there’s an energy to writer/performer Aliyah Knight’s work Snakeface that bodes well for their future. This is a voice I want to hear more from.

Snakeface is a monologue that jumps backwards and forwards between events in the life of Maddie (Knight). It’s a rolling commentary on life, friends, sexual partners and fantasies as both a teenager and a young Black 20-something. But some of those moments are dark, and Maddie doesn’t always want to – or know how to – face them.

Knight is fantastic as Maddie: full of warm, childlike enthusiasm, with flashes of violent intent. Taking its inspiration from the legend of Medusa, Snakeface hints at violence unseen. Knight’s performance gives us all the graphic details through her physicality. Their hands are rarely static – either tugging at pieces of costume, playing with jewellery, or tearing into a large block of clay that dominates the stage.

At times, this is less a play and more a piece of spoken word poetry, as Maddie slips into a rhythmic metre that hits the ears like a heartbeat. It’s an evocative way to show her transformation into something more animalistic than she first appears. We are introduced to a heavily redacted written version of Maddie’s story as text projected onto the wall. The words and letters we see spell out anger and pain, though it’s clear we’re not reading the full piece. It’s only at the show’s climax that we get to read the full poem.

There were moments, as the language grew more poetic – and at times obtuse – delivered with measured tempo, that I began to lose track of the story. The delivery became more prominent than the words themselves, and I was lulled into a trancelike state for a minute. This, combined with the time jumps and the multitude of characters to keep track of – who are the ex-lovers, who are the best friends, who are the ex-lovers who are now best friends, etc. – does make it hard to track the details of the story. But ultimately Snakeface boils down to a single moment and its aftermath, which is crystal clear.

What is undoubtedly successful is the brilliant staging. In the black room of 25a’s space, your eye is instantly drawn to the large earthen block of pale clay in the centre. It sits in the room like a sacrificial altar. Above, netting like spider webs frames the stage. 25a has become a cave – a lair – for this Medusa to work through her pain. It is stunningly simple work from Keerthi Subramanyam (set & props), Rachel Lee (lighting), Wanyika Mshila (costumes), Marco Cher-Gibard (sound), and Wendy Yu (projections). For the first time in a while, this 25a show actually feels like it is genuinely made for the $2500 budget (unlike other recent shows that definitely seemed to be… well… let’s just say I wanna see some receipts), but that budgetary restriction has brought out their best.

Aliyah Knight and director Bernadette Fam have created an excellent intersectional work that drills into the specificity of a Black/queer experience. Snakeface is a story of survival, in many forms, that avoids the pitfalls and boring clichés of “trauma porn” drama and finds something more engaging, more fascinating, and ultimately more hopeful. I think some extra refining to the storytelling will ensure it really lands its punches.