By Lia Middleton, Second Year English
Claudia Shnier is the performer, writer and director for Split Ends, a one-woman show exploring coercion, control and hair-cutting. She’s also the producer of her UK tour, which visits Bristol’s Loco Klub on the 28th and 29th April. I caught up with her to chat about audiences, rehearsing an autobiographical show and finding truth in the pretence of theatre.
Passionate and genuine, Claudia instinctively makes me laugh with her storytelling style. She tells of the time she performed Split Ends in the scorching heat of a Sydney summer, and a woman sits snoozing under blankets on the front row - ‘she looks like she might be dead.’ When she awakes, Claudia, in character, quips, ‘warm enough?’ to her, which leads a reviewer to comment that ‘Claudia was quite scary when she told the woman off who was sleeping in the front row cause [she] had a pair of scissors in [her] hand.’
That interaction aside, Claudia loves audiences. She thrives off the ‘intimacy and authenticity’ of being connected with an audience, ‘telling them my story rather than a blanket of lights’. Using multimedia, puppetry and physical theatre, she sandwiches heavy scenes with levity, chasing an authentic, embodied and constantly shifting audience experience. It is this fearless vulnerability that differentiates Claudia as a theatre-maker. She describes the play as a ‘Sarah Kane rave’, referring to a pivotal British playwright from the 1990s concerned with the confrontational and visceral stage experiences of ‘in-yer-face theatre’.
But, while Claudia does ‘deep-throat a pair of scissors’ onstage, she is less interested in shock value and more in what is integral to the story. While studying an MA at RADA, Claudia found herself in an abusive relationship that sparked all sorts of psychological triggers. Split Ends is a deeply autobiographical show where Claudia’s intent to depict her ‘truth’ drives her with fierce conviction.
I asked more about the surreal experience of crafting a narrative from a personal truth. ‘I was in a room by myself, constantly getting triggered […] I have to cut my hair in character, but then I’d get carried away and do it as me’. The bewildering doubleness continued at RADA, where she rehearsed - ‘I’d bump into him at RADA and then go rehearse a play about him’.
One reviewer noted, ‘the challenge is not about being honest, but about keeping control’ (My Melbourne Arts). Although she found it ‘weird’ to do, it sounds like differentiating a dramatic space was necessary to craft the play. Claudia said limited rehearsal time helped contain her unravelling. She also maintained a dramaturgical awareness of the script, which helped her make narrative changes that better served the ‘flow of the script’.
Claudia ‘found her creative voice’ whilst at RADA. I was struck by how a ‘hugely challenging time’ can also provide artistic liberation, ‘because it was so challenging mentally, it made work more enriching [...] I had never felt more in my body and more creatively free.’ Clearly, Claudia is an artist energised by intensity, released by the ferocity of raw emotion, ‘that feeling of freedom is everything I crave’. Perhaps that ability to feel free whilst gripped by intense emotion is what gives her such compelling control as an artist.
Here, the audience comes back into focus, ‘I don’t think I found the catharsis until it was in front of an audience’. Initial doubts she was ‘fraudulent’ or ‘catastrophising’ were relieved by the validation of early audiences. Hearing that the show provided such a release for those who had been through similar experiences was incredibly special for Claudia, with one audience review saying, ‘this was more valuable than a lifetime of therapy for me’ (available here).
The show is also practically informative about ‘the damage left behind and the damage people can cause other people’. After seeing the show in Edinburgh, a doctor invited Claudia to perform for NHS staff to provoke conversations on the effects of coercive control on a person’s mental and physical health.
Daisy Guilor
Claudia is a brilliant and tenacious voice. Her inventive use of props and conviction for authenticity make her a skilled storyteller intimately connected with the audience. I cannot imagine a venue more suited to Split Ends than Bristol’s Loco Klub, and I highly recommend going to see it - perhaps as a post-diss deadline catharsis!
Split Ends is at the Loco Klub on 28th - 29th April at 8pm. Tickets are available here on Headfirst - more from Claudia on Instagram here.
Featured image: Claudia Shnier
Will you go and see 'Split Ends'?
