The Natural Way of Things review – a masterpiece of feminist horror

Ten women are abducted and held prisoner in the Australian outback in Charlotte Wood’s powerful modern-day parable

At the beginning of The Natural Way of Things, 10 young women wake from a drugged sleep to find they’ve been abducted and taken to a derelict sheep-shearing station somewhere in the Australian outback. There are no telephones, no computers, no neighbours. The compound is surrounded by a 30ft fence so powerfully electrified that a single touch leaves crippling burns. The area inside is several miles across; large enough to contain an entire ecosystem, including not only cockatoos and poisonous snakes but troops of kangaroos. The women are put to hard labour, and their two male guards treat them impersonally, sometimes brutally. Any request for explanations is met with beatings.

Gradually they realise what they have in common: all have been involved in sex scandals with powerful men. “Isobel Askell the airline girl, then Hetty the cardinal’s girl … Maitlynd the school principal’s ‘head girl’… that morose gamer girl Rhiannon, the one called Codebabe and the wanking mascot for every nasty little gamer creep in the country. Then poor cruise-ship Lydia, then Leandra from the army, then … the girl the whole country could despise: little Asian Joy, from last season’s PerforMAXX.” Finally, there are the two point-of-view characters: Verla the politician’s mistress, and Yolanda, who should have known better than to go into that room alone with those footballers. We never get the full stories of these scandals, but then, we know them without being told. They are – and this is the point –all too familiar.

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