I’m not little,
I’m Barbara

A stethoscope-swinging doctor by day and leather-clad punk singer by night, B meets a man at a jazz club who buys her a drink and steals her heart. He just fits. Like a glove.

Years later, squeezed between wardrobe and wall in a tiny room on a psych ward, B asks herself: “How did I get this broken? Where’s my voice gone? What silenced me?”

With poetry, music and humour, I’m not little, I’m Barbara tracks the impact on B of an oppressive military father, an abusive alcoholic husband and a misogynistic world at large, through to the emergence of her deep creative nature, a power that had protected her all along.

A story of resistance and uncrushable spirit, the play tackles tough subjects around coercive control, gender-based violence and the silencing of the female voice, which millions of women around the world know all too well. It speaks to hidden shame, normalised damage and inexpressible rage, and to hope, courage and the power to change.

If anyone had told four-year-old B, standing on a log at the bottom of the garden, singing her heart out to gathered relatives, that her life would take the turns it did, she would have laughed. “I’m not little, I’m Barbara.”