top of page

Double Infemnity

VAULT Festival

Double Infemnity, a one-woman gender-flipped crime noir thriller, debuted at VAULT Festival in February 2018.

A dame walks into a Private Eye’s office. She’s beautiful, and she’s dangerous. She’s in trouble and she is trouble. Only this time she’s in charge.

1960s Los Angeles, a glamorous place in a seedy kind of way. Effie-Lou, a dame with a dark past, is the only one who cares that her PI friend Joe is missing. Her investigation takes her into a dark world of murder, sex trafficking, and beehives. As she investigates the mysterious disappearance only she seems to care about, Effie-Lou discovers what it means to be a woman in a man’s world.

Double Infemnity is a stylish and gender-flipped crime noir, simultaneously subverting, homaging and pastiching the genre. Funny, dramatic and chilling, the face-paced thriller twists and turns as our heroine gets drawn deeper and deeper into the sinister mystery.

This one-woman show is a feminist interpretation of a classic genre, taking inspiration from the works of Raymond Chandler and films such as Double Indemnity, the Big Sleep, and Sin City.

Double Infemnity is the first collaboration Little but Fierce, and Paperclip Theatre.

Written by Jennifer Cerys, Catherine O'Shea, and Naomi Westerman.

Directed by Andriana Sanford.

Starring Katrina Foster as Effie-Lou.

Gallery

Critical Acclaim

Miro Magazine

Brilliantly written [with] efficient zingers. The narrative devices work: Effie-Lou’s voiceover narration is used as a structural device, a clever and efficient way to stage a one-woman show peppered with amusing visual aids. The main character's hyperawareness of women’s treatment have to be highlighted. The norm is, indeed, reversed. As Effie-Lou astutely puts into words in what can only be called the pinnacle of the show: “having a vagina doesn’t make you a feminist”.

The Stage

Co-writers Naomi Westerman, Catherine O’Shea, and Jennifer Cerys achieve something quite neat [...] in a show bursting with good ideas.

BroadwayWorld

Clever and engaging script [which] displays plenty of interesting ideas, and is certainly creative in its concept. It shows that it's possible to gender-swap the iconic genre and define the main character by her femininity. Little but Fierce and Paperclip Theatre have a bright future ahead.

Aspen Reviews

A sparky and evidently well-researched script [with] an unmissable contemporary relevance. The laughs were the loudest and the play at its best when the audience were being directly engaged by Foster, moments that allowed the audience to be more intimately included in Effie’s one-women mission. Overall, it is an hour of feminist infused fun.

The it turns out extremely friendly Bronx teenagers helped knock my handbag to the ground, albeit laughing at me, which is fair. But still the tiny thief refused to yield. He's smelled chocolate and would not give up his trophy. Alas the zipper gap was just big enough for his own body, not enough for a bag of Wal*Mart's finest Reeses' peanut butter cups.

Again and again we battled, until finally we managed together to open the zipper. Wallet keys and 15 lipbalms scattered, but all I could see was a fluffy tail bouncing up and down into the distance, bearing an orange bag larger than its owner.

Now, back in London, I feed the squirrels in the park next to my building, so tame they politely wait in circles around me and gentle take cashew nuts directly from my hand. One even knows how to walk on his hind legs.

Telling this story to a group of Americans recently, exclaiming at the difference between American and British squirrels, on Louisiana native remarked, "Yeah, we have some ratchet-ass squ'alls in America."

Ratchet Ass Squ'alls is my band name.

bottom of page