Hot Desk Extract: WRETCH BETCH

As part of the Wheeler Centre’s Hot Desk Fellowship programme, Diane Vu worked on a mini-series. WRETCH BETCH is a 6 x 30 min traumedy based off Diane’s experience regaining her sanity after leaving her abusive partner.

The series follows ALISA (30), a self-righteous feminist with a problem: she’s a dirty, dirty hypocrite whose dopamine addiction is male validation. She’s just broken up with her abusive boyfriend EWAN (36), for the seventh and final time, and is on a journey to getting hot, getting healed and getting out of her mum’s house.  

We follow Alisa’s torturously clumsy process of waking up from the fog of being gaslit, whilst also fighting the desperate urge to go back.

Everything is pitted against her. Her love addiction withdrawals, the judgemental police on their third domestic violence statement for the day, her well-meaning but unhinged Vietnamese family and the state of Tinder in her thirties. Everything is pitted against her. 

WRETCH BETCH does away with the idea of the quivering victim and monstrous abuser to instead show the more painful truth of what it’s like to be an IMPERFECT VICTIM in love with a charming but deeply insecure man. 

This excerpt is ACT ONE of the pilot.