The farce of feminism

The Female of the Species, Vaudeville Theatre
****

The first twenty mintues of The Female of the Species suggest that we’re in for a disappointment.

Eileen Atkins and Anna Maxwell Martin, two fantastic actors, appear under utilised in the two-dimensional characters of Margot and Molly.

Margot, obviously inspired by academic Germaine Greer, is a self obsessed feminist writer, who thinks that the world revolves around her. Molly is an archetypal geeky student, rucksack on both shoulders, with a West Country drawl. She blames the death of her mother on Margot and holds her at gun point.

Atkins and Maxwell Martin are restrained by the sterotypes, and the jokes are a bit obvious and clunky. For example, Greer’s The Female Eunuch is substituted with The Cerebral Vagina.

But then Sophie Thompson appears on stage, as Margot’s daughter Tess. Initially, she seems only to be a cypher for the anti-feminist viewpoint: a harrassed wife and mother, everything her mother despises.

But very quickly, Thompson shifts the comedy up a gear. After encouraging Molly to pull the trigger on her mother, she launches into an exhausted and hysterical rant about dealing with the children. Who is God? Where do Pokemen go on holiday? The audience spontaneously applaud her at the end of it.

From this point on, the play is massively entertaining. The arrival of each new character adds to the farce, and the writing and delivery is exceptional. The next entrant is Tess’ husband Bryan – he’s a businessman but also a “new man”, sensitive and apron-wearing. He’s followed by a butch taxi driver who has been attempting to be communicative and caring, but is desperate to show his manly side again.

Yes, credibility is strained. Would Molly’s mother really be driven to suicide because of following Margot’s feminist teachings? (She apparently dies clutching a copy of The Cerebral Vagina). The talented actors aren’t going to be stretched to the limit of their capabilities. And the play’s not going to win any awards for offering the revelation that sometimes women prefer a bit of rough.

But who cares when it’s this much fun?

Sensitive handling

A while ago I read an interview with Geri Halliwell in the Metro. She had just published her series of Ugenia Lavender children’s books and answered some questions about her love of reading.

Then came this question:

“Can you identify with John Prescott? You’re both high-profile bulimics”.

Right.

Firstly, being compared with John Prescott isn’t hugely flattering. By lumping Halliwell and Prescott into the same category, the journalist is getting a cheap laugh from the unusual combination.

Secondly, does this encourage people to be honest about sensitive problems such as eating disorders? To know that if you talk about it, you may be ridiculed.

I can imagine a young girl reading that interview and deciding to keep quiet about her eating disorder — even if she has the comfort of knowing she would only be a “low-profile bulimic”.

There are so many reasons for people not to reveal their problems. Journalists shouldn’t add to them for the sake of a cheap laugh.

Completely lost

Lost Highway, the Young Vic
*

The David Lynch film is confusing but it’s a walk in the park compared to this stage production of Lost Highway.

The set designed by Riccardo Hernandez is atmospheric and very cool. A long runway intersects the studio floor, with a perspex box suspended above it; similar to David Blane’s box above the Thames when he went for 40 days without food (possibly a more enjoyable experience).

The story is surreal. Vamp 1 (Valérie MacCarthy as Renee, wearing a red wig) is murdered and Fred the saxophonist (Mark Bonnar) gets arrested and put on death row. While in prison he gets a headache and turns into a car mechanic (Quirijn de Lang). The car mechanic is then released from jail as he’s clearly not Fred. He meets and falls in lust with Vamp 2 (Valérie MacCarthy as Alice, wearing a blonde wig); unfortunately she is already going steady with the terrifyingly weird Mr Eddy (David Moss in a fantastic performance, full of screeching and talking in tongues).

The cycle of rebirth and who-killed-who is potentially fascinating, the mystery hovering over it like a fog. But the mystery gets lost in a smog of pretention.

The multimedia experience is a good example of this. Two large screens present cliched images of sex: writhing and heaving bodies punctuated by moaning “oh oh ohs”.

On a more practical note, Lost Highway is billed as an opera but there is very little singing. 40 minutes go by before anyone sings and when they finally do, you wish they hadn’t. The powerful voices of the cast are trapped by terrible lyrics: singing “OK” or “Would you like to go to dinner?” in an operatic way, doesn’t work unless it’s designed to be funny.

A quick glance across the auditorium revealed expressions of confusion and several pockets of poorly supressed hysteria.

I don’t like to be too dismissive as experimenting is a vital part of developing exciting work; and Olga Neuwirth, the composer, is certainly avante garde. I am sure some audience members emerged feeling it was an overwhelmingly creative experience. But I don’t think anyone could persuade me that it wasn’t pretentious and boring.

It was rescued only by good performances and the inevitable car that comes sliding along the runway at the end.

I don’t know about the highway being lost: I was though.

Randomly brilliant

Random, Royal Court
****

Random is just fifty minutes long. But who needs more time when you can fit this much in?

The performance alone by Nadine Marshall is unbelievably good, deserving of some Best Actress nominations.

As she stands alone on the Jerwood Theatre stage, in semi darkness, all eyes are on her. Marshall holds the attention and imagination for the entire piece, bringing to life playwright’s Debbie Tucker Green’s four key characters – a mother, father, daughter and son – and an array of peripheral characters.

Each is created with clarity and perfect intonation, the personalities all distinct. The mother is steeped in Carribean tradition, dad is a man of few words, the sister is bright, funny, unfulfilled by her boring job with her colleagues “chatting their shit”, and the son is a teenager, skirting around the edges of getting into trouble. It is easy to become completely engrossed and convinced by the dialogue between them.

The series of beautifully observed relationships transform dramatically into a tragedy, when the son is killed in a gang attack.

And this is what lets the play down. Although the tragic climax is powerful, it occurs too early and Marshall has to maintain the grief and pain for too long. The authentic detailed observations of the characters are replaced with wider brushstrokes, descriptions of mourning around the scene of the crime, the policemen breaking the news, viewing the dead body. There is a danger of reaching saturation point with tragedy, where the audience becomes overwhelmed rather than empathetic.

Most of all, the death is narrated only by the sister and I missed the lightness and technical brilliance of the first half, where Marshall switched between characters.

Random is funny, lyrical, moving and dominated by a startlingly good performance by Marshall. But if the tragic climax had come just a bit later, and Tucker Green had reintroduced some of the deftness from the first scenes, the play would have gone from brilliant into unmissable.

Mentally ill: physically fine

Insane in the Brain, Peacock Theatre
****

There’s not much room for examination of the mental state in Insane in the Brain, a street dance version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

But that’s because it’s all about the body. The skill and energy of Bounce, a Swedish dance company, is breathtaking. The angular and unpredicatable moves of street dance (performed to a soundtrack that includes Missy Elliot and Cypress Hill) create an impressive physical representation of the mind in disarray.

The inventive opening scene sets the tone for the rest of the show. On an eerily lit stage, the dancers are dressed in baggy clothes and white masks. When they turn round, there are masks on the other side too and, disorientatingly, you realise you were watching the dancers’ backs.

There are a string of visually stunning sequences. An obsessive compulsive routine is transformed into a complex dance on the hospital beds; bungee jumping performers create a convincing impression of electric shock therapy.

One weak link is Nurse Radcliffe, who is meant to be an iceberg of fear; but the dancer has no chill her presence and her dancing is less impressive than the rest of the cast.

The tragedy at the end of the show is not handled well. It is rushed and, unless you are familiar with the story, it’s not completely clear what has happened.

Dancing is the strength of the cast, so it is lucky that speech is kept to a minimum. When McMurphy arrives at the hospital, the acting is unconvincing. There are no more words after this and there is really no need for it – their bodies do the work of a thousand mouths.

As Ronan Keating says, ”You say it best when you say nothing at all”.

No joy in Troy

The Women of Troy, National Theatre
**

The grief suffered by The Women of Troy is huge: city destroyed, husbands and children murdered, friends raped by the triumphant Greeks. Yet Katie Mitchell’s production fails to deliver the horror and pathos that this should inspire.

Her women are locked in a prison which looks like an underground carpark with cafeteria tables. They are dressed in cocktail dresses and fumble futilely through make-up bags, evidently plucked from a far more salubrious setting. The gap between the high life and rock bottom is a perfect place from which to mine the power of despair.

But Mitchell’s decision to stylise their misery means this opportunity is lost. The chorus of women are reduced to representations of hysteria. They twitch and moan in regular patterns, twirl fabric around fingers, eyes wide with horror: all sterotypes of psychological trauma.

It is an annoying way to present collective shock; but it also means that when the tragedies pile up, it’s a body count instead of an examination of human suffering.

There are moments of beauty. The women drift into ballroom dancing, a ghostly evocation of a previous existence. There is an impressive scene when a woman performs a grotesque parody of the dance, her limbs jerking around in death throes, like a broken string puppet.

There are also scenes when convincing feeling seeps through the stylised surface. Andromache tells Hecuba that her daughter is dead, and the exchange is a quieter and more powerful examination of unbearable grief.

However, these are outnumbered by shouty scenes: the shrieking Cassandra is carted off to marry Agamemnon, stripping off and setting fire to dustbins before she goes. The debate between between Clytemnestra and Helen is not a desperate battle of wits as the script suggests but a brawl, points scored by decibel.

To top it all off, there is an almighty explosion at the end of the play as the prison is blown up. I almost leapt into the lap of the person next to me (which was probably more shocking for her than the explosion). Although spectacular, it was a shock tactic.

But even this explosion could not cut through a relentless tragedy that inspires little sympathy.

Notes on a Scandal vs Predator

Notes on a Scandal
**

I read Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller and loved it, so I was really looking forward to the film version. 

I was disappointed. The performances are fantastic, but the adaptation and direction were less so.

The story is as follows: Sheba (Kate Blanchett), a middle-class art teacher in her thirties, has an affair with a 15 year old male pupil. Barbara (Judi Dench), a school mistress in her sixties, is obsessed with Sheba. When she discovers the affair, she uses it to manipulate Sheba.

The joy of Heller’s book is Barbara. Her narrative voice is creepy and controlling, a spinster with other things on her mind besides Countdown and cats. She slowly manipulates Sheba, winding her into her spider’s web.

But it’s only towards the end of the book that we discover the true extent of Barbara’s malice and repressed sexuality.

From the start, the film sets up Barbara as a villain, a Machiavellian creature motivated primarily by sexual desires — she might as well have a big yellow post-it note on her forehead saying “I am an evil lesbian witch”. Dench does a great job making her sinister and rotten but there’s no room for increased malevolence or character exploration: she shows all her cards at the beginning.

Sheba is not the only object of Barbara’s affections. A former “conquest” took a restraining order out on her and the film ends with Dench on a park bench, attempting to pick up her next victim.

The finer points of Barbara’s character are dissolved in a puddle of toxic poison. Loneliness, grief at the loss of her cat, sharp intelligence, all lose distinction when delivered by a big preying mantis.

There are other problems with the screenplay too. The affair, which constitutes such an important part of the story, is discovered when Barbara sees them getting up to no good in the art room. The build up is unsatisfactorily revealed in flashback. Why not show it as it happens?

The relationship between Sheba and the young pupil is convincing, as is her marriage to her older husband (Bill Nighy, great fun as always). Dench is impressive in the restricted role and Blanchett is fine as the bland Sheba.

But the director, Richard Eyre, tries too hard to make Barbara into a predator, the next big villain.