Joanna Murray-Smith’s new comedy is hardly a testament to sisterhood. It’s a controversial riff on the media-saturated life of fellow antipodean Germaine Greer. In it, ageing feminist Margot Mason is handcuffed to her own desk by crazed fan Molly. As she gnaws her gag, several other victims of her theories (including her housewife daughter, and a random taxi-driver whose wife has dumped him) are propelled by the laws of improbability through her French windows. Is Margot responsible for their pain? Was Molly’s birth mother really driven to suicide by Margot’s hit polemic ‘The Cerebral Vagina’? And will anyone stop monologuing long enough to shoot Margot, their hated sacred cow?
Under farce rules you can make a mockery of anything as long as you make people laugh. And this does – thanks to some sublimely ridiculous acting. Sophie Thompson is agonisingly funny as Margot’s daughter Tess, a bedraggled hippie mother, mad with exhaustion and on the run from her three young kids. Paul Chahidi is husband Bryan, the kind of pacifist, pinny-wearing, high-earning respecter of women who, so the argument goes, is the feminist dream but not, alas, the feminine wet dream.
Director Roger Michell keeps all the balls in the air with admirable dexterity. And Murray-Smith’s repartee comes rude, sharp and fast enough to make up for the fact that her characters are rooted in cliché. Her play is also reactionary, trivial and increasingly silly – though none of that should prevent it from being a West End smash hit. It is a shame that Margot, the most substantial character, is gagged, bound and sidelined to allow the others to gambol improbably towards new alliances. The play, like the gun that gets tossed from person to person in the climax, takes aim at a lot of shifting targets (New Men, Old Women, mothers, me-culture – even consumerism). It’s fun, but it takes a lot more random pot-shots than the caricatured version of ’70s feminism that it’s taking the piss out of.
i saw this production yesterday afternoon and ir was absolutelly brilliant. Well done to all the Cast. Very well produced and i laughed from beginning to end. Shame the rest of the Audience didnt find it so funny
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i saw this production yesterday afternoon and ir was absolutelly brilliant. Well done to all the Cast. Very well produced and i laughed from beginning to end. Shame the rest of the Audience didnt find it so funny