In the opening number of Glittery Clittery, a raucous, progressive cabaret by Fringe Wives Club, we’re told exactly what to expect. “It’s a motherfucking party, but it’s also educational.”
In sequinned jumpsuits with vulvas on the shoulders, Laura Frew, Rowena Huston and Tessa Waters lead us in hour of anti-patriarchal catharsis. Through a series of songs and skits, including a game-show where ‘vulva’ is always the word of the day, the subject is clear: celebration of female power.
There’s a collective uplift of women here, and the Club tackle everything from the historical weaponisation of pockets to the casual ways women are denigrated, harassed and abused on a daily basis. There’s even a paeon to a distinctly modern problem: the ‘feminist fuckboi’. This parody of a boy band hit is sharp and on the mark, with lyrics like, “he says that he’s an ally, but not in front of his bros” and “I just respect you too much to date you.”
There’s a lot to like about Glittery Clittery: there’s the witty, gorgeous costumes; Frew’s choreography; and the tightly-scripted but scrappy-feeling performances from Frew, Hutson and Waters. Claire Bartholomew directs the show so it feels like it has a twinkle in its eye and a weapon in its hand: it’s coming for you, men – but mostly in fun. It’s a good and comfortable space for its most likely audience members, particularly cis straight women, who quite rightly crave spaces to let down their collective guards in a world designed to devalue them.
But for a self-billed feminist cabaret in 2019, it feels a little limited in its reliance on the assumption that women generally have vaginas; there’s a welcome to audience members that have transcended the gender binary, and a joking, mis-pitched song lyric that assures us “you can have a dick, just don’t be a dick,” but in an era where TERFs (trans-exclusionary ‘radical feminists’) are gaining audiences and followers by the day, it feels discomfiting to not make space in a feminist show for the different bodies of different women, or to uphold anatomy as the symbol of defiant – or divine – womanhood.
Still, we are all in different stages of feminist discovery and patriarchal de-conditioning; for anyone in the audience, cis or queer or straight, there’s a lot to learn from Glittery Clittery if you’re not deeply entrenched in feminist talking points. And for a lot of people, after consuming the metric tonnes of mainstream media and entertainment that abuses and mistreats women, seeing a show where the feminine is celebrated is a collective sigh of relief; an uncomplicated pleasure.