Women’s stories rule the roost
Edinburgh Festival What Girls Are Made Of Traverse ★★★★★ Ulster American Traverse ★★★★★
+ Meek; The Greatest Play in the History of the World…; On the Exhale
There’s nothing in the theatre calendar that quite matches the sudden explosion of work at the Traverse – Scotland’s only subsidised venue devoted to new writing – in early August. It hands London-based critics an urgent summons to head north and get a sniff of what’s occurring across the border. But it also acts as an invaluable guide to the state of play more generally, the mood of the moment.
Orla O’loughlin – who’s bowing out as artistic director after seven years – has shown an increasing knack for allowing the voice of each playwright to resonate while creating a composite sense of chorus.
Last year, she put gender fluidity and the “non-binary” centre-stage. This year, there’s an unmistakable emphasis on women’s stories, and that’s encapsulated by What Girls Are
Made Of, the undisputable hit of the programme, which is directed by O’loughlin herself.
This is an electrifying account, written and performed by Cora Bissett (a repeat-achiever at the Fringe), of her teenage days as a Nineties rock contender. It might sound like a vanity exercise, but as this radiant fortysomething relives youthful hopes and crushed dreams, you not only get a blast of entertaining reminiscence – interspersed with live, loud punctuations of pastiched period pop and the punkishly noisy efforts of her own band, Darlingheart, – but a front-line account of how nefarious the music industry could (can still?) be. The personal becomes political, widening into a timely overview of who exactly wields the power.
Initially, it’s the stuff of fairytales: the wide-eyed schoolgirl from Glenrothes, Fife, who landed one of the biggest record deals in Scottish music history and got to support Blur and Radiohead when they were on the up. But it unfolds as a heart-stopping cautionary tale: a debut album trashed by a vicious review in the NME, all the money gone, the manager vanished, the band dumped, Bissett (whose parents didn’t check the small-print) liable to resolve the issue. Rather like the rollercoaster ride of adolescence itself, there are jump-for-joy moments, and episodes, particularly her desolation after that debacle and later struggle to have a child, that will have you fighting back the tears. And it ends on the kind of euphoric, empowered, hard-won high that makes you want to wear the T-shirt, read the book, see the film of it all.
A comparable story of a woman struggling to cleave to her vision of what she wants, resisting nefarious masculine pressures, can be found in
Ulster American, though David Ireland’s aim is the opposite of earnest engagement. Having caused a stir at the Royal Court in 2016 with Cyprus Avenue – in which a Belfast loyalist becomes convinced that his granddaughter has the face of Gerry Adams – the Northern Irish playwright confirms his status as a theatrical shock-jock.
The comic premise is simple, with hints of Mamet’s Speed-the-plow: a Hollywood star (played with riproaring obnoxiousness by Darrell D’silva) has committed to a West End play without realising that it’s not, as this Irish Catholic descendant supposed, on the side of the “Fenians” (a word he can’t pronounce). Cue a hotel-room battle with the indignant Northern Irish author (Lucianne Mcevoy) on the eve of rehearsals, with the hysterical English director (Robert Jack) trying to smooth things over by, among other things, reframing Northern Ireland as, effectively, Ireland. If I tell you that one outrageous early line runs: “I’m not for one minute justifying violence against women, but if you did wish to justify it, it can be done”, you’ll have some inkling of its tactical toxicity.
Every minute, you’re caught between gasps, guilty guffaws and the urge to storm out.
Elsewhere in the Traverse programme, there are let-downs. I was left underwhelmed by Penelope Skinner’s contrived Meek, in which an incarcerated young woman faces the death penalty in a dystopian Christian fundamentalist state for performing a song alleged to show hatred of the Holy Spirit.
I was take it or leave it, too, about The Greatest Play in the History of the World…, a garrulous, convoluted, overly cosy monologue written by Ian Kershaw and performed to the affable hilt by (his wife) Julie Hesmondhalgh about two across-the-road loners who form a bond in the strange dead of a mid-december night.
Near-misses also include On the Exhale, Martin Zimmerman’s topical, slightly too twisty and impersonally rendered portrait of an American mom (working at a high school) who’s sent, grief-stricken, into a dangerous obsession with guns and those who facilitate gun-ownership after an elementary-school shooter rampage modelled on the Sandy Hook massacre. Taken all together, though, these plays provide a historically valuable sense that in 2018 women’s stories are ruling the roost.