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with pressure. The audience cheer when both women are finally in their balloons, in a way that would certainly suggest so. Dressed in swimsuits and hats, performers Annie Hägg and Nikita Lebedev are told by Roxanna Kadyrova how to ‘inflate’ themselves. As their athletic bodies turn into other-worldly, alien shapes within the balloons, their tortoise-like heads popping out of the top, they playfully subvert how we might expect a woman to look.
My dad thinks it’s about office culture; I think it’s about feminism; the programme says it’s about language. If you need further explanation, creator Blair Simmons made it as part of her New York University Dramatic Literature degree as an interpretation of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories in Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. But, really, this is the kind of show that can be whatever you want it to be. “Logic is the only impossible reason”, says a piece of paper left on a seat at the end. SALLY STOTT
0 Bursting balloons as a feminist analogy? You decide. period was never so fierce. DAVID POLLOCK Oxford graduates. The three performers, Emma Brand, Luke Haworth and Luke Rollason appear on stage in restrictive whalebone corsets, like those which confined women for centuries.
Taking as a starting point Nabokov’s unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, the show opens up, using movement, puppetry and talking underwear, to look at fashion, the pressures put on women about body image, and the pressures women continue to put on ourselves.
More like a series of sketches or vignettes than a single narrative, the show picks up on ironies such as 1950s advertisements to help women gain weight, and therefore curves, through to modern-day celebrities who use implants and surgery to sculpt themselves a body.
While they are interesting points to make, they don’t really tell us anything very new. The idea of a woman who sets out to erase herself one piece at a time in order to regain control of her image and her body is a much fresher idea but that doesn’t appear until well through the play, and isn’t fully explored. SUSAN MANSFIELD The French call it “jeu d’esprit”, game of wit, and it’s the only name that fits Helen Norton and Jonathan White’s beautifully presented but inconsequential satirical take on two of the most intensely respectable characters in drama. They are the governess Miss Prism, and the country parson Canon Chasuble, from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest; and in a brief hour, Norton and White proceed to take their apparently impeccable characters apart, revealing them as chancers with secret lives and dodgy money-making scams.
Helen Norton is particularly impressive as a stately, bombazine-swathed Miss Prism, the very picture of respectability (as Wilde himself remarked) until offered a chance to blackmail the poor canon into marriage; Jonathan White offers heroic support, on a charming pocket-sized Edwardian set by Maree Kearns, all potted palms and elegant writing-desk.
And if the reason why they do it remains obscure – so much effort, for such a simple joke at the expense of Edwardian society – it’s hard not to feel that Oscar himself would have been delighted to know that his characters are still inspiring such harmless merriment, more than 100 years on. JOYCE MCMILLAN thespace on the Mile (Venue 39) JJ When she was 18, the 17thcentury painter Artemisia Gentileschi was raped by her father’s friend. The ensuing trial was the first rape trial ever to be fully documented.
In Joan Greening’s play, a middle-aged Artemisia (Julia Munrow) is visited by Tuzia (Julia Rufey), the one-time friend she believed could have protected her. There’s a wealth of interesting material here, both in the trial documentation and in Artemisia’s paintings, but as the women snipe and bicker, accuse and counter-accuse, we are in danger of losing interest in both characters. SUSAN MANSFIELD