Theatre / feminism
Review: Two Man Show, Circomedia
The lights come up on Abbi and Helen (for they are RashDash) plus musician Becky, who sing a capella harmony beautifully, dressed in long shimmering golden polyester robes nicked from Sun Ra, Bowie, Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra and early-generation Star Trek aliens.
But that singing and shimmering is all a bit too pretty and sweet, so it’s abruptly abandoned in favour of a potted history of Neolithic Man delivered on mics that distort their voices into tinny, high-pitched-girly ones: “They were hunter-gatherers who hunted and gathered, and women were high priestesses until men took over – men are necessary for making babies.” Followed by some amusingly gruesome (watch grown men wince!) descriptions of primitive agrarian castration techniques. So far, so good.
But then Abbi and Helen morph into John and Dan, and we’re suddenly in a realistic drama about two brothers who have a dying father but not much else in common. It seems to be about how men are incapable of communicating emotionally with each other, but it’s so naturalistic yet full of soap-style subtext that the stylistic break is confusing.
is needed now More than ever
This and top pics: The Other Richard / info@theotherrichard.com
And simplistic, because actually, wasn’t it men – Freud, Jung, R.D. Laing & co – who invented an emotional vocabulary for us to communicate with in the first place? (Women must have been too busy washing up to invent psychology, after having invented fire, water and pottery: an early mistake, I feel.)
And then there’s a send-up of the female form as Classical sculpting material, and some expressive dance – the costumes for that bit are fun too because there aren’t any, and so it’s (a) pleasing to see strong naked women with no vanity or self-consciousness flinging themselves and each other about, and (b) good to see that pubic hair is not completely extinct.
Pic: Richard Davenport / richard@rwdavenport.co.uk
But snatches of the mystifying John and Dan soap keep playing in between. And despite a wonderfully blistering end-rant from Abbi (when Helen snatches the mic away from her in mid-flow, she whines: “oh no, I was having such fun, I’m always being CURBED!”, which is the history of the patriarchy v. women in a nutshell), I’m left feeling that this is more like a partially developed scratch than a touring show that delivers on its promise of a radical feminist company “making an unabashed show about gender and language, masculinity and patriarchy, but the words that exist aren’t good enough, so there’s music and dance too”.
RashDash could transcend their own get-out clause here if they wanted to, but then their material would have to do more than ‘crackle with punk rock energy’ (Time Out). They’d have to get someone in to challenge them every step of the way in the making process by asking, ‘why this bit?’ and ‘words?’
Or are they (and their audience) just having a post-modernist, post-punk, post-feminist laugh? It seems a bit of an easy (or uneasy) laugh to have when post-patriarchy is nowhere in sight.
Two Man Show continues at Circomedia until xx as part of Tobacco Factory Theatres’ BEYOND offsite season. For more info, visit www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com/shows/two-man-show
Read more: Preview: Heather, Tobacco Factory Theatres
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