Three girls. A table. A guy behind a keyboard that isn’t allowed to speak. What appears at first as another artsy student play, fresh out of university actually opens up some amazingly potent truths about women from all different walks of life.
The audience are not simply presented with a story of woe, but an original way of showing the process of a play and the feelings that can appear in an actor or actress when presented with a character they feel a bond with. So we therefore see three actresses exploring their own characters and how or even if they can be their case’s ‘Other’.
The audience is forced to explore presumptions about culture in the Middle East, to a woman in prison and even Heather Mills. While the play doesn’t focus so much on the character, it’s about how to do a real person justice on stage as well as whether it should be done.
The skill of the performers is truly formidable, with violent convulsing mimes and high pace comedy sequences. They applied such a naturalistic approach to their actual selves that they were narrating the process at points, which made the characters they’d created far more contrasting and potent. From subtleties in accent and very small gestures, we were truly shown how a character can become another facet of a performer that can be switched on and off.
The moral of the play, which is a rare thing of late, is not that stereotypes are wrong and hurtful. It’s that the individual is truly important. No ideal from an outside party should govern opinions we have over others. I’d encourage any to see this play, simply for the enlightenment it can conjure.
