WOman | WOmen
Using Greek theatre as a jumping off point to explore feminism has been en vogue within the Meanjin scene as of late - it's a device that many use, and I have found myself wary when approaching work of this description. It’s hard to do, and even harder to do well. WOman, however, completely blindsided me with how raw, aggressive, and just plain staunch it was - this is a modern Medea done right.
WOman is a work that feels like a collation of the various interests of its creative team. This is not a critique - despite the mosaic-like nature of its contents, WOman feels incredibly cohesive, flowing confidently from spoken word to movement work to straightforward statistics. The works devising nature shines through here, with these disparate elements feeling natural when presented alongside each other. Opening with descriptions of feminine rage as answered by the internet, WOman starts angry and ends furious.
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A particularly memorable sequence involved one performer taking on a masculinised character and commanding their fellow cast as if they were dogs - “Sit, speak, come.” This sort of brash, in-your-face metaphor feels straight out of the 90’s, evoking Kathleen Hanna’s work with Bikini Kill. Perhaps the most apt description I could give to the work is that it is theatre by way of riot grrrl - punchy, witty, and cruel, but with a true sense of camaraderie and sisterhood behind it. On this note, I cannot commend the writer-performers behind WOman enough for their performances - intimate is a buzzword within theatre reviews, and one I am guilty of using frequently, but there is no other way for me to describe my experience as an audience member. Each performance felt real, and I can only assume that much of the text comes from the lived experiences of its writers - this is one of the few times I’ve felt truly seen by a piece of theatre. The complexities of loving one's mother while also feeling looked down upon by her for not ‘succeeding’ at womanhood; the fear of waiting at a bus stop for a friend while a male stranger forces you to talk to him; the madonna-whore complex of existing as a woman with sexual agency - all of these are things that I, and no doubt much of the audience, have experienced many times before, and WOman deftly executes its depictions of these experiences.
WOman has no interest in unpacking, intellectualising, or deconstructing what it shows to you, and that is as much a point in its favour as anything else - it exists as a raw and unfiltered expression of the feminine rage of the artists behind it. In watching WOman, I’m reminded of writers like Caryl Churchill and Alice Birch - women who watch the animosity of the patriarchal world around them and rightfully respond in kind. The work feels youthful, holding an earnestness and vitriol that seems to be lost by many artists as they age, and that might be my favourite thing about it. Having emerged from Vena Cava’s Fresh Blood Festival and running at a brisk 20 minutes, WOman feels like the stepping stone to something greater and more extensively developed in the near future, with its most recent run at Backbone Festival best characterised by the tagline of the festival itself - “The world is yours too”. The creatives behind WOman are the faces of the future of Meanjin theatre, the world belongs to them, and I cannot wait to watch where they go from here.
