Australian playwright Joanna
Murray-Smith writes with intelligence and insight about personal,
domestic and gender relationships; this West End opening reunites
director Roger Michell and actors Eileen Atkins and Anna Maxwell Martin
from the NT’s 2003 production of her play
Honour. Perhaps she has become
impatient with a growing but still limited amount of respect, and gone
for critical and commercial broke with this controversial farce. The
thing is, it deserves to pay off on both fronts.
The Female Of The Species
concerns an old-school feminist author/academic/icon who is held
prisoner in her house by a maddened student. Murray-Smith is at pains
to deny that her Margot Mason is intended to be Germaine Greer, who
suffered a similar incident in 2000. However, Mason occupies the same
place in her world that Greer does in ours, her book
The Cerebral Vagina is as
celebrated as
The Female Eunuch,
and she even uses a number of Greer-like rhetorical locutions; all that
is missing from Atkins’ wonderful central performance is an
Anglo-Melbourne accent. Even when Maxwell Martin’s apologetically
deranged student Molly pulls a gun, handcuffs and gags her, nothing can
stop her. But this basic situation would quickly pall, so additional
characters are periodically thrown in: Margot’s daughter,
her husband, a taxi driver and
finally her publisher. Each gets to blow their own solo on social and
gender roles before joining in with the combo.
In some respects, the play feels like Ben Elton with brains: it proves
periodically unable to resist a crass gag like malapropising
“Toblerone” for “testosterone”. Mostly, though, it’s a sharp satire of
some of the extremities proclaimed in feminism’s name and some of the
self-aggrandising proclaimers. It strikes me as the kind of play which
that one-trick pony Yasmina Reza would love to be able to write (an
impression perhaps aided by an elegant set from Reza’s usual London
designer Mark Thompson). Sophie Thompson as daughter Tess gets a
classic farce moment, about to bop Molly on the head from behind just
as the latter asks Margot to recap on “what is it about your daughter
that you find so mediocre?” Paul Chahidi, Sam Kelly and the excellent
Con O’Neill add the requisite amounts of Toblerone. I don’t wonder that
Greer (who has apparently neither seen nor read the play) feels
aggrieved: this is a confection. But, at the risk of seeming an
instrument of the patriarchy, it’s a marvellous confection.
Written for the Financial
Times.