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Mischief making

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 30th July 2008

The Female of the Species
Vaudeville

Hangover Square
Finborough

The Frontline
Shakespeare's Globe

A first-class Aussie bitch-fight has erupted over a new West End comedy. Joanna Murray-Smith’s satire opens with a famous feminist author, Margot Mason, being held at gunpoint by a deluded fan and forced to explain the contradictions in her work. Margot Mason is of course Germaine Greer, who suffered a similar ordeal at the hands of a former pupil a few years ago. Greer is said to be furious about the play. The bad news for her is that it’s an absolute hoot. Murray-Smith, who is also Australian, has had the sense to portray Mason sympathetically as a wry, brave, charismatic and witty intellectual with the forgivable flaws of egoism and insensitivity. She’s surrounded by comic caricatures, the best of which is her daughter, played with show-stopping aplomb by Sophie Thompson, who stumbles in on the abduction and instead of rescuing her mother takes the side of the gunwoman and encourages her to shoot.

The daughter’s husband then arrives having discovered their three children abandoned at home and he’s followed — in a credibility-defying plot twist — by a hairy Scouse taxi driver who wants to become a New Man. This unlikely crew of misfits set about debating the failures and moral illogicalities of feminism. Improbable set-up maybe, but the cast are superb and so are the gags. Mason boasts about her daughter’s glamorous upbringing: ‘Jacques Derrida fed her her first solids. He broke up a rusk and fed her the pieces in the wrong order.’ Purists have grumbled about minor technical faults, but who cares? The play is an inspired piece of mischief. A slapstick comedy with intellectual muscle, a farce that’s also a detailed analysis of feminism, and a drawing-room comedy that illustrates the greatest disappointment of the women’s movement. Women set out to free themselves from the prison of men’s expectations and ended up building the new prison of women’s expectations. This show will win prizes. One drawback is the moral quandary created by its origins.

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