Alma Mater is a topical melodrama set on a university campus. The new principal, Jo, (amusingly played by Justine Mitchell) is a radical feminist who recalls the bitter struggles of the 1980s when she strove to put women on an equal footing with men. Her task now is to address the college’s reputation for ‘binge-drinking, partying and casual sex’. To ingratiate herself with the students she makes a speech full of swear words which greatly impresses the first years, apparently. Then a nightmare unfolds. A naive Welsh fresher, Paige, attends a fancy dress party where she’s sexually assaulted by a handsome older student.
Drink was involved. Paige admits that she blacked out during the incident and the accused has no recollection of what happened. Paige, encouraged by a fellow rape victim, writes a blog about her experience and invites others to submit further accusations. Cue a flood of 520 anonymous complaints. The writer, Kendall Feaver, seems unaware that a single crisis is enough for a play and by adding hundreds more she simply blurs the focus. From here the drama starts to get its tentacles into all kinds of themes and issues. There’s a rapist on the loose who murdered a student back in 1986. A gang of drunken rowdies are accused of vandalising an important portrait of a Victorian feminist. Jo’s relationship with her old flame Michael comes under scrutiny when it emerges that he was her tutor during their romance. Does that make him an abuser, too?
Michael has since married the eccentric Leila who gets her kicks by having public sex in Christian places of worship. More storylines spring up like daisies. Jo has to deal with the construction of a ‘new prayer room’ to accommodate the religious fervour of a Malaysian student who calls himself Gerald. And Jo learns about a game in which male students share out the female first-years like sex slaves.
As she investigates Paige’s complaint, she renounces her rad-fem principles and argues that ‘sexual assault’ is too broad a category as it gives equal status to a stolen kiss and a gang rape. That’s a fair point. And she makes a speech comparing the optimistic and combative feminism of the 1980s with the tragic surrenders of the 1990s when ‘ladette’ culture developed. Or did Leila say all that stuff? The two characters are interchangeable. Later, someone delivers a well-researched history lesson about the tax status of British women during the 20th century.
The script is far too stiff and discursive to grip your attention. And the original complaint of sexual assault vanishes beneath the tundra of irrelevant subplots. However, for professors of gender studies and their pupils this show is an unmissable treat. And, if anyone’s interested, there are readings of middle eastern poetry in Farsi and English as well. The show feels like an attempt by the dramatist to discover what she wants to write about. The answer is, she doesn’t know.
Abduction dramas are as old as Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. This version, by Samantha Hurley, concerns the capture of the movie star Tobey Maguire. He wakes up one day and finds himself chained to a pole in the basement of a deranged teenage fan named Shelby. She zaps Tobey with a Taser and asks him to marry her. When he accepts, she squawks and yells with ecstasy and she continues to scream her lines for the duration of this 105-minute horror show. It’s unclear how Tobey wound up in the mad girl’s basement. The actor, Anders Hayward, doesn’t resemble the star very closely. So perhaps it’s all a hoax. Or is it a dream unfolding in Shelby’s deranged imagination?
The ‘Tobey’ character claims that he’s the victim of a random kidnapping. But at times he seems to know Shelby already. Maybe they’re friends engaged in an elaborate a game of role-play. It’s impossible to tell. And the script offers no rewards to anyone who gives it their full attention. The meandering and repetitive action is padded out with dull sketch-routines involving a camp estate agent and other clowns.
At one point, Shelby stops screaming and tries to commit suicide by drinking custard. Later, the Tobey character dons a tatty Spiderman costume and indulges in a spot of ‘audience participation’. This led to a very uncomfortable atmosphere in the stalls. A few play-goers walked out. Perhaps they felt unwell but it’s likely that they feared being picked on by the cast. Bullying the customers is never a wise business practice. The saving grace of this show is that it offers a genuine experience. If you want to know how it feels to be stuck in a room with a screaming psychotic, buy a ticket.
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