Why aren’t women angrier? What would happen if their rage started to bubble and boil – if they stopped smiling and being good girls and started taking direct action?
For the woman at the heart of Julia Taudevin’s extraordinary, galvanising piece of gig theatre, her whole life has been leading to one moment and a particular place: the 17th floor of one of those phallic-shaped corporate buildings that reach up into the sky. This woman has 500lb of dynamite in her bra and she’s going to blow the patriarchy sky-high in order to “wake us not hurt us”.
This year the Edinburgh fringe has been full of the sound of women re-imagining their place in the world, questioning male structures and why they persist. In shows such as Hot Brown Honey, they have done so through music and subversive humour. None has been quite as electrifying as Taudevin’s collaboration with the musicians Kim Moore (formerly of Zoey Van Goey) and Susan Bear and Julie Eisenstein (both from Tuff Love).
This is a dynamite hour of sexual politics embedded in a gig format, in which the melodies and fierce chords tell their own stories as they mingle with Taudevin’s words. It creates an experience that has the pulsating energy of a blood vessel about to burst.
At its centre is the unnamed, ordinary woman. Since she was tiny, she was told that she was a sugar plum who had every possible opportunity, but as she grew up, she found her world contracting, just as the fields at the bottom of her childhood home were gobbled up by developers before she was old enough to enjoy their freedom. A woman who finds herself taking all the expected steps through life and working for a corporation whitewashing their image. But no longer. When a man puts his boot into her face and rearranges her nose, something has got to blow.
Blow Off takes its inspiration from the actions and writings of the 1980s Canadian anarchist activists Ann Hansen and Julie Belmas, who firebombed targeted sites selling pornography and producing weapons of mass destruction. Taudevin also makes the connection between patriarchy and capitalism in a piece that, for all its noise, has a quiet thoughtfulness as it considers whether extremists are not born but made, and whether direct action is justified if you ensure that nobody gets hurt.
Taudevin fronts up the band with grace and is a mesmerising presence in 70 minutes of hit-and-run theatre that made me think of Antigone and which has the concentrated power of a Greek tragedy – albeit one in exhilarating musical form.
- At Dundee Rep on 20 September (box office: 01382 223530) and the Traverse, Edinburgh, on 12 and 13 October (box office: 0131-228 1404). Then touring.
