Anonymous Is a Woman is a new all-female company dedicated to telling women’s unheard stories, and who, this month, are curating a festival called Women in the West End, featuring comedy, cabaret and Jane Austen with a twist. The flagship show is inspired by Robert Radcliffe’s novel Across the Blood-Red Skies, and gives us a glimpse into the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, known today as FANY (Princess Royal’s Volunteer Corps). This independent volunteer corps was established in 1907 and, despite opposition, played an active frontline role during the first world war, driving wounded men from the battlefields to casualty clearing stations and hospitals. The FANY remains the UK’s only remaining all-women military unit, though is not part of the army.
This rough and ready show is more interesting as social history than as theatre, but has an exuberant charm. It tells the stories of four women brought together by war and discovering themselves and each other under the command of Evadne Bruton (Henri Merriam), nicknamed the Brute. There is a boarding-school-romp flavour to the show, though the japes become less jolly amid the stench of gangrene and the German bombing. Because the women had to pay for their vehicles, uniforms and living expenses, most were from moneyed families, a point that’s underexploited dramatically when Stella Taylor’s working-class Emily joins the corps.
The quartet of women are not all equally well drawn (although Madeleine Gould’s Fortnum’s heiress is a joy), and some stories are underdeveloped. Stronger connections could be made between the suffrage movement and these women, resented by male generals yet daily doing a job that required physical strength, mechanical skills and leonine courage. But for all its soapiness and lack of polish there’s something heartfelt and appealing about a show that excavates these women’s stories with such spirit and invention.
• At Arts theatre, London, until 2 April. Box office: 020-7836 8463.
