Female frustration ... Olivia Williams (Kitty) and Anne Reid (June) in Happy Now? Photograph: Tristram Kenton
It's sometimes said that feminism is having a hard time of it at the moment: from so-called raunch culture, to the objectification of women's bodies in magazines likes Nuts and Zoo, and the attempted attacks on abortion rights. And what's theatre's response to this? Well, generally fairly uninspiring.
Lucinda Coxon's Happy Now? was widely touted as a play written by a young woman, directed by one of the most exciting young directors in the country, with a starring role for a talented actress, and yet its exploration of 21st-century womanhood didn't extend much further than the overly familiar territory of finding happiness in the fraught balance between work and family. And while Katie Mitchell's staggering production of Attempts on Her Life acutely deconstructed the manipulation of female identity, it was greeted with a wall of patronising misogynistic bluster that she should dare mess about with Martin Crimp's play.
However there are, reassuringly, some places where it appears that an overtly feminist politics is making a theatrical resurgence. At the greenroom in Manchester recently, the artist Nic Green presented the astounding first part of her Trilogy to standing ovations. The piece, the finale of which Lyn Gardner described as "a brilliantly revealing and empowering few minutes that cheekily subverts the objectification of women's bodies", is rare in the gorgeously open way in which it wears its feminist heart lightly on its sleeve. It has a refreshing, wicked humour to it that belies the erroneous notion that feminism instantly renders you a killjoy.
The same could undoubtedly be said of the Clod Ensemble's Red Ladies, currently at the ICA for a fleeting couple of nights. Decked out in black trenchcoats, dark sunglasses and striking scarlet headscarves, 20 or so women parade across the empty black space - these are the red ladies. Strutting around with a knowingly chic militancy (like a cross between Yves Saint-Laurent and the Red Army), the Red Ladies are a gorgeous enigma; as one actor utters into the mic, "I'm not what you think I am. Whatever you think I am, I'm not that."
The show defines itself through this slippage between definitions. Catwalk strut becomes a military march, a dance becomes a spasm of suffocating frustration, a reading circle becomes a prison of silence and, most magnificently of all, a recipe is transformed into a rousing call-to-arms as electronic bleeps thunder behind it and the Red Ladies rush breathlessly back and forth across the stage. It's at these moments of absurd chaos that the show is at its most brilliantly powerful; at once angry, funny, defiant and euphoric.
There are of course other examples of where a healthy, vibrant theatrical feminism is to be found. Please feel free to share pieces of which we should be aware.
