I have often felt glum about International Women’s Day: it is such an othering notion that we/they need to be celebrated as if we were an event on the brink of oblivion, like an armistice. Yet it’s a salutary reminder of how far there is to go – and often provokes good stuff, off and on stage.
The Old Vic has seized the opportunity to put some sharply varied female monologues online. Two new commissions, Aisha (The Black Album) and Putting a Face On, can be seen from 10am tomorrow. Last week the theatre reran four monologues from One Hand Tied Behind Us – a series, curated by Maxine Peake, staged and recorded in 2018 to mark the pathetically short 100 years that women have been permitted to vote in Britain.
Peake’s own play, Contactless, takes a fierce look at women in prison. Siobhán McSweeney does not move from her chair, but her jiggling left leg sends an added tremor of tension through her speech. On the day of her release she is “underwhelmed and anxious”, stunned by what happened: set up by bosses who were fiddling the books, sent down for four years, in which time she has lost home and lover, and been told by strangers that prisoners lead the life of Riley (“who’s he?”). Though the audience greets every defiant curse with titters, the story is desolating – and credible.
Ella Hickson’s Betsy has no immediate argument: it is a sinuous exploration of feeling trapped and thinking of escape. In Anna and The Writer, Hickson demanded acute attention with ingenious surprises. Betsy, though less formally startling, is piercing. Jill Halfpenny – bare feet, forceful but seemingly effortless – looks back on crucial days. Patronised at work, anguished by her desperate, impoverished sister and by misery in the streets, she glimpses happiness with a woman. When should she put up barriers, and when allow herself to be invaded by others? Questions that aren’t restricted to women, but which have pressed on them with particular pain.
Available to stream on the Old Vic’s YouTube channel until the end of March
