Women beware women ... Eileen Atkins (Margot) is threatened with a gun by Anna Maxwell Martin (Molly) in The Female Of The Species. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
From a publicist's point of view, it takes some beating. In the run-up to the opening of The Female of the Species, a play by Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith, originally staged in Melbourne and now on at the Vaudeville Theatre in the West End, Germaine Greer expressed her anger about the staging of a work that was inspired by an incident in her life, when a student broke into her house and held her captive.
Greer's outburst scored the production plenty of media coverage. In an interview with the Sunday Times she labelled Murray-Smith "an insane reactionary" and accused her of holding "feminism in contempt," before asking: "what are they doing putting this play on in the West End of all places?" (It's worth noting she made these statements without having read or seen the play.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, most critics used her outrage as the starting block for their reviews.
Murray-Smith insists that, while the play is inspired by the incident in Greer's life, it is not about Greer: "I certainly didn't want to write a play about Germaine Greer," she has said in interviews promoting the London production. "I would not have the courage; I don't have the desire." In the play, Eileen Atkins stars as Margot Mason, a rather self-regarding academic and writer whose many feminist tracts include an era-defining book called The Cerebral Vagina. But despite Murray-Smith's defence of the play, and despite the fact that the narrative rapidly deviates from the events on which it was based, not everyone is convinced, something Nicholas de Jongh confirms in his Evening Standard review: "Greer's spirit and aggressive personality, subject to comic, wounding caricature, haunt the play in the tart, self-admiring shape of Eileen Atkins's Margot Mason."
The play left many of the female critics cold, with the Observer's Susannah Clapp echoing - in part at least - Greer, when she says: "As farce this is nifty, sometimes exuberant; as debate it's threadbare." However Rhoda Koenig, writing in the Independent, felt otherwise, dismissing Greer's complaints as a "banshee wail" before calling the play "the best Ayckbourn play Alan Ayckbourn never wrote". Charles Spencer, writing in the Telegraph, was equally full of praise. He found the play "hugely entertaining, unless of course you happen to be a humourless radical feminist (something Greer herself certainly isn't)".
I'm guessing that makes me a humourless feminist then, because I found the play incredibly underwhelming, a muddled, middling farce blessed with a better cast than it deserves.
Murray-Smith has said of feminism that it has "been around for quite a while now, it has been by far the most influential 'ism' of my own generation in terms of changing my life and shaping it, but it's been around for long enough to have fun with it". But I'm not sure I share her definition of fun. Though it boasts the occasional sharp line, the play is a pretty limp thing and, as the always astute Alison Croggon surmised, when writing about the Melbourne production, "it doesn't do to look too closely at the ideas in this play: despite the putative subject matter, it is not actually about feminism but about that old comic standby, motherhood." She's right. The relationship between Mason and the married daughter that she sees as a "traitor to her potential" is the most interesting aspect of the play.
So, is Greer's outburst justified or more a case of being able to dish it out but not take it? Am I suffering a sense of humour failure for not finding the feminism-bashing in this play funny? What do you think?
