Last year the West Yorkshire Playhouse staged a minor coup with the premiere of Avocado, a new, 20-minute monodrama by Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler. Performed in almost total darkness, it was the harrowing testimony of a very young woman concealed in a shipping container of rotting fruit and seeking the light of a promised land known only as Asylum.
Now, in association with the Southbank Centre’s Women of the World festival, Ensler has augmented the work with a pair of companion pieces to create an absurdist triptych on the commodification and ownership of women’s bodies.
The new first part, entitled Pomegranate, presents a post-Beckettian scenario of two jabbering heads on a supermarket shelf, whose plaintive observations (“It’s a long time since I last saw my body”) are contrasted with innocuous muzak tinkling in the background. Mark Rosenblatt’s ingenious staging becomes a tart, tragicomic curtain raiser to Avocado, harrowingly performed by Carla Harrison-Hodge, whose confinement now appears to be part of a fresh shipment to Pomegranate’s diabolical cash-and-carry.
The third part, Coconut, is a more optimistic parable about a young woman finding her feet – quite literally, as she emerges from a long bath and spends 20 minutes or so massaging coconut oil into her soles while providing a commentary about how this opens a portal to new self-awareness. Unfortunately, it also opens a portal to Ensler’s partiality for jargon best left on the self-help shelf: “Let your agenda-less gaze be my safety.” Amelia Donkor deserves full credit for the extremes of emotional and physical exposure the piece demands; and though you may not be quite sure where at times to direct your agenda-less gaze, it could be described, after the intensity of the first two pieces, as an emollient experience.
- At West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until 9 April. Box office: 0113-213 7700.
