Happenstance is responsible for the fact that all three pieces reviewed this week are made and, mostly, presented by women of diverse backgrounds – an indication, perhaps, that our theatre ecology is coming closer to reflecting contemporary complexities. The similarities, though, end there: all three are very different in form and subject.
Charlene James’s Cuttin’ It is about female genital mutilation (FGM). An NHS website describes this as “a procedure where the female genitals are deliberately cut, injured or changed, but there’s no medical reason for this to be done. It’s also known as female circumcision or cutting.” Originally produced in 2016, the play well deserves the awards it has since won. A simple dramatic construction presents the issue clearly and raises consciousness about the practice via a vivid, emotional situation. It’s a shame, however, that James’s close focus on personal experiences excludes presentation of wider pressures that make it so hard to tackle FGM in the UK.
Muna and Iqra both attend the same inner-city secondary school. We learn about their lives mainly through monologues, offering spirited summings-up of people and places, and opening windows on to their individual worlds. The spoken text is neatly projected on to Amanda Mascarenhas’s evocative set, dominated by a grey concrete staircase against a backdrop outlining a featureless collection of high-rise flats.
Muna’s family left Somalia when she was small; she has no experience of the war in which Iqra’s family were all killed. Iqra has only been in the UK for a few months and is finding it difficult to settle in – the school has allocated her a counsellor, but only, she feels, because the staff don’t want her “screaming for my dead family” during an Ofsted inspection. Muna shies away from contact with Iqra because she feels guilty about having escaped the war.
However, after a small incident on a bus brings the two 15-year-olds together, Muna impulsively blurts out to Iqra her secret fear: that her sister will be cut on her seventh birthday, just as she herself was. Muna, who hasn’t dared to speak of this with any of her many British friends, feels that Iqra is the only one who will understand. Iqra does, indeed, understand. However, she certainly does not share Muna’s view that “what they doin’ – it ain’t right”. For Iqra, cutting is “what we do – because we always have”.
The girls’ divergent backgrounds and attitudes set them on course for a terrible collision. Nickie Miles-Wilden’s direction is finely paced, and both performers are consistently engaging. Asha Hassan’s extrovert, gabby Muna, masks pain behind a brash exterior. Hermon Berhane’s Iqra (delivering her lines with a mix of speech and sign language) reveals a steely strength behind her diffident demeanour. James skilfully plays the two situations off one another, deploying dramatic irony to ratchet up the tension for the audience and lead us to a shocking, highly charged conclusion.
The play’s melodramatic simplicity makes it a useful introduction to the subject but a less than satisfying adult drama. I imagine that, if Muna’s school had hosted a play such as this one, she might have felt able to share some of her fears with her friends or GP. However, James’s narrow focus leaves in the shadows factors that facilitate FGM in the UK. Here, anyone who fails to protect a child from FGM can face prosecution. If Muna had spoken out, others, including her mother, might have fallen foul of the law. In this sense, issues around FGM are not just tied to cultural practices but also linked to the way our laws are framed. The production programme speaks of wanting to bring about changes: speaking about the issue is one step; challenging the mechanisms that make it possible is another.
The Girl With Glitter in Her Eye is the latest work by the OPIA Collective, a recently formed group of young artists aiming to create multidisciplinary work that reflects female/LGBTQ+ experiences. This new play, written and directed by Masha Kevinovna, is fresh, imaginative, ambitious and stimulating, although it still needs to take a couple more developmental steps (in writing and delivery) if it is to fully realise its rich potential.
The action is accompanied throughout by an on-stage musician (Ben Ramsden, also the composer). It’s presented by a chorus of three strange, birdlike figures who introduce themselves as the furies of classical mythology, come to set before us a case to judge. The furies morph into contemporary characters in a naturalistic environment (Cara Evans’s simple set of screens and stairs facilitates various settings, from outer space to inner-city London). This turns out to be a dramatically effective genre mix. The switching perspectives, between fury storytellers and characters, allows fragmentary scenes to be jostled together in such a way as to provoke, while undermining our judgment (references to kaleidoscopes are not accidental).
Helen and Philomela are from opposite sides of the social tracks. Together they run Phil’s on-trend cafe. Unfortunately this is in an area as yet untouched by gentrification (Phil’s father fixes up a feature in Vogue). Helen’s dream, though, is to be a famous artist. The stumbling block is that the work she presents to a gallery owner is declared too “nice”: “Nice doesn’t sell!”
Kevinovna’s dialogue is lightly satirical. “Maybe that can be our USP: we stock all kinds of milk,” says Anna Mackay’s increasingly desperate Phil. The gallery owner (given a satisfyingly reptile-like quality by Naomi Gardener) encourages Helen (who is black and comes from a housing scheme) to paint work “inspired by your background. We want to feel what you feel. Shock us!” Helen’s problem is that she doesn’t have a trauma with which to titivate the palates of gallery visitors. Ironically, white, privileged Phil is the one who has a trauma. Should Modupe Salu’s finely textured Helen appropriate the appalling experience Phil cannot speak of? And so make her art edgy and sellable? Should Phil prevent her? This is the case before us. I, for one, could not pass judgment.
Since its launch in 1977, the London international mime festival has introduced to the UK artists from around the world. Australian artist-creator Fleur Elise Noble is making her second appearance here with Rooman. This wordless multimedia piece is based on an encounter between a bored office worker and the hybrid creature she dreams up, which has the head and tail of a kangaroo and the torso and limbs of a man.
Technically, the production is complex and intriguing. Rooman (Tony Martin) and the woman (Noble) appear in the flesh and on film (along with Anna Kastrissios). They interact with or become incorporated into film projections of cityscapes, landscapes, various vehicles. They are involved in scenes alongside stop-motion puppet animations and cartoon drawings (the progress of a lift through a building and a series of bus journeys are particularly wittily executed).
In her episodic imaginings, the woman objectifies Rooman as a cheesily romantic figure. The pair cuddle under the stars beside a roaring camp fire (like Bottom-as-an-ass with Titania, but without Shakespeare’s poetry, humour or raunch); they dance, start a family, grow old together. The two of them travel through dreamscapes that modulate from poster-bright cheerfulness to nightmarish, stormy darkness. It all looks fabulous, but there is no real storytelling to carry us along, no narrative drive, no dramatic through-line nor any overarching dynamic to involve us in the woman’s experiences or engage our emotions. Visually impressive, it adds up to a ruefully unsatisfying experience.
Star ratings (out of five)
Cuttin’ It ★★★
The Girl With Glitter in Her Eye ★★★
Rooman ★★
• Cuttin’ It is at the Studio, Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 1 February
• The Girl With Glitter in Her Eye is at the Bunker, London SE1, until 27 January
