No fewer than seven female writers are credited with this reimagined version of a play by Aristophanes, The Assemblywomen, written around 392BC. While it’s good to see a radical comedy resurrected, and the result is an evening of lewd fun, the show never seems sure how far to go in giving a neglected classic a contemporary bite.
The piece sticks closely to the original structure in which a dynamic Athenian leads the city’s women in staging a coup d’etat. Not only that: she proposes a form of economic and sexual communism in which property is shared along with all forms of physical pleasure. While attacking the corruption of governments run by men, Aristophanes leaves open the question of whether he is endorsing or satirising this envisaged utopia.
You could offer a straight version of the original or rewrite it totally in terms of today’s world: this version seems torn between the two. It retains Aristophanic gags such as a young man, here played by a woman endowed with a vast, banana-shaped phallus, being fought over by a group of randy oldsters. At the same time, it makes reference to living figures, advocates that sex should be a public service like the NHS, and suggests that crap jobs will be done by robots.
While I’d like to have seen a more ruthless update, Blanche McIntyre’s production and Jasmine Swan’s design, with its fibreglass columns and pillars, create a fantasy Greece and the six-strong cast – Lydia Rose Bewley, Elizabeth Boag, Anna Fordham, Lisa Kerr, Alicia McKenzie, Anne Odeke – are brimful of energy. Tim Sutton’s songs also embrace everything from Hamilton-style hip-hop to parodic Broadway melodies.
But since the team of seven writers – Wendy Cope, Jenny Eclair, Suhayla El-Bushra, Natalie Haynes, Shappi Khorsandi, Brona C Titley and the MP Jess Phillips – includes a parliamentarian, I’d have been intrigued to see a version in which modern Westminster is taken over by women. The show is rude and raucous and even includes an onstage defecation, but sometimes falls between two stools.
• At NST City, Southampton, until 29 September.
