TRILOGY To 30 January.
London.
TRILOGY
created by Nic Green.
BAC (Council Chamber) Lavender Hill SW11 5TN To 16 January.
7pm.
then Barbican Theatre 22-23 January.
7.15pm.
then Nuffield Theatre Lancaster 30 January 2010.
8pm.
Runs 3hr 20min Two intervals.
London performances sold out.
TICKETS: 01524 594151.
www.nuffieldtheatre.com (Lancaster).
Review: Carole Woddis 13 January.
Forceful and inventive..
Feminism has become the `f’ word that dare not speak its name. Nic Green however is the real thing. A fully-fledged, paid-up feminist prepared to speak its name with daring and bravura artistry.
The gamine, fresh-eyed Green takes feminism back to one of its earliest tenets – freeing the female body and mind from the all-powerful male grip and gaze. To that end, each segment of the Trilogy – first seen at Edinburgh last year and garlanded with accolades - includes and rejoices in the sight of the female body stripped to its essentials and shorn of pornographic titillation.
Hardly a new concept since the late ‘60s with Hair and Oh Calcutta!, what’s fascinating about Green’s post-feminist performance piece - which culminates in strangers baring their all whilst the rest of us sing our hearts out in pursuit of that ever-seductive chimera, Jerusalem - are Green’s reflections backwards in order to go forwards.
Trilogy is as much about a reconnecting and celebration of the past as it is about the here and now. Green exhorts women in the audience to “make your own herstory” and, this being the digital age, download it. But she also rather sweetly re-imagines a recently deceased grandmother as a one year old baby, re-enacts her own birth and that of her 1980-s born onstage collaborators and centrally places a seminal moment in the Women’s Lib movement at the core of the middle section of the Trilogy as a springboard from which to launch her vigorous 21st century response.
That moment was a famous debate in 1971 when Germaine Greer and other feminists met Norman Mailer in New York’s Town Hall, recorded by the famous documentary film-maker, D Pennebaker. Green replays it with distorted lipsynching and restages it with retaliatory force.
Some might find this approach, at once enthusiastic and shamelessly didactic, too uncompromising. But make no mistake, this is a major piece of intellectual and physical theatre by a young visionary from whom we shall hear much more. It’s performed by Green and her three female and one male companion with exhilarating rigour and energy. Inspirational.
Cast: Nic Green, Laura Bradshaw, Louise Brodie, Murray Wason, Jodie Wilkinson.
Designer (Part Two): Susannah Henry.
Lighting: Will Potts.
Sound/AV: Guy Coletta.
Participant Coordinator: Sally Rose.
Trilogy premiered at BAC during the BURST Festival in 2009 following its development both at BAC and through Glasgow’s Arches Award for Stage Directors.
2010-01-15 01:54:19