The Female of the Species, Vaudeville Theatre 15-07-08

The Female of the Species a comedy, opened last night at the Vaudeville Theatre. The play is ‘loosely’ based on an incident in the life of Germaine Greer. The author Joanna Murray-Smith is at pains to deny that the feminist writer at the heart of the play is based on Greer stating that she wouldn’t dare to portray her on stage. Germaine Greer begs to differ, points out that the incident itself was nearer to tragedy than farce, and is suitably outraged.

I’ve read most of Germaine Greer’s books and I’m a great admirer of her work. This made me rather uneasy but we’d been given some complementary tickets (one of the perks of blogging ) and I thought I’d go with an open mind.

There is nothing like a Dame

Dame Eileen Atkins takes the lead as Margot Mason, a famous feminist author. I’m trying here to avoid mentioning Germaine Greer again but it’s very hard. She even looks a tiny bit like her, although at least she’s not wearing one of those classic grey Greer frocks. Her performance is quite wonderful, pure class and very funny. She dominates the stage and the play showing us in turn the vast ego of the woman, her undeniable intellect and her vulnerability. Atkins mixes this with some great comic timing and some lovely, physical comedy. Even in moments when the focus was off her it was hard to drag my eyes away from her expressive face.

I think her real triumph was to take a potentially unsympathetic part and make us see Margot as very human and often actually right in her assessment of people. Atkins’ Margot is witty and smart with a tiny edge of self-doubt. Even though Margot is the focus of everyone’s anger in the play Atkins’ performance steals the show and it is the other characters who end up looking hollow and foolish.

So far so good.

I was not so happy with some of the other performances. I felt that the rest of the cast were patchy. Everyone had good moments but no one shone. Each of the characters in turn gets to have a go at Margot (by now handcuffed to her desk) and tell her just where she, and the rest of the feminist movement have gone wrong. Each tries to tell her she is to blame for the situation they find themselves in.

The two younger women, Anna Maxwell Martin (the self styled ‘homicidal intruder’) and Sophie Thompson (the ‘disappointing’ daughter) both played their parts with gusto but with a rather exaggerated use of physical ticks.

I quite enjoyed Paul Chahidi as the son -in -law. Despite the character being dense, well meaning, full of platitudes but a bit of a cardboard cut out Chahidi managed to make me feel quite sympathetic to him.

Poor Con O’Neill has a strange and amazingly short part to play, coming on only for the last 15 minutes or so as the taxi driver. He’s almost the last to speak and is made to give voice to the argument that it’s these nasty feminists who have messed up a system that’s worked fine since the time of the cave men (no – really!) Unfortunately the biggest laugh he raised the night we saw it was when he slightly corpsed in response to a line from Sophie Thomson.

There’s also a very small cameo role as Margot’s publisher for Sam Kelly right at the very end.

So is it funny?

Well, yes. There are some wonderful one liners and moments of hilarity. It’s not the great intellectual comedy, which it sort of aspires to be but it is funny. It made an interesting and enjoyable evening at the theatre. If I had paid for my ticket I wouldn’t have felt in the least bit cheated. It was a real treat to see a genuine Dame of the theatre in action.