Womanhood at The Stables Theatre
EBM HUMPHREYS
Kicking off the upcoming Scene & Heard festival at the Stables theatre, which this year is led by women, two short but important plays go back-to-back for four days. Opening the festival on Thursday 5 June, The Cagebirds by master of absurdism David Campton and White Lead by Jessica Siân bring powerful themes of womanhood, creativity, expression and oppression to our local stage.
The Cagebirds was first performed seventy years ago, yet remains a perfect allegory for our contemporary lives, where we hold freedoms and constraints in an uneasy daily balance. Directed by Vanessa Coatz, this absurdist play evokes Plato’s allegory of the cave, where people who have only known moving shadows come to confuse them with the real people who cast them and are not interested in having their ‘reality’ revealed as a mistake. The Cagebirds is an encounter with the effect of female stereotyping through the eyes of six characters, whom it describes: “They are women. They are birds. They are prisoners of the Mistress. Self-absorbed and insular, they exist in isolation and are reduced to caricatures to be feared and ridiculed … The status quo is questioned and disrupted by the new addition of ‘The Wild One’ but will that be enough to help them break free?”
Directed here by Jane Midwinter, White Lead was written by Jessica Siân and first performed at Hampstead Theatre, London, in November 2016, as part of the Women Centre Stage festival, which was Sphinx Theatre’s demonstration of “the range, depth and richness of women’s writing for the stage”. This impactful short play explores the “expectations and responsibilities of being an artist and a woman,” about which the singularly talented Georgia O’Keefe once said “I’ve settled it for myself, so flattery and criticism go down the same drain.”
In White Lead, however, “power and vulnerability collide, as three women share their innermost thoughts over dinner … that no-one actually eats!” According to the Tate, only five percent of London galleries represent an equal number of male and female artists (with seventy-eight percent representing more men), suggesting that despite the welcome trend in ‘rediscovering’ the work of wonderful women who have excelled in all areas but have been sidelined or ignored, there is still a great deal to be done in the mainstream art world to level the playing field for living women artists.
Double-bill performances take place on 5, 6, & 7 June at 7.30pm, and on 8 June at 2.30pm. Tickets: stablestheatre.co.uk/double-bill-cagebirds-white-lead
We hope you have enjoyed reading this article. The future of our volunteer led, non-profit publication would be far more secure with the aid of a small donation. You can also support local journalism by becoming a friend of HIP. It only takes a minute and we would be very grateful.
Leave a Reply