Greenside @ George St, Forest Room
Greenside @ George St, Forest Room ‘The Evolutionary and Inescapable Rotting of Girlhood’ is a brilliant name for a show, isn’t it? It has connotations of growth and decay, grotesquerie and a touch of gender politics. It’s advertised as a puppet show and sounds exactly my style. Unfortunately, the stage play is not what I had in mind. This episodic show explores aspects of the female experience in short scenes played out by five actors accompanied by two guitarists. It’s a playful piece, funny at times and has some nice musical moments but really feels like a work in progress. The cast…
Reviews
OK
Teenage themes, light laughter, but no real development.
The evolutionary and inevitable decline of girlhood is a brilliant name for a show, isn’t it? It has connotations of growth and decay, grotesqueness and a touch of gender politics. It is advertised as a puppet show and sounds exactly like my taste. Unfortunately, the stage work is not what I had in mind.
This episodic show explores aspects of the female experience in short scenes played by five actors and two guitarists. It’s a playful piece, funny at times and has some nice musical moments, but really feels like a work in progress.
The actors themselves are not without talent, but their characters are underdefined, just as the entire piece is unstructured, and the lack of clarity makes things seem stilted at times. The staging is an unrefined version of a woman’s bedroom, with laundry and underwear hung out to dry in the background – possibly a metaphor for the ideas of intimate revelations discussed? It’s not clear. The props are also basic and didn’t always work, coming across as clumsy and unprepared. As for the puppetry, well, there’s one puppet and it doesn’t really contribute much. The lighting is indistinct, so there’s no sense of movement between environments or temporal shifts. The whole thing just needs tightening up all around.
The stories themselves are more general commentaries on periods and growing up, societal expectations and so on, which elicit a few appreciative laughs. Yes, tampons and thongs are reasonably amusing, but there’s so much more that could be said about young adult life in the 21st century.
Worryingly, the production’s theme of the female experience is undermined by having two men sit at the front of the stage playing guitar – while reading books labelled “porn”. If the show is about women, why are the men so prominently placed and visually preferred to the action? The duo play and sing beautifully, but there is no real connection between the music and the narratives.
Some of the audience interactions, involving balloons as sacrifices for breast development, seem forced and are over in a flash. At the end of the show there is a sentimental outburst from the friends (who all love each other!) that is a far cry from the title.
While this is an enthusiastic production, it is not currently “evolutionary” and would benefit from a dramaturge to bring the disparate pieces together and reshape them to guide the audience through the various themes with some structure or at least connection, and to help us understand why we should care about these people and their lives.
I would also save the brilliant title for another show and think more carefully about what this production is actually trying to describe.
Created by Payton Oswald
Directed by: Dylan Carter and Payton Oswald
Produced by Good Grief Theatre Company
The evolutionary and inevitable decline of girlhood runs as part of the Edinburgh Fringe until August 24th. Further details and booking options can be found here.
