A Moment On The Lips

A Moment On The Lips (Mad March Hare Theatre Company in association with Sydney Independent Theatre Company) runs at the Old Fitzroy Theatre from 25 March – 12 April 2014. By Jonathan Gavin, directed by Mackenzie Steele.

I loved this play from the moment I read the press release. A show that focuses on the bonds between women – sisters, friends, lovers – with an all-female cast? Oh yes. Oh HELLS YES. That is something I am immediately interested in. These are the types of relationships that are desperately under-explored. And call me selfish, but as a twenty-something woman, I am totes going to be into a show about other young women. Strange, I know.

So perhaps I went in with crazy high expectations, but A Moment On The Lips really bummed me out, because I did not get what I wanted from it at all.

There was a line at the end where one of the characters demands of the others, “so what are we going to do now? Sit around and think up clever new ways to be awful to each other?”. I thought that that pretty much captured the whole play. This was a show that basically revolved around women – sisters, friends, lovers – being awful to each other.

Two points. 1) I do not believe that characters have to be likeable for a show to be good. (Which is lucky, because none of the characters in this show are.) 2) I firmly believe that women can be and often are awful to each other. I’ve been awful to other women. Other women have been awful to me. It’s a thing that happens.

But OMG, the women in this show were SO UNRELENTINGLY awful to each other. And that was the problem. You couldn’t understand why they hung around each other: why the friends stayed friends, why the lovers stayed lovers, why the sisters kept talking to each other. You never, ever understood why they couldn’t stay away from each other. And I mean, sure, there are terribly unhealthy relationships where you’re bad for each other and mean to each other and still can’t stay away. But not every friend is a frenemy. I feel like A Moment On The Lips was shooting for “complex, messy female relationships” but ended up at “women being bitches to each other”.

This play didn’t ring true for me at all. Not that every play about young women should, like, replicate my life, but there was very little in here that resonated with me. Take, for example, the character of Rowena (Lucy Goleby), who is a PhD student writing a dissertation. That is not so far from my life. That’s something I recognise at once. But when she starts talking about her thesis, she’s immediately told to stop by the people that are supposed to be the closest to her. That is exactly the opposite of my experience. If people care about you, they’ll listen. Even if they’ve heard you talk about it a million times. Even if they think it’s boring.

That’s quite a specific example of a broader problem with the play. The dynamics of the female relationships just weren’t… right. This is one thing that I think Lena Dunham’s Girls does very well: while some of the characters can be totally unlikeable and are often terrible to each other, you still understand why they hang out with each other. Hannah and Jessa, for instance, have both been narcissistic and self-centred and showed little care for the feelings of others, but you still understand a) why their friends are still friends with them, and b) why they are still friends with each other. For all its other faults, this is also something I think Sex and the City did reasonably well at. Teen girl drama Pretty Little Liars has four girl leads, and while it has a spectacularised hyperbolic storyline, it is great at female friendship and its complexities. I didn’t find that in A Moment On The Lips at all, and it made me so, so sad.

The character I was the most engaged with was Emma (Claudia Barrie), probably because her relationships were the most complex and nuanced. She was the only one I really believed felt genuine affection for her friends: one of the play’s most accurate moments came, I thought, when she lied to her artist friend Victoria (Beth Aubrey) about liking her exhibition when she’d actually hated it. Her storyline, however, which involved her being stalked and almost murdered by someone who had seen her on TV, did not ring true. Other storylines did – the selfish Victoria reliant on her career being funded by her older sister Jenny (Sarah Aubrey), and being resentful when that money was taken away – but the relationships felt so one-dimensional that the story too became unbelievable.

I think the problem was that we don’t see any of the characters being really genuinely nice to each other until right at the end of the play. And that is just not how female friendship works. Sure, sometimes friendship is performed, but most of the time? Women like hanging out with other women. Genuinely. Really. For me, my female friendships are the most cherished relationships in my life. And if you’re going to do a show that centres around the bonds between women – whether they’re sisters, friends, or lovers – the pleasures of those bonds are something that need to be recognised.  

Top Girls

Top Girls runs at the New Theatre from 9 July – 3 August 2013. By Caryl Churchill, directed by Alice Livingstone.

Caryl Churchill’s 1982 play Top Girls is a seminal work of feminist theatre. Despite this, I think that is possible that an anti-feminist reading of the play could be advanced, one that condemns all the characters in it for their choices and criticises women who attempt to combine corporate success with a family. Thankfully, New Theatre’s production does not take this direction. This is an excellent production of Churchill’s play – lucid, pointed, and incisive, critical not of the choices its female protagonists make but of the oppressive system that has forced them to make them.

Top Girls follows the story of businesswoman Marlene (Julia Billington, in an outstanding performance). The show famously opens with a dreamlike sequence in which she dines with famous women from history, other women who have broken the mould, shattered the glass ceiling, and pursued success outside the typical mould of marriage and motherhood. The exception to this, Patient Griselda (Ainslie McGlynn), who obeyed her husband in all things, is treated with some derision by the other women, who scoff at and are horrified by her choices. These women are from all different periods and different walks of life, but their struggles and sorrows are surprisingly similar. All are unusual and remarkable for doing things that would not be especially extraordinary for a man, whether becoming a high powered executive like Marlene, travelling the world alone like Isabella Bird (Cheryl Ward), or becoming pope like Joan (Sarah Aubrey). In the next two acts, we see Marlene in the real world – first, the corporate world, where we see her as a hardnosed, ruthless businesswoman; and the second, with her family, whom she is visiting for the first time in six years. We see quite clearly just how much Marlene has had to sacrifice to achieve the success that she has, and how impossible success can be for other women.

The focus the show casts on the unhappiness and loneliness of these women – especially Marlene – is where I think it is possible for an anti-feminist lens to be applied. It would be possible (although certainly not Churchill’s intent) to see Marlene’s unhappiness, as well as the unhappiness of her fellow successful women, as a direct result of her ‘unfeminine’ choices. But no one is allowed to be happy in this play, a fact that this production highlights deftly. Marlene’s foil is her sister Joyce (played fantastically by Sarah Aubrey), who has followed the more conventional path, and is still clearly miserable. This production does a great job of emphasising what I think is the real underlying message of Top Girls: the unhappiness that these women experience is not the fault of the individual women, but because they must live in a culture that is distinctly unfriendly to them. Marlene must make outrageous sacrifices to carve out a space for herself in the professional world, and she is still blithely asked to give up her success by the wife of a male executive who was competing for the same position, because he has children and will not like working for a woman. Likewise, Joyce, abandoned by her husband, is reduced to domestic drudgery to make ends meet. For Angie (Claudia Barrie), whom Joyce has raised, the future seems to be hopeless: she has no hope of a career, nor of finding a man to support her. They exist in a culture that has no space for autonomous women in it, even if these women do their best, like Marlene, to compete with and beat men at their own game.

What hope there is seems to be in sisterhood, in female support networks, and this is another aspect of Churchill’s script that director Alice Livingstone has managed to highlight very well, albeit subtly. There is an inherent sense of competition between many of the women of the play – between the successful women at the dinner in the first act, who regularly talk over one another; between Marlene and the co-workers who have become her employees; and most especially between Marlene and Joyce. But there is a possibility of sisterhood and support. The women at the dinner find common ground. Marlene’s co-workers are friends, gossiping to each other about their lives. And while the tension between Marlene and Joyce is certainly not resolved, the class issues between them an almost insurmountable barrier, there is still a glimmer of hope. “I do love you,” Joyce says to Marlene, reaching out and pressing her hand. In this production, this is an incredibly poignant and powerful moment.

The only real problem I had with this production was the portrayal of Lady Nijo (Bishanyia Vincent) in the first act. The geisha-style makeup, along with the strong accent, ran the risk of turning this character into a racial stereotype. The performance did get more nuanced as the act progressed, but the portrayal of non-white characters by white actors is obviously an area which needs to be navigated with care (if not navigated around altogether).

Otherwise, this production is a fantastic realisation of Churchill’s script. The emphasis on female support networks as important in navigating the oppressive culture is not only a commentary on Thatcherism, which was prevalent at the time Churchill was writing, but remains important as a feminist tenet. This production also offers a powerful argument for an inclusive and intersectional feminism, one that cuts across many boundaries, the most pointed one in this case being class. Alice Livingstone has directed a lucid and intelligent production, abetted by some truly inspired performances. This is definitely a show you should go and see.