Feminist farce slammed by Greer

Female Of The Species ***, Vaudeville Theatre, London. Box office: 0870 890 0511

Dame Eileen Atkins Margot Mason is a confused swipe at Germaine Greer Dame Eileen Atkins' Margot Mason is a confused swipe at Germaine Greer

GERMAINE GREER has given publicity that money can’t buy to Joanna Murray-Smith’s comedy, first seen in Australia. The play is inspired by a real incident when the feminist guru-turned-Grumpy Old Woman was held hostage in her home by a deranged student. Without having seen it, Greer has denounced the work as “threadbare” and the playwright as “an insane reactionary who boasts that she has not read a single feminist text”.

Strictly speaking, the central character of Margot Mason, played by Eileen Atkins, is too English to be Greer. But after such a loud public spat it’s hard not to have a chuckle at the Celebrity Big Brother drop-out’s expense.

Margot is the ego-maniac author of best-sellers such as Madame Ovary, Ugly Cheating Bastards and The Cerebral Vagina, whose diktats to her followers are apt to undergo 180-degree revolutions. Draw your own comparisons with the author of The Female Eunuch. But the character is little more than a cardboard cut-out monster and the joke wears thin pretty quickly. When Anna Maxwell Martin turns up as stalker Molly, the idea of playing a real-life abduction for laughs really does seem in poor taste.

Fortunately we turn away from Greer’s life when Sophie Thompson enters with a riotous performance as Margot’s rebelliously conventional daughter, pushed into insanity by domestic drudgery. But three male arrivals, trooping through the French windows like an Alan Ayckbourn curtain-call, stretch credulity, and Margot’s final conversion doesn’t seem to convince Dame Eileen any more than it did me.

Murray-Smith does not seem sure whether she is attempting a serious engagement with changing attitudes to feminism or a battle-of-the-sexes knockabout. She can write comedy but too many of the gags are lame or clichéd.

Director Roger Michell seems equally unsure whether to go for madcap chaos or naturalism and the physical business is particularly lacklustre. Margot is imprisoned in the least restrictive handcuffs I have ever seen and a supposedly riotous climax where half the furniture falls over is just bewildering.

It’s all reasonably diverting but Greer is right to complain at the crude lampoon – and “threadbare” isn’t entirely wrong.

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