All-women plays are notoriously bad for the box-office. But Pam Gems’s highly acclaimed feminist play did very well in the West End on its first outing in 1976 and transferred to the West End. It was her first major success and Helen Eastman’s revival is its first professional production in more than 35 years. Pam Gems (1925-2011) is probably best known today for Piaf, her play about the great French singer, Edith Piaf.
Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi are the names of four young women, an unlikely quartette, who share a tiny flat in London and their message is loud and clear: a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
Dusa (Sophie Scott) is divorced. Her husband has just abducted her two children and gone abroad and she doesn’t know where and she is desperate. Fish (Olivia Poulet), a feminist activist, has lost her man. She puts on a brave front and spies on him and his new girl friend making love and thinks he will come back to her. Vi (Helena Johnson) is a tiresome punk teenage anorexic who never goes out. Who will be the first to commit suicide? Stas (Emily Dobbs) wants to study marine biology at an American university and has decided the quickest way to get a lot of money is to work as an escort. She is the sort of woman who takes off all her clothes in front of the audience, and stands there stark naked, making a sort of mission statement.
The play, written in short little scenes, may have a nostalgic appeal for women who were young in 1976. The theatre was full of women in that age bracket. It will almost certainly drive men out of the theatre. The actors shout and screech far too much for so small a theatre as the Finborough. It’s ear-piercing. They need to tone it down. The suicide note, on which the play ends, is gabbled so that it is incomprehensible.