Just Us Girls (whATS a giRL?)

What to say?  Just Us Girls (or as the website has it, juSt uS GirLS) is sort of absurdist stream-of-consciousness mix of #MeToo meets Dada by way of cultural theory, poetry and vaudeville.  That formulation comes from The Companion.  After the show she said, ‘I don’t envy you reviewing that one…’

Ellen Grimshaw, in a sort of Barbarella-at-the-circus get-up of red and gold, a wig of a red not seen in Nature, and breast pasties, seems to begin the show as an alien recently arrived on earth.  As a naïf, she can ask ‘dumb’ questions and speak her mind, and be contradicted, corrected and bullied by Alice Stewart, who begins the show as a bloke in T-shirt and shorts emblazoned with numerous and varied tumescent penises and brandishing a large-ish penis shaped dildo – which here represents rampant male sexuality – i.e. ready to shove this anywhere.    

I don’t think I have ever seen a show into which has gone such moment-by-moment, detailed thought: text, choreography, costumes, sound and SFX, lighting, video projections and props.  There are moments of piercing analytical clarity, there are flights of fancy, there are insights, there are poetic monologues, there are sharp satirical barbs and occasional laughs.  There are elements of the White Clown and the victim clown, or of the two-hander comedy routine – although it’s interesting that Ms Grimshaw and Ms Stewart as performers never quite connect – as if each is doing her own thing on stage.  But whether it all adds up to the avowedly feminist argument the show wants to make is, well, perhaps debatable. 

Take for instance, the bursts of synchronous choreography that interrupt rather than punctuate the bumpy flow of things.  These bursts of a sort of jazz ballet are undeniably well-done and entertaining but what they have to do with what precedes them or follows them escapes me.  Maybe they’re just a pause in the verbal assault for us to catch our breath?  Or there’s the use of five or six micro-wave ovens as props.  Or the startling lighting switch to all deep-sea green – that turns red to black.  (The lighting design, as intricate and swift changing as the rest, is by the talented Justin Gardam.)  Or the projection – in a series of projections – of a dinosaur which emits a squeaky cry.  Or the windy and prolonged farts. 

Whenever I glanced over at the Fringe assigned technician/stage manager, who would have had no rehearsal time but did a great job, she was rigid with tense concentration at her computer, keeping up with the very many complicated cues.

But through it all, it does seem like whatever Ms Grimshaw and her collaborators – Ms Stewart, director Sarah Vickery, assistant director Milly Cooper and dramaturge Morgan Rose – thought up went into the mix – pell-mell, willy-nilly – in no particular order and all too often of the ‘wouldn’t it be funny, if…’ variety.  And yet you figure there must be a thread if only because Ms Grimshaw herself radiates such confidence, intelligence and charisma.

Sad to say, my audience was rather quiet, perhaps bewildered, responding in fits and starts to a barb or a pratfall.  Ms Cooper says the show is ‘a staunchly feminist takeover of the patriarchy’.  And Ms Vickery calls it ‘both a compact and simultaneously erupting piece of feminist theatre that humorously digs deep into the artists’ own experiences.’  Yes, that is the intention. 

Still, as an old, white cis-male, beneficiary of the patriarchy, it doesn’t matter much what I think.  It’s not – as the pre-emptive joke ‘review’ by a ‘very important white man/very unimportant white man’ on the website has it – ‘the WORST show I’ve ever seen!!!’  It’s like a fire-works show in which some one got into the box and let ‘em all off at once.

Michael Brindley