RUTH AYLETT admires the blunt honesty with which a woman’s experience is recorded, but detects the unexamined privilege that underlies it
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Tear the house down
SIMON PARSONS relishes the revival of a highly original play that explores the reinvention of a family that rejects traditional gender roles
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IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
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The Chinese language only introduced a feminine pronoun in the 1920s. Now, it might adopt a gender-inclusive one, suggests JANET DAVEY
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Park Theatre
TAYLOR MAC’s highly original play establishes a surreal, darkly comic tone from the outset. We find the man of the house in a pink nightdress and clown’s make-up sitting docilely beneath a hippy-like banner with an 11-letter acronym for diverse sexual identities in what looks like a trashed kitchen.
But the play does much more than simply question traditional sexual identities.
Returning from Afghanistan suffering with a form of PTSD, ex-marine Isaac (Steffan Cennydd) is faced with a home in chaos. His mother Paige has seized on her husband’s mentally incapacitating stroke as the chance for personal freedom and reinvention. Rejecting traditional, stereotypical female values and revelling in her daughter’s hormone-induced gender realinement, she is on a tumultuous quest to find a fresh, non-materialistic identity while keeping her husband drugged up and in fancy dress.
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