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Exploring identity and female solidarity
On the eve of France’s 1940 surrender an intriguing gathering takes place at Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas’s renowned Paris salon
JS
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Little Wars
Union Theatre
Southwark
IN SIMILAR fashion to Caryl Churchill’s 1980s Top Girls, Steven Carl McCasland’s Little Wars brings together a group of famous women from history in a notional dinner party. The critical difference is that this fictional gathering, here of contemporary literary luminaries, could actually have happened.
This online revival — set in the Paris apartment of modernist guru Gertrude Stein and her partner, Alice Toklas, a virtual salon renowned for its gatherings of emerging artists and writers — happens in 1940 with France on the point of surrender.
Invitees include fellow Jewish Americans, playwright Lillian Hellman and the acerbically witty poet and critic, Dorothy Parker. They are joined by Muriel Gardener, a Jewish American psychologist working as an anti-Nazi operative getting Jews out of Germany, and, least likely, the very English Agatha Christie.
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