Girls’ Night, Forfeit, The Cycling Gymkhana

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on GIRLS NIGHT at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, FORFEIT at Oran Mor, Glasgow, and THE CYCLING GYMKHANA at the Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, for Scotsman Arts Magazine, 12.4.12
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Girls Night  3 stars ***
Forfeit   4 stars ****
The Cycling Gymkhana  3 stars *** 

HERE THEY ARE, laid out before us in a quiet week for Scottish theatre; the three faces of 21st century feminism, from the brash, glitzy and loud, through the hard-edged and power-driven, to the cheerfully resurgent, paying tribute to the long history of the struggle for women’s equality.

First up, at the King’s Theatre in Glasgow, is the current touring production of Girls’ Night, a show-with-songs for a cast of five women written by Louise Roche back in 2000, and in permanent production almost ever since.  The secret of the show’s success lies in the robust simplicity of its formula.  It has a small cast, yet a big nightclub set that looks good on large main stages.   It offers a straightforward star vehicle for well-known actresses who can dance and sing a little.  It features a short playlist of 12 big female karaoke anthems, from I Will Survive to It’s Raining Men.  And in a culture where women already form a majority of theatregoers, it self-consciously caters to them with a storyline that reflects at least some of the ups and downs of ordinary female lives – the happy marriages, the silly mistakes, the lost babies, the disappointments in love.

The play is set in a club bar on the night when four friends – glamorous Carol, her dowdy younger sister Kate, chubby Lisa with the rich husband, and Anita who is adored by her man despite mental health problems – meet to celebrate the birthday of their mate Sharon, who died 22 years ago, at 17, in a motorbike accent.  The twist is that Sharon is also present, as a lively eavesdropping angel-cum-narrator; and the current production, directed by Jack Randle, also features former Eastenders star Gillian Taylforth as Carol, with her sister Kim Taylforth as Kate.

On the whole, the quality of the show is not high.  The script is a compilation of cliches punctuated with tacky ladette-style jokes; among the cast, only Kerry Enright, as Lisa, shows any talent as a dancer, and only Rebecca Wheatley, as Anita, sings at all well.

As the evening wears on, though – and Gillian Taylforth limps her way touchingly through a croaky rendition of Don’t Cry Out Loud – it becomes increasingly clear that this show isn’t really about quality of performance, or even about transcending the terribleness of an average real-life karaoke night.  It’s rather about using the currency of female experience to bring famous folk and ordinary audience members together, in shared space, around the songs that have helped to mark out their lives.  In that sense, it works: and it also reflects one of the many ways theatre can function, in a world where human beings spend more and more time at home alone, and less and less in a shared space like the King’s Theatre, packed with the breathing, sweating, dancing bodies of 1200 other women.

There’s an entirely different kind of girls’ night afoot in the latest Play, Pie and Pint lunchtime show Forfeit, co-produced by Dundee Rep.  Written by Alan Wilkins – author of Traverse hits Carthage Must Be Destroyed and The Nest – Forfeit is set in a country pub near Stirling owned by the astonishing Vi, a gangland queen who has recently been released from prison.  Fearing that her property is about to be seized under the Proceeds Of Crime Act, Vi demands the presence of her former prison cellmate Shona, and her surly barmaid Megan, also an ex-con; her plan is to make them joint owners of the pub, in return for certain guarantees about her own future.

It seems that Shona, though, has other ideas about Vi’s right to a comfortable retirement; and what follows is a tense, intriguing debate about criminality and forgiveness, given an extra edge by the fact that all three players are women, and immaculately performed by a fine Dundee team, featuring Emily Winter as Shona, Natalie Wallace as Megan, and the great Irene Macdougall as Vi.

If the women in Forfeit seem stuck in a world as hard and unforgiving as that of their menfolk, though, Eilidh MacAskill’s Bicycle Boom project at Kelvingrove has been looking back to the great age of women’s suffrage, and to the role of the bicycle in promoting true and joyful female emancipation.  The project ended at the weekend with a free-to-all-comers Cycling Gymkhana at the Kelvin Hall, designed to celebrate the 111th anniversary of the 1901 Great Exhibition at Kelvingrove, which also featured a cycling gymkhana.  Clad in her splendid 1901-style green tweed cycling suit, the redoubtable MacAskill therefore led us through a jolly if slightly vague 70-minute show, featuring novelty cycle races for a team of female riders with pleasingly different cycling personalities, a bit of bicycle history, a few songs by Eilidh, a best-decorated bike competition, and a final biking ballet for a group of eleven women riders.

In terms of achievement, the show’s success was undeniably mixed.  Composer Kim Moore’s music was impressive, and  beautifully delivered by a four-strong oompah band; the closing ballet, led by Laura Bradshaw, was simple but moving; the songs were slightly inaudlble; and the best-dressed bike competition was nearly won by a poised little tot of about two with a balloon tied to his wee wooden trike.  As a whole, though, the event felt laid-back, lovely, fresh and free.  And it came as a timely Easter reminder that at its best, the cause of women’s freedom has always been about changing the world into a finer, fairer and more enjoyable place; rather than winning the right to behave like the most macho and bullying of men, at their very worst.

Girls Night at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, and Forfeit at Oran Mor, Glasgow, both until Saturday.  The Cycling Gymkhana’s run is completed.

PERFORMANCE OF THE WEEK

Irene Macdougall is one of the great female stars of the Dundee Rep Ensemble, and she delivers a terrific performance as former Scottish gangland queen Vi, in Alan Wilkins’s Forfeit.   As tough and butch as she is glamorous, Vi encounters an unexpected obstacle to her retirement plans in the shape of her implacable former cellmate, Shona; and over a short 45 minutes, Macdougall creates a memorable portrait of a strong woman attempting a last throw of the dice, and facing the fact that she may lose.

ENDS ENDS