All-female play at West End

Press, 25 February 1977, Page 10

All-female play at West End

NZPA London The West End is showing its first all-female play. The play has opened at the posh Mayfair Theatre to critical acclaim after a successful run at a fringe theatre. “Dusa, Fish, Stas, and Vi” was not written to mark International Women’s Year, or the Equal Rights Legislation. It does not try to deliver a trendy, hard-hitting feminist line.

Pam gems, the playwright, has written a realistic piece about four girls sharing a London flat that has prompted male theatre critics to praise it as “the best and most penetrating new play about women.” Men lack the courage to handle female characters strongly, and that is why their plays about women sometimes lack reality, according to Mrs Gems. At the start of the play it (seems that the four misfits are going to be stereotypes. Fish is a roughly dressed, middle class feminist who spends her time preaching Marx and women’s lib. Dusa, her old school friend, is a slightly hysterical surburban wife whose husband has left her and taken the children with him. Stas holds two jobs, a therapist for brain damaged child-

ren by day, and a prostitute by night. And Vi sits at home breathing Eastern culture deeply and starving herself.

But as Irving Wardle said in “The Times” by the end of the play the categories were meaningless because the characters had become people doing unexpected things. Vi takes a job as a traffic warden although she hates cars, and Fish commits suicide when her lover is unfaithful. “The four have been interwoven in a pattern of mutual dependence with strong and weak continually changing sides instead of hardening into a fixed pecking order. The household has its own atmosphere, with conventional female responses displaced b- brisk, matter-of-fact attitudes to abortion, bisexuality, freelance prostitution and drugs,” Mr Wardle said.

And still Mrs Gems subtly worked a feminist statement into the play, he said. “It is impossible to think of men as utterly unlike as these women forming any kind of a family. Mrs Gems earned the right to have Fish say ‘women won’t do as men want any more and men hate it’.”

The play is running for an indefinite season.