The Female of the Species

Roger Michell’s production of Australian dramatist Joanna Murray-Smith’s The Female of the Species opens more than promisingly, with Eileen Atkins struggling to remove her bra while answering the telephone and toying with titles for her next feminist tome – would “The Utopian Fallopian” give “Madame Ovary” a run for its money? – on a seductively picturesque design by Mark Thompson.

Dame Eileen plays Margot Mason, a once liberated writer and teacher who finds herself trapped in her country retreat by a former student – Anna Maxwell Martin walks in as Molly and spouts the play’s title as a suggestion – seeking idolatrous revenge.

Germaine Greer, who was once similarly cornered by a deranged student in her Essex cottage, has taken offence and dubbed Murray-Smith an insane reactionary, though she has neither read nor seen a play which could be viewed as an inverted companion piece to Murray-Smith’s Honour (at the National in 2003 and in the West End) in which a famous writer is seduced by a journalist barely older than his own outraged daughter.

The model for Margot is clearly Greer (Margot’s life-changing equivalent to The Female Eunuch was The Cerebral Vagina) – and why shouldn’t it be? She’s a public figure to put it mildly and Bernard Shaw based virtually all his characters on contemporary approximations - but the situation is articulated in a way that makes you think just as forcefully of Roland Maule descending on Garry Essendine in Noel Coward’s Present Laughter.

Murray-Smith assembles her arguments in the same dogged way she assembles the cast list: Margot’s crazed daughter Tess (brilliantly done by a wild-eyed Sophie Thompson), teetering on the brink of breakdown in flight from a dull marriage to “safe” husband Bryan (Paul Chahidi); and the last-ditch back-up of a “new man” taxi driver ([Con O’Neill]) and Margot’s gay publisher (Sam Kelly) who wasn’t out of the closet in the late 1960s, but “hovering in the doorway of the armoire.”

The play dates from a Melbourne premiere in 2006, but sometimes feels even more passé than that (we’re all post-feminists now). Still, Atkins is delightful, squeezing laughs from trying to suck Scotch through a straw while manacled to her desk, or wrinkling her features in distaste at the news that her daughter was always mounted on a pedestal by devoted hubby.

And Maxwell Martin animates Molly’s screwed-up plight (her mother gave her away because of Margot’s political prescriptions, and she’s rendered herself barren) with a resourceful energy that betrays the play’s spongy centre and over-zealous insistence on discrediting past radicalism.

- Michael Coveney