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