Origin of the Species

An ageing Yorkshire academic recounts how, on a dig in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanganyika, she once uncovered a four million year-old woman. But instead of a collection of bones, she found a comely and vivacious young thing whom she smuggled back to her Yorkshire cottage, named ‘Victoria’, and taught to sing “On Ilkley Moor bar t’at”.

Aided by her protege’s miraculous aptitude with language, the academic, Molly (played with suitable fireside manner by Marjorie Yates), is able to ascertain that women discovered fire, that our distant African ancestors were occasional cannibals and that, despite being “less of a guzzle guts and less of a chatterbox”, ‘Victoria’ and herself have a remarkable amount in common – not least a mutual distrust of men.

It’s very difficult to get a handle on what exactly Lavery is getting at, primarily because the framework in which she’s saying it is so difficult to accept – not least the fact that for the majority of the play Yates is supposedly playing a much younger version of herself (prompting me to question why the tale is told in flashback?).