Vagina Monologues
Liverpool Empire
How can you laugh at a woman’s private parts? Well the whole audience did at the Liverpool Empire when the Vagina Monologues hit the stage with three well-known local actresses who reclaimed the ‘invisible’ V word.
Local girls Jennifer Ellison, Sue Jenkins, and Cathy Tyson did a sterling job acting out the mainly hilarious tales from the pen of the talented Eve Ensler,
The three women sat on stools, dressed in black, with just a simple black backdrop sparkled with starlights. The focus and impact was on the tales, some hilarious, some extremely disturbing. One that made its mark was the story of six Bosnian young women and the trauma of their violation by soldiers during the war.
But generally the tales were honest real-life revelations from women both in UK and USA. Ellison Jenkins and Tyson acted out the tales that revealed how much fear and ignorance there is in the world where women are not encouraged to talk about ‘down there’.
But it was all done in the best possible taste, as fellow scouser Kenny Everett was prone to say.
There was a sprinkling of brave men in the audience who also found the accounts uproariously funny. And there was also some audience participation with one half pitted against the other to shout out loud the c**t word. It sounds weird on paper, but the audience were up for it and readily got into the mood, joining together to repudiate the closeted world of female repression.
And we were also educated in the myriad of words for ‘down there’ from all over the world, some funny, some strange, some rather unsavoury! We also learnt that 100million to 140million women suffer genital mutilation each year, 15,000 of them in Britain, leading to damage, infection pain or even death.
But the ending put it all in context with all three actresses touchingly elucidating the wonderment of birth – the raison d’etre, apart from pleasure, for that piece of a woman’s anatomy that has so many names!!
Rating: 8/10
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