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Airswimming
by Charlotte Jones
Director- Brenden Lovett
Hen & Chickens Theatre
4 - 22 May 2010
A review by Bernie Whelan for EXTRA! EXTRA! Surprisingly accomplished for a first play and based on a true story, Airswimming has everything you could possibly want from a trip to the theatre. The writing has a Beckettian emotional depth and integrity but conjures humour and promethean acts of transcendence out of the indignity and plain drudgery of living, in this case, with the consequences of female non-conformity for two 1920s flappers. Samuel Beckett famously objected to women playing Waiting for Godot in the 1980s, Charlotte Jones has written a kind of answer with this play. By turns, the stage became the bathroom of St Dymphna's asylum for the criminally insane which the two women, significantly called Dora and Persephone, are condemned to clean for fifty years and then the council flat where they finally find a kind of freedom in their old age, although these time frames are deliberately confused at the outset to highlight the disorienting effects of institutionalization where everything depends on being able to tell the 'horrible hairy brute of a man' what year it is. The man who questions Persephone is the doctor who has the power to keep these women imprisoned but also Hades, who kidnaps Persephone for half of her life to ravage her in the underworld and also perhaps Freud, who famously analyzed Dora as the classic hysteric, a case history much contested by modern feminists. The play is so rich in allusion to women's lack of self-determination throughout history, as Dora's encyclopedic knowledge often reminds us, that being a mad woman, or a witch, or at least a non-conformist seems the only sane response, but these women are brought to life with such empathy that their experiences at times take on a universal quality. After fifty years of hell, they stop being who they were and become Dorph and Porph, two characters who rehearse their roles of sensible pragmatist and impossible fantasist in order to prop each other up and survive the violent irruptions of memory which constantly threaten to destroy them ('Why do people do such terrible things?'). They are like Beckett's Estragon ('I can't go on like this') and Vladimir ('That's what you think') in the way they keep each other going while keeping the audience engrossed throughout. As Dora says early in the play, quoting Hamlet, 'there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so' and it is through fantasy that the women escape the boredom, frustration and mind-shattering injustice of their circumstances. Dora (Jane Dodd) plays at being a soldier, a woman who can be more of a man than most men in a man's world. Persephone (Ellen Gylen) takes the social construction of female gender to its most camp extreme but logical conclusion in the role of Doris Day with the aid of a madly disheveled wig. Perhaps all gender roles are performances, as Marjorie Garber argues in Vested Interests (1992), although being male proved fatal for Dora's three older brothers in the First World War and wasn’t much fun for those shell-shocked men who survived, hysteria proving to be more than just the female malady Freud had diagnosed. It is through love for and loss of her brothers that Dora acts the soldier, smoking cigars and dressing up until her father commits her and Persephone's romantic dream leads to illegitimate pregnancy, separation from her' little fish' and an identical fate in Saint Dympha's. These two wonderful, vibrant women’s eyes meet across an imagined ballroom floor escaping the cold tiles of asylum reality in 1926 and they are still dancing after release in their late seventies council flat. The interregnum between the wars was a time of flux, allowing challenges to traditional gender roles to flourish in literature and producing the womanly man of Joyce’s Ulysses and the manly woman enacted in the writing and persona of Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Townsend Warner, both cigar smoking cross-dressers. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando goes both ways in one novel, having a baby like Persephone but also soldiering like Dora. However, this play isn't about a butch/femme couple so much as the power of friendship, or the rather old fashioned sounding concept of sisterhood, in overcoming isolation and its concomitant despair. The women were convincingly played by Jane Dodd (Dora) as a kind of Colonel Blimp to Ellen Gylen's foolish ingénue (Persephone). When they first meet in the mental institution, it is Dora Kitson who initiates Persephone Baker in the art of tackling each day's menial task as it comes, making major concessions to Persephone's devotion to dancing and the dreamed up romance of the 'coming out' party she never had. However, Persephone is not without her own resources, she teaches Dora how to dream and Dora comes up with the decidedly un-Blimpish fantasy of being rescued by a brigade of brave Bolshevik women soldiers who would rush the steps of the asylum toilet block as if it were the Winter Palace in Eisenstein’s film October (‘I would have to get them widened’). Later, in one of the most moving scenes of the play, we understand that Persephone's mental strength and capacity to endure has grown throughout her incarceration while Dora's has waned, so their trajectories allow them to take turns in rescuing each other. Persephone's creative ability to imagine happiness, even through the fake male-manufactured model of female perfection that is her idol, Doris Day, turns out to be the key to their survival. Dora attempts to smash the fantasy by telling Persephone that Doris Day was 'a dyke, a common carpet-muncher' because she knows they have been forgotten in the underworld. Unlike the Persephone of Greek myth, no one loves them enough to bring them back, even for a half life. However, when Dora despairs, Persephone refuses to allow the harsh reality of their wasted lives to crush her and they go 'airswimming'. The snatches of Doris Day songs, sung so sweetly by Ellen Gylen and sometimes seeming to crackle from a record player which cleverly appears and disappears on set, were full of longing and nostalgia for a preposterously romantic notion of femininity which is ridiculous in the circumstances yet still somehow strangely compelling. Working with women who often have to cope with cruelty, injustice and the mental health problems which, sometimes result, my mind was already open to this play. It did so much more than I expected it would, it blew my heart open too.
Box Office: 020 7704 2001 £13
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