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Marjorie Yates and Clare-Hope Ashitey |
Descent of a woman?
ORIGINS OF THE SPECIES
Arcola Theatre
“AN archaeologist,” says mildly eccentric Molly, over her tea and cakes by her Yorkshire fireside, “is a man whose life is in ruins”: a joke like one of those she pulls out of her seasonal crackers.
She calls herself an archaeologist too, though in fact she’s more of an anthropological palaeontologist – and tells how she went off to the Olduvai Gorge to join Mary and Louis Leakey with the aim of finding herself a fella. She was looking for a nice hairy man but instead, brushing away the sand on the dig one day, she got a big surprise: a four-million-year-old woman.
Not the ordinary set of fossil bones, when welcomed with a kiss, Sleeping Beauty-like, this woman came to life. Molly called her Victoria and smuggled her back to Yorkshire.
We see it happen as she tells the story and then watch Victoria’s education in this delightfully funny play, which quotes and then refutes the belief of 19th-century father of social psychology Le Bon that “women represent the most inferior form of human evolution.”
Dramatist Bryony Lavery sets her 1987 play, revived to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s famous book, on New Year’s Eve.
She uses a year to represent the whole time span of the universe starting with the Big Bang on January 1. The Milky Way developed on May 1, planet Earth on September 9, micro-organisms invented sex 11 days later and humans arrived in the last few seconds before midnight.
Marjorie Yates’s Molly is played with a lightness that stops this becoming a lecture.
Joyfully, she teaches Victoria names (it is no coincidence they begin with Apple), colours and the use of the imagination. Molly learns in turn as Clare-Hope Ashitey’s Victoria outlines her story: how women discovered fire, invented tools, weapons, and clothing.
Can this reborn, innovative, imaginative woman stop man’s Big Bomb from bringing an end to everything?
This could easily have become obvious and preachy, but with Lavery’s script and Tom Littler’s direction on a cosy and imaginative set by Victoria Johnstone, it is as delightful as the fairy lights that deck it.
Until November 21
020 7503 1646 |
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