Published: 17 June 2010
by JOSH LOEB

THIS series of plays about feminism could not have been better timed by the Tricycle – if they want to preach to the converted.

While most men were cracking open the lagers for the start of the World Cup, critics were consuming all nine short plays in the self-styled home of political theatre’s Women, Power and Politics season during a six-hour press performance. As with the playhouse’s Afghanistan season, which was staged last year and is being revived after WPP finishes, these plays are a mixed lot. They are grouped into two sets: Then and Now.

Lifting the trophy for the best piece in Then was Handbagged by Moira Buffini, which imagines a series of meetings between Margaret Thatcher and the Queen – scenes which go right to the heart of these two women.

Suffragettes in Ulster are the subject of Marie Jones’s The Milliner and The Weaver, while Bloody Wimmin by Lucy Kirkwood takes an amusing look at goings-on in the women’s peace camp at RAF Greenham Common in the 1980s, but revealed little that was genuinely new.

Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s The Lioness was the heaviest of the set – a macabre mini-portrait of Queen Elizabeth I which captures the monarch’s ruthlessness but which will probably prove too dark and impenetrable for most. 

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