Rage can come in many forms, and be directed at many different things. Some can rage against their position in society, rage against their domestic circumstances, or rage against their own, uncontrollable feelings. Individually it might seem like this rage is unquantifiable, at times irrational, but only when placed in a rich tableau of different individual experiences do it’s intricacies and intersectionalities emerge.
That’s the joy of Jen Silverman’s luscious Collective Rage, currently running at Southwark Playhouse. We are introduced to five Betties – woman in different social, racial and personal circumstances, who agree to perform a devised production based on a play within a play – based loosely on the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe. We meet Betty One, a privileged yet frustrated older wife, Betty Two, married, repressed and almost entirely unaware of her own body, Betty Three, desperate to direct the play, Betty Four, desperate to facilitate Betty Three’s vision and escape in her truck, and Betty Five, recently released from prison and running her own boxing club.
The foreword to Silverman’s text describes the show aptly – “Do you remember when you were in middle school, and you read about Shackleton and how he explored the Antarctic? Imagine the Antarctic as a pussy and it’s sort of like that.”
Silverman gives us the lives and the frustrations of Betties – some desperate not to be who they are, others desperate to let others know exactly what they mean. The different ideologies coalesce, collide and collude. It’s anarchic, exciting and, though with no shortage of rough edges, thrillingly fun. Betty Two, capably handled by Lucy McCormick, transforms in front of our eyes, teasing out aspects of her character’s psychology while also letting Silverman’s comedy work its magic.
The gendered commentary within the show is also unceasingly didactic but never preached. Betty Five (Genesis Lynea), for example, while using female pronouns, never identifies herself as a woman. When she begins to adopt the persona of Betty One’s incommunicative husband Richard (as part of a subversive romantic engagement between One and Five), it’s an apt reflection on the performativity of gendered norms – binaries are as easy to put on, but also as easy to take off, as a tailored blue suit.
Photo credit: Jack Sain
Charlie Parham’s direction is fluid, interspersing the Betties’ scenes with ironic pre-recorded jabs at modern pop culture (everything from Sex and the City to La La Land is given a suitable dressing down) while Anna Reid’s design, part changing room and part locker room (this is locker room talk of a radically more progressive sort), lets the show feel suitably liminal in a consistently versatile Southwark Playhouse space. Even the theatre itself is presenting a fluid, uncategorised identity.
The meta-theatre lets Silverman also have a cheeky jab at audiences, especially the typically middle class audiences that flock to performances night after night. The ones that to the ‘thee-at-terrr’ as Betty Three calls it (Beatriz Romilly, worlds away from her performance in Much Ado at the Globe last year).
It all ends up as a show happy to play with our perspective of performance. Gender is a performance. Sometimes that performance is empowering, other times it is debilitating. Assuming a role can be comforting, a relief, but it can also be frustrating. And that’s when the rage comes out.
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