In her essay, Women and Fiction, Virginia Woolf discussed why women throughout history were so limited in achieving success in literature. The essay and the series of lectures it evolved into in 1928, remain a potent feminist examination on three areas: what women are like, women and the fiction they write, and women and the fiction written about them.
In A Room of One's Own Peta Hanrahan has taken Woolf's words and adapted them for the stage putting her 90-year-old thoughts under a compelling new light. First performed in 2016 at La Mama Theatre, Hanrahan's production returns for a second season at fortyfive downstairs with four actors expressing Woolf's thoughts and ideas as if they were an internal dialogue. Hanrahan eloquently interprets these to present an intelligent and articulate conversation on feminism while ensuring a relevance to the contemporary world we live in.
In Laura Eason's Sex With Strangers, a female
novelist meets a male blogger at a bed and breakfast in rural
Michigan. She loves books, he prefers ebooks. She likes reading the classics, he prefers living writers. She prefers to keep her private life private, he lives his life on-line. Despite their differences, the two are drawn to each other and are forced to question the choices they've made in their lives and the ones they are going to have to make in the future.
Will Atkinson offers a strong
performance as Ethan, finding the right balance of brashness, cockiness and
arrogance to his sweet, charismatic and endearing nature. Ethan is the type of
guy that many of us despise but secretly want to be and it's Atkinson's work in
Sex With Strangers that really has you debating this position.
A book club: where everyone has great
intentions to read the book but, for some reason, never seem to have the time.
Either that, or the meeting itself turns out to be an opportunity to talk about
everything - but the novel. In The Book Club, middle-class suburban
housewife, Deb Martin seems to have found the perfect literary social club, but a few
indiscretions and a blurring of fact and fiction begin to create some
interesting moments for Deb.
Amanda Muggleton is completely at ease with the demands of this production
which, in her case, is portraying every single character – male and female – and
relying on nothing but her facial expressions, body language and voice for
differentiation. Her comedy timing and physicality is spot on and while she
plays these characters as “big”, Muggleton still manages to retain an honesty
and authenticity to them all.
