female parts: shorts
We may be coming to the end of award season and the many impassioned #TimesUp speeches of men and women alike may fizzle out, but there’s still plenty more to talk about when it comes to women in the arts space and beyond.
The Female Parts season at Hoxton Hall is in full swing and in case you missed some of the earlier productions, such as five star rated Oranges & Elephants, the discourse is still ongoing within the historic music hall.
Moving away from the glitz and glam of Hollywood stars grabbing the headlines about what it’s like to be a woman in the 21st Century, Hoxton Hall artistic director Karena Johnson takes us to the more relatable with three short plays she’s directed entitled A Woman Alone, The Immigrant and A Mother.
In these three monologues written by Franca Rame & Dario Fo and Oneness Sankara, Female Parts: Shorts explores what it means to be a wife, a mother, a lover, a worker, an immigrant, and ultimately a woman.
Although Rame and Fo’s work was written at the end of the 20th Century, A Woman Alone and A Mother do not feel in any way out of place amongst this line-up of contemporary conversations. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. And Oneness Sankara’s Hoxton Hall commissioned The Immigrant has been a hot topic conversation for years from the early Caribbean Windrush settlers to the war-torn displaced refugees of today. These plays remind us that we are never just one thing, defined by one role, regardless of what society sees us as.
Billed as confessionals, A Woman Alone, The Immigrant and A Mother (performed by Gehane Strehler, Clare Perkins and Libby Watson respectively), are small shining glimpses into the inner thoughts, fears, desires and realisations we all have when trying to understand who we are, where we’ve come from and how we move forward.
“...there’s still plenty more to talk about when it comes to women in the arts space and beyond.”
Though seen and spoken through the eyes and mouths for three women, there is something to take away for everyone in the performance of Female Parts: Shorts. There is never just one story to tell or one side to take, but the conversations are there to be had and if there’s anything the Female Parts season does best, it’s to be a part of that conversation.
Karena Johnson’s Female Parts: Shorts runs from Tuesday 13th March - Saturday 31st March, with a special post-show talk with Johnson on Wednesday 28th March after the 19:30 performance.