Writer: Charlie Josephine
Director: Julia Head
“You’re looking at me. I can see you, you’re looking at me.” Charlie Josephine’s new play Flies, their first to be staged since last year’s I, Joan at the Globe brought them to wider attention, opens with a defiant inversion of the male gaze. The seven young women that make up its cast – all anonymous in the show, and named “Girl 1” to “Girl 7” in the programme – lock eyes with men in the audience, calling them out for looking.
And of course, it’s weird that they do so – this is a play, so the audience is going to look at the actors on stage. But not all attention is wanted, not all looks are welcome – and sometimes “merely” looking, when one knows the subject does not want it, has the impact of a violent act.
The production has assembled its cast from a mix of current attendees and recent graduates from the BRIT School, nearly all of whom are making their professional debuts here. Dressed in a variety of leisurewear, designer Cat Fuller places the seven girls on a white backcloth that rises up from beneath their feet to form both floor and wall – the extent of their world. Martha Godfrey’s sometimes overly dramatic lighting changes push them back whenever they look like they might step off their artificial island – these are women hemmed in by circumstance, who nevertheless persist in pushing boundaries.
Joesphine’s voice as a playwright comes through in discussions of how women can struggle to occupy the same space that men take up (“How can I be the best version of myself, when I’m scared?”, muses one). The girls elaborate on how they are sexualised from a young age – not for nothing is “sexy schoolgirl” a misogynistic trope – and how responses to gendered violence by men are geared towards victim blaming. From carrying keys in one’s fist, taking self-defence classes or even, as was trotted out after the murder of Sarah Everard, “flagging down a passing bus”, Josephine’s script makes the point that putting the focus on women protecting themselves means that when a crime occurs, it’s taken to be a failure on their part.
And the fact that the playwright’s voice is the one putting words in these characters’ mouths is acknowledged. At several points in the play, the girls explicitly tell us what The Writer thinks or is trying to convey. They also muse aloud on what Josephine’s place as a non-binary writer who was assigned female at birth means for their writing: is it an abandonment of femininity? If one of the characters were written as a lesbian, would that affect the way she looked at other women, participating in the destructive nature of the “male” gaze? Such questions do not have answers easy enough to fit into a 70-minute play, and are left as intriguing homework for the audience to ponder further.
There are evocative moments of depth, of pain and fury within the piece, but they are nicely balanced by humour, affection and some raucous dance sequences – sometimes tightly choreographed, often slightly looser than that. It keeps things flowing, ensuring that nothing gets too bogged down and worthy.
But it also means that, by the time it reaches a final, anarchic, conclusion, Flies feels like it is incomplete. We are witness to a draft of something that feels like it has something important to say, but hasn’t yet narrowed its focus enough to decide exactly what.
Still, Flies asks questions of all of us. One of those is whether men would be witnessing the show, commenting upon it or, indeed, reviewing it. But in addressing the way men treat women, it is surely more essential than ever that the questions posed are addressed to men, above anybody else.
Because it is only when men confront their own behaviour that any progress can be made. Anything else is just telling women to flag down a bus.
Continues until 11 March 2023
The Reviews Hub Score
Unfocused
