Theatre review: Hormonal Housewives

Published on Thursday 25 February 2010 18:04

HORMONAL HOUSEWIVES ** EDINBURGH FESTIVAL THEATRE

CAROL Smillie has already told the press that her role in Hormonal Housewives could mean the end of her marriage, so cruel are some of the jokes about men that emerge from this two-and-a-half-hour sketch show about the current state of the sex war. Even if the Smillie marriage survives the strain, though, I'm here to report that there were moments when I felt this staggeringly uneven touring show, soon heading onward to Inverness, Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen, might well be the death of me.

It's not, let's be clear, that there are no funny moments in Julie Coombes and John McIsaac's script. In the course of 15 scenes – written for a cast of three including Coombes herself, and designed by Philip Witcomb and Steven Jonas with a spectacular, ever-changing backdrop of silhouetted female images, light and flame – the show scores one or two memorable bullseyes; I particularly liked Coombes's sharp-tongued underclass mum, half-heartedly trying to persuade a court that pre-menstrual tension was responsible for her assault on her useless boyfriend. The cast are also hard to resist. Carol Smillie is a beautiful mover and a good actress, even in a full pointy-bra Madonna outfit. Coombes has moments of comic genius; and the lovely Shonagh Price is a hugely talented all-rounder.

But in the end, the material is just too confused, and too variable in quality, to sustain a show of this length; at least two of the sketches – one at a New Age rebirthing class, the other in an old folks' home – are painfully reactionary and unfunny. The show's problem, in the end, is that it simply can't decide whether women still have good reason to be angry, or are just comic victims of their own hormones. And until it makes its mind up about that, it's likely to remain a bit of a mess.