The Riverfront, Newport, Wed 23 Jun 2010 (7.30pm)
The Grand Pavilion, Porthcawl, Thurs 24 Jun (1.30pm/7.30pm)
Tickets: £12 (£10)
It would be easy to dismiss Carol Ann Duffy’s collection, The World’s Wife, as a feminist rant trying to counter the view that hardly any women did anything important in the olden days. Yet, published in 1999, the work captures a significant moment in time, as Duffy settles the score by filling in the gaps that his-story left before the turn of the millennium. Poems that speculate on the lives of real people who were lost in the shadows of history are combined with elegantly fashioned transgendered rewritings. The historic significance of women is recognised, and their mythology is imagined with just as much passion and hyperbole as that for their male counterparts.
Performing this collection by the now-Poet Laureate is a very hard task indeed. With characters as diverse as Medusa, Pope Joan, Frau Freud and Queen Kong, the leaps of time and imagination are enormous. This feat is rendered especially difficult if the cast consists of just one woman. Yet Linda Marlowe gains mastery over this near-impossible task in her latest solo show. Her confident articulation brings the strength of a medieval knight and the power of an ancient king to these stories, and she even manages to add a twist of unmistakably feminine charm.
Marlowe is quick to admit the universal appeal of these poems, claiming that Duffy has covered a ‘wonderfully colourful spectrum of women’. Taking this as her starting point, the actress elegantly draws on Duffy’s tales with an undeniable sophistication and marches through these diverse and timeless tales with a warming sense of ease.
The appeal of this show firmly lies in how it fuses recitation and performance. As Marlowe dances around her stage, falling about like a gorilla and jumping off chairs, she breathes new life into Duffy’s collection, allowing these beautiful works, confined to GCSE and A-Level classrooms all over the country, to rise off the page.
Marlowe is a storyteller with a difference, an elegant shape-shifter passing seamlessly from character to character and from century to century. Through this triumphant sprint through history, she teasingly strips her audience of any expectations and firmly proves that behind every great man in history there was a witty, intelligent and alluring woman.
