It’s a brilliant exposure of the invasiveness and violence lurking just below the surface of our sexual discourses. “ Where are you putting your fingers?” he asks at one point. He employs all the established clichés available to him, with talk of spreading and screwing and pounding, but isn’t so aroused when the roles are reversed. It opens on a man (Gareth Reeves) and a woman (Sophie Ross) about to have sex. Language is Birch’s central interest here – its tendency to codify and constrict women’s experience in ways we don’t even notice – and she manages to elicit some hilarious exchanges by inverting our expectations.
The fraught relationship society has with women’s bodies and the language used to describe them only seems to deepen with each passing year. back in 2013, but given recent events around the world like the Women’s March on Washington and the Daily Mail’s sexist headline about Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon, the work could easily have been conceived in the white heat of now.
UK playwright Alice Birch wrote her play Revolt.
