Simon Jenner wrote a review of Zana Hoxha’s play Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again, published on fringereview.co.uk.
You can read his review below:
Alice Birch – Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again
Alice Birch’s 2014 RSC play delivers its title. Director Zana Hoxha takes some directions literally and has them voiced. Above all Birch’s exhortation not to be well-behaved. It’s a revolutionary open text with dynamic exceptions and inflammatory potential. Hoxha seizes on this, alters details and confirms its freshness with a few tweaks.
With Hoxha ‘bad behaviour’ extends to Birch”s text as she cuts the last two pages: a brief Act Four where four women commune on the difficulty of the struggle. Instead Revolt concludes in the previous monologue delivered by Natalie May: a self-immolatory one ending abruptly in an act. Hoxha goes for theatricality all through, stripping out provisional hope. In her production, there’s even less of it than Birch allowed. We glimpse a dystopic future where just a few women cling on.
Tanaka Mpofu also sings; there’s an improv opening. And despite Birch’s direction of no set, Grace Rumsey’s one of blue-green sea-wrack portends world-ending drek scurfed round. Evocative costume changes add texture and signal scene-changes.
A water melon’s detritus liquifies a shopping aisle whilst (not literally) a punter strips off, questions shop-floor managers’ motives: their misogynistic language is transformed. There’s much floor mopping.
If Birch was writing this a few years later she might have opted for the gender fluidity and exclusion of male actors as here. It works memorably (with May and Mpofu for instance in the opening anti-seduction scene). When performative male roles are indicated through language, they’re reclaimed as different levels of oppression women experience: in structural relationships from sex to work.
Patriarchy extends everywhere but in the opening section language (even “penis”) is appropriated as possession, here subverted by Birch as the female or ‘possessed’ role takes power, through language. It’s done with delicious humour and (considering later scenes) optimism.
In work scenes that structure is challenged: three employees want Monday off where the employer (Xixi Xiao in whip-crack mode) asserts they own the faces, even smiles of their employees.
Hoxha’s sheer theatricality works even if some subtlety is jettisoned with (say) Act Four’s rapprochement excised. Revolt already plays with open form – and subverts traditional scenes with named roles. (Ghoti Fisher’s lighting tracks performances with versatility.)
This works well in a formalised three hander. Olive McHugh often delivers speeches of affect and is central here. Where Xiao remains almost mute, May growls in a turban. In a Chekhovian-looking tea party a mother furiously confronts her own mother’s implacable coldness; the granddaughter utters “nightingale” and stray words. However these two unite against the more vociferous middle generation in an astonishing act (one Birch prescribed elsewhere in different guises too, faithfully followed).
Hoxha keeps pace limber, with an exuberantly gifted cast. There have been virtuosic deliveries of some monologues: Hoxha’s team refuse such easy aplomb and applause. A few words are substituted like “genocide”. It fits this even chillier climate.
Revolt has shifted here, oppression internalised. Whilst non-specific around gender, the performative element underscores how post #MeToo feminism has adopted self-interrogative critiques that blow apart even the binaries of Revolt.
A reaffirmation of Birch’s brilliance, not withstanding cuts. An essential update on the struggle, Hoxha’s Revolt hurls defiance in the face of despair.
Olive McHugh Tanaka Mpofu Xixi Xiao Natalia May
Voice Actors : Gloria Olajide, Alex Holliday, Diego Zozaya , James Walsh, Robert Furey, Samuel Ferrer
Writer Alice Birch Director Zana Hxoha Set and Costume Designer Grace Rumsey Lighting Designer Ghoti Fisher Sound Designer Aidan Gibson Movement Director Kristin Fredrickson Instrument Consultant Julia Deng Hanzu Stage Manager Ace Turner Set and Costume Assistant Xiaomin Fan
