“As Maud and Agnes, Harriet Pringle and Lizzie White are sensational.”

Editorial Rating: 5 Stars (Nae Bad)

38%. That’s how much domestic violence rates increase when England loses a match. Between the fallen angel and the rising ape, few other statistics lay quite so bare the glaring awfulness of men’s behaviour towards women. In so many contexts. Across class and creed, culture and class something is wrong and it isn’t getting right by itself.

We enter to find ourselves about to go live. The TV studio is abuzz as aspiring leaders Maud and Agnes get ready to be grilled about their clickbait policy options – no men allowed out of the house without written permission, no men in gynaecology, no men allowed to drive. It’s crazy because these things are being suggested for men. Then again, go next door to The Surgeons’ Hall exhibition on ‘Women in Surgery’ and you can see how things once were in the city now so proud to have produced pioneers like Sophia Jex-Blake and Elsie Inglis.

This production asks some pointed, impertinent, and ultra-provocative questions. Are we trying to solve our problems, or are certain clownish performative politicians surfing the tides of frustration and despondency simply for effect? If a man can be elected to the White House or to Downing Street by playing a bafoonish persona for all it is worth, why not two women literally Pagliaccing themselves before the cameras? 

As Maud and Agnes, Harriet Pringle and Lizzie White are sensational. For all the comic exaggeration and effect, these are two highly nuanced performances which also deliver the counterbalancing expressions of anger, loss, and betrayal with heart-string-tugging urgency. Surely scaffolded by exceptionally strong supporting performances by Liz McKenna, Abbie Want and Mukuka Jumah, I have a feeling we will be hearing great things from Pringle and White in the not-too-distant future when this caustic and challenging (but bang on the money) piece of juvenilia (with its unaccountably clumsy ending) has been chalked up to experience.

Here is a show taking risks and winning. Here is a company (Minotaur of the University of East Anglia) living up to its reputation while refusing to rest on past laurels. If the plan was for ‘I’m Not Saying We Should, But What If We Did?’ to showcase talent, push boundaries, and challenge prevailing approaches and orthodoxies, then… job done. Top marks.

Come for the absurdly urgent premise. Stay because you’re going to want to tell folks you saw these performers back when. Get your coats on and go see this! (Chaps, please remember to ask permission of the relevant matriarch before leaving the house.)

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