The Time Machine: A Radical Feminist Retelling from Jordan & Skinner is a fine piece of theatre in every respect, and refreshingly uncensorious.
📍Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
📅 3rd – 5th November
💷 Standard £15, several concessions available
🕖 7:30pm
🕖 Running time (approx.): 1 hours 10 minutes (no interval)
✍️ Devised by: Jordan & Skinner with the Cast
🎬 Director: Caitlin Skinner
🛠️ Designer: Christine Ting-Huan Urquhart
📝 Producer: Li Kennedy
🎂 12+
🎭 Wheelchair Accessible Venue, Captioned: 3rd Nov, BSL Interpreted: 4th Nov
Melanie Jordan and Caitlin Skinner, better known as Jordan & Skinner enjoy an enviable reputation for producing thought provoking, anger-infused theatre with an intersectional feminist agenda. I say enviable because not only does their reputation countenance subject, but also quality. Their work began winning awards in 2014, and one way or another, has made such recognition into a habit.
However, in titling their newest work, The Time Machine: A Radical Feminist Retelling, one might be forgiven for worrying whether cause hasn’t overtaken art. Fortunately, such concerns can be safely left to rest for, though the play’s agenda is precisely as stated, the show is a seriously slick piece of serious, and seriously comic theatre.
Essentially a narrative palimpsest, the show layers an abbreviated, and perhaps surprisingly faithful telling of H.G. Wells ‘The Time Machine’, atop the story of four contemporary feminists planning for the post-apocalypse from their battery-powered bunker. The connecting motif you may well be able to guess…’Eat the Rich.’
The four performers, Melanie Jordan, Amy Conachan, Gabrielle Monica Hughes, Itxaso Moreno interchange the role of Well’s time-traveller by means of a substantial top-hat. It’s a neat, and effective device, averting the least confusion, and enabling a slick, and seamless telling of the story. Neatly integrated dramatically, but entirely distinct narratively, the four, taking the names one, two, three, and four, busy themselves with the adventures, politics, and worries of a bunker-full of feminists.
Where the time travel thread is handled with admirable gravity, it’s in this contemporary strand, that The Time Machine: A Radical Feminist Retelling, finds its humour, and the space to explore its thesis. What is that thesis? Quite simply whether the world’s governance has slid so deep into the toilet of corruption & inequality, that all there’s left to do is plan for the post-apocalypse.
That might not sound like the basis for a good time, but it really is. There’s nothing preachy, or self-righteous on offer: this is practical radical feminism. You know, the sort where women build each other up, fall out, periodically wish to throw one another in the nearest bin, but ultimately agree that the world really could be a better place if hyper-wealthy people, predominantly men, didn’t run the world exclusively for their own benefit?
The bunker plot, as it were, revolves around a tub of sperm samples secured by Itxaso Moreno’s character upon taking a jokey plan for re-populating the world, seriously. Promptly frozen, this ‘seed’ store pushes the inhabitants to consider the best candidate for turkey baster fertilization, and to thoughts of ‘the people’s baby.’ It’s ensemble performance of a very high standard, the dialogue natural, and the discussions organic, rather than forced by noble intention.
Faced with the reality of prospective motherhood, moral rectitude and female solidarity are put to a very practical test. Efforts to discern who’d make the best mother are not blessed with volunteers, and so first, an ovulation chart, and finally rock, paper, scissors are used to pick a womb.
‘Are we trying to win, or lose?’ asks Amy Conachan’s character, belaying the conflict at play.
The play is, let me re-state, very funny, whether it’s discussing the state of a woman’s discharge, or in the friction between organised and chirpy Melanie Jordan and the free spirited Gabrielle Monica Hughes. Itxaso Moreno is an absolute joy, fizzing like an energizer bunny, her perimenopausal character most definitely ‘still in the game’ in all matters baby making.
There’s one fabulous scene where the four discuss their hopes for ‘the people’s baby’, the aspirations beginning nobly be it ‘to be loving’, or ‘understanding’, but ending up a little more practical. Hopes that ‘the people’s baby be good at playing by themselves,’ or that ‘the people’s baby be tall’ acknowledge the interface between virtue, and reality. The discussion then countenances the possibility that baby will be an awful human being, perhaps through nature, or made so by societal pressures. The comedy shifts through shades of pale towards black, lending its discussion of issues a grounded humanity.
The play proves no less deft when handling H.G. Wells well-known story, and it’s in this enactment that the company foregrounds a remarkable physicality amongst its cast. Each actor proves equal to the hat, but Conachan, excellent in the NTS’s recent ‘Orphans’, proves a particularly arresting narrator. The story, if unknown to you dear reader, revolves around one man’s journey to the year 802,701, and the discovery of humanity’s evolution into two distinct orders, the child-like, indolent Eloi, and the subterranean Morlocks. The latter provide the industry to guarantee the former’s luxurious want for nothing…and periodically eat them.
It’s an adventure tale, and despite emphasising the inherent societal messages, this remains true in the company’s rendition. Christine Ting-Huan Urquhart’s set, ostensibly a pair of square steel arches proves immensely atmospheric when bathed in smoke, and Simon Hayes‘ atmospheric lighting design. About this frame, our intrepid quad scramble, exploring this future world of light and shadow, in a viscerally physical tour-de-force. There’s a genuine sense of both wonder and horror attending this fine, and rather faithful telling of the story. It also offers a fine paradigm reversal, wherein its the rich who have ceased to struggle, and thus become meat for their former servants.
Now, perhaps there is a slight imbalance in strength of performance, belying the varying degrees of experience within the cast, but it’s never to the point of derailing either drama or comedy. No, this a fine piece of theatre.
The shifts between bunker and time-traveller are a particularly slick affair, clearly sign-posted through sound design from Novasound, and purposeful, ambitious choreography thanks to movement director Emma Jayne Park. The two narratives combine with a fluid tempo, each episode segueing to the next easily, but without any awkward forcing. The two narrative strands slip between each other happily, the connections clear, and in no need of heavy handed exposition.
Where in the present-ish day bunker, the 4 women are sometimes pushed to surrender, to lash out at the apparent futility of trying to change the world, H.G. Well’s story offers a fabulous answer. Cease to struggle, and expect to be eaten; keep up the fight and just maybe you can reverse roles when the dinner-gong sounds. Which isn’t to say Jordan & Skinner’s The Time Machine: A Radical Feminist Retelling, is advocating actually eating the rich. Composting will do.
(Photography Credits: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)
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If you CAN repopulate the world, should you? Fascinating – and what would you owe that baby and possibly its siblings? At least the possibility of growing up? Having a grownup around until they are established?
Wish I could see what they chose. And why.