The Fruit Trilogy

West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds

THE Vagina Monologues playwright Eve Ensler's Avocado at this venue last year explored the plight of an underage sex worker who’s seeking asylum in an unknown country. It's performed in near total darkness within a shipping container full of rotting fruit and at at one point the character wryly notes that she spends her whole life stopping avocados and cocks getting soft.

Boosted by its success, Ensler penned two companion pieces that continue her exploration of the endemic commodification of women’s bodies and their struggle to reclaim them.

Pomegranate, which opens the trilogy, shifts confinement from within the shipping container to that of a supermarket shelf. Featuring the disembodied, price-labelled heads of two brothel workers (Amelia Donkor and Carla Harrison-Hodge), it follows their sometimes tart observations on their status as “merchandise.”

Contrasting Item One’s impossible possibility of hope with Item Two’s pragmatism of being figuratively dead, their lack of names is a poignant indicator of how far removed they are from owing their own fates and bodies.

It's towards a reclamation of the body that the final playlet, Coconut, turns its attention. The most optimistic piece of the evening, it has a young woman emerging from a bath and massaging coconut oil into her feet.

As she does so, she provides a commentary about her bodily experiences and, less successfully, the mysticism of being part of “the collective sister body.”

This cod-spiritual language makes the piece rather hard to swallow and while, in common with the other two mini-plays, it provides plenty of fruit for thought it ultimately leaves the audience feeling pretty hungry.

Runs until April 9, box office: wyp.org.uk

Review by Susan Darlington