STEPHANIE BROWN draws attention to the hidden labour of the female embroiderers, and how a 19th century replica made no such error
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Play on fractious women's football team struggles for result
Archetypes: The cast of The Wolves
[Manuel Harlan]
MIK SABIERS revels in a band that ploughs an idiosyncratic furrow of expletive laden, guitar-driven alt rock
ANDY HEDGECOCK, MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Synthetic Sincerity, Our Hero, Balthazar, Heartstopper Forever, and A Year In London
The bard invites readers to a gig, raps for Clacton, and lays out the Burnham-Hurzeler conundrum
RON JACOBS recommends an important book that enhances the oppositional theories put forth by Fanon and, in doing so, remakes psychology itself
JAN WOOLF relishes an extensive history of our long relationship to trees in Britain that underlines the current emergency
DIANE WATT argues that while evidence of sex is not there, a 16th‑century lesbian poet could be Scotland’s answer to Gentleman Jack
The Wolves
Theatre Royal Stratford East
THERE’S nothing quite like a rousing chorus of Beyonce’s Who Run The World? followed by the slogan to end all others, “Suck my tampon, bitches!” to announce — in case you missed it amid all the upspeak — that this a play about teenage girls navigating their way through the post-training-bra years.
In Sarah DeLappe's story of a high school indoor “soccer” team from Middle America making their way through the league and hoping to be scouted for college teams, the arguments are about tampon blood and the Khmer Rouge, with the conversations occasionally coalescing gruesomely — “It’s like a mass grave in my bathroom!”
Stretching in unison and gossiping in cliques, the dialogue is superbly handled by director Ellen McDougall’s brilliant cast, but as the play goes on, these archetypal characters buckle under the demands of the script and the narrative simply doesn’t cohere.
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