It is remarkable what Ellen Davies can build from a bowl of fruit, a length of rope and one uninvited guest.
Women-only utopias keep surfacing in fiction, in film, in the kind of online conversations about separatism and female safety that flare up with exhausting regularity. The question of what women build when they opt out of a world that has failed them, and what it costs them, is not a new one, but it feels newly charged. From Women Talking to The Handmaid’s Tale, the reckoning around male violence shows no sign of quieting down – none of it feels particularly abstract at the moment. Ellen Davies is clearly in conversation with all of it. We, The Women Wild is not really a cult story, or not only one, it’s a story about what it takes to make a world without men in it, what gets distorted in the process, and whether the thing you were running from has a way of finding you.
The stage at the Old Red Lion is bare. This is not a caveat but a feature. Davies has stripped the production to almost nothing — bowls of fruit, lengths of rope, dirt on hands and feet — and the effect is to throw everything onto the bodies of the actors. All four of the girls are primal in a way that feels entirely uncontrived: they eat the fruit with their bare hands, move like people who have never been watched, inhabit their bodies with a wildness that never tips into affectation. It’s unselfconscious, committed work, shaped by movement director Freya Sharp, whose influence is visible in every gesture. Rayah (Grace Hey) and Rovin (Emma Cavell King) anchor the piece with a barely-contained electricity between them, but the younger girls are every bit their equals. Aine (Lotus Lilly) and Neera (Olivia Carty) bring their own distinct textures. Carty in particular finds something quietly devastating in a young teenager, rendered almost entirely in gesture of a muddy finger half-placed in the mouth, the particular stillness of someone who hasn’t yet learned that the world finds innocence strange.
All four are dressed in identical old-fashioned white dresses, the visual grammar of the commune doing quiet, efficient work, while the older mothers (Sarah Sealey and Taru Sinclair) carry a touch of green at their hems. The Man (William Bennett), arriving in regular clothes, lands with exactly the right strangeness. He is also, at times, a welcome comic pressure valve, and a smart piece of writing.
The singing is a revelation. The commune’s hymn recurs like a thread being pulled taut, and when the cast move together, ritualistic, sisterly, something haunting settles over the room. Davies has constructed a world with its own mythology and hierarchy almost entirely through performance and language. Fiona Cox’s sound and Eli White’s lighting do the atmospheric heavy lifting that set design might otherwise carry, the shift from communal warmth to something darker handled with real care. Joshua Campbell’s fight choreography and intimacy coordination ensure the production’s more charged moments land with weight rather than awkwardness.
If there is a note, it is only that the world Davies has built is rich enough to sustain more. Questions sit pleasurably unresolved at the edges, about the women we never meet, the history that brought this commune into being, the logistics of a society that has chosen to forget men exist. More could be explored, and one suspects it would not take much such as a line here, a conversation there. The minimalism that makes the production so striking is also, occasionally, where it stops short. There is a version of this play with more room to breathe that would be no bad thing. But in sixty minutes not a moment drags, and the argument could be made that restraint is precisely the point and that a play this spare, this focused on the relationships in front of you rather than the world behind them, earns its gaps. Either way, a piece about what women build to protect themselves, and what finds them anyway, does not feel like a small thing right now.
We, The Women Wild runs until Saturday 30th May at The Old Red Lion Pub and Playhouse, London.