Review: DI AND VIV AND ROSE at Rumpus, Bowden

Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Saturday 16th July 2022.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least by me and my mentor, Myk Mykyta, that most modern plays are twenty minutes too long. Contemporary audiences have been conditioned by films and, especially, television to pick up the thread of a story very quickly. After all every millisecond of screen time costs 'squillions'. Live theatre can take its time and, while this new show from The Corseted Rabbits Collective, at Rumpus, Di and Viv and Rose, could be twenty minutes shorter, the establishment of character and story is done with such warmth and focus as to carry you along nicely.

Three young women share a house with the usual clashes of personality and culture that have marked shared student houses since for ever. Amelia Bullmore's recreation of the long friendship between the three women is delivered with grace and an easy rapport between the performers. Director Rachel Burke is the fourth member of the team and has worked so closely with them that the energy is unimpeded.

Georgia Laity's intense academic, Viv, and Julia Vosnakis' sporty lesbian, Di, are the perfect foil for Isabel Vanhakartano's Rose. She's the energy bunny whose crowded sex life, number crunching indeed, leaves her with some wonderful memories and half-Japanese twins. Men are mentioned and manifest offstage: landlords, stepfathers, boyfriends. The play is about the women. Apply a theatrical Bechdel test and this play scores highly.

The most confronting moment when one of the three is raped by a knife wielding burglar is softened by the care shown to Di by her housemates, and the later developments in their lives, Di's crippling spinal tumours and Rose's accidental death are also just touched on, and add layers of emotional orchestration to the end of the play.

There's one idea followed through in the play that I responded to perhaps more than most men, having boned a couple of corsets in my theatre days. The corset is frequently seen by feminist observers as an act of oppression against a woman's natural shape, a real coercion of the body to fit the male ideal. It's her study of the corset that gives Viv her way into a career in the world of fashion academia. She's also ready to make one for Rose to conceal her pregnancy.

The program was available in the new format in which you point your phone at the QR code and it downloads to you. My phone still hasn't got the hang of that so when I went home, I Googled Corsetted Bunnies. Straight to the Playboy Club. Such a witty statement of identity.

The play is so well chosen for this collective, so tailored to their talents, that I'm hoping another such play can be found for them, or perhaps even written for them.

I have to say that three print reviewers attending on the opening night were, and still are, male.

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