Femoid

Anna Sokolova
Apr 6
3 min read

The review

“Femoid” has returned to the stage after being performed recently in Perth and Melbourne. The play, which is written, directed, staged and performed by a group of young women, having returning seasons, must be hitting the contemporary nerve hard.

It is not a story as such, it is a snapshot of two time bubbles of three indeed best-friends-for-life, three high-school girls. One sits in their last year before graduation, and the second one is slightly later. The chain of event interrupting each other, and with only subtle changes of lighting and sound, the narrative is the key in this work. One is fun and cheeky, another is deeply dramatic. One is full of jumping between all possible subjects of various importance, and another is anchored around long-gone history studies. Then a sentence said by Julius Caesar at the river Rubicon, “Alea iacta est” ("the die has been thrown") stuck in their mind, posing the unsolvable question: is the faith really there, and time is set-up and tragedy is inevitable?

The title, “Femoid,” is an insulting slang word used by online Incel (what a repulsive word by itself!) forums, the outrageous society of misogynists, to dehumanise women. The appearance of the internet did a tremendously double-sided thing in society: it has exposed the horrific, sick entities so one knows about them but can just observe, as through unbreakable glass.

This play exposes their existence loud and nonapologetic.

The stage set-up is neutral, a cube to sit or lean on, and flower beds, like a little garden (ever noticed that might be really similar to a graveyard?), surrounding a bit of a space for three girls. And behind, there is a foil-looking screen with words projected on them. They flick quite quickly; it takes time to read what they say, but once it gets in, it makes one feel disgusted. There are quotes from the forums. Even more - credit goes to the playwright here - they are selected so they pervertly correlate with what the girls are doing.

Olive, Piper, and Rory are three (Catholic - they refer to a priest a lot) school girls. Wearing their uniforms - white blouses and flaming red long skirts and cardigans, there are three bright spots, sparkling with emotions, anticipations, fantasies. They are chatty, cute, innocent in their friendship and self-discoveries, at the edge of becoming women in an open world - on one side.

They talk about everything, mostly of course - sex and their own bodies, wishing and pulling back from becoming real grown-ups. Their conversations, if they were exposed to outside of their world, would be appropriate or weird. Hence, they shall not. They belong to their circle, their gender, their age.

And there is a disgusting world of inhuman males, who are like blood-seeking hunters butchering a gentle deer, on another.

This play dares to place close, in distobring way, the victims and the stalkers. It does not offer a solution, and it does not resolve anything, but it will make any woman’s, and especially a mother’s, heart ache. And it will keep feeding the flame of fury for those dirty creatures for whom the only justice must be total isolation.