Alice Cavanagh in Gin Sister; photo ​by Sarah Walker.
The experience of alcohol ​in Gin Sister is limited to one young woman’s ​struggle.
Although the play bills itself as ‘the ultimate theatrical response’ to female drinking culture, this show is so youth-focused in every respect that it doesn’t speak to ​a broader audience or reflect anything about the older woman’s life.
It comprises a mash-up of Chekhov characters, a lecture about the damage caused to health by alcohol, dancing, some nice writing in a riffing monologue about identity delivered by Alice Cavanagh that worked very well, the personalization of drink as the character Dino (Dionysus) in myth reworked as contemporary love affair warmly delivered by Emma Hall, and more dancing including a bit of girl-fighting along the way in what was one of the performances weaker moments.
The various elements of the show seem thrown together and Gin Sister suffers from having been overly conceptual yet narrow in scope. There’s not enough of the personal or authentic, or even the really historical, to move the audience. The show doesn’t cohere and it lacks impact due to overuse of dancing.
A work needs to tackle more than drunken sexual disinhibition or romantic disappointment if it’s to take on such a large subject, and it needs to speak to either a wider variety of women. Where’s the story of drink and the indigenous woman? There are many stories that could at least be nodded to. There’s nothing about the gin culture of 18th and 19th century working class London, nothing about ‘mother’s ruin’, remiss when a show calls itself ‘Gin Sister’.
There is too much focus on drinking as a response to failed love without the contributing cultural paradigms being properly tackled.
A set consisting of a river of wine glasses rising into the air makes a beautiful image, ​however the segment where Hall starts drinking out of the full glasses and ends up tipping them over her should perhaps be paced differently. The visual metaphor of a lonely woman sat lonely in the play.
The performances were strong on the whole, and a lot of work has clearly gone into Gin Sister. It’s by no means a failure, not at all, but it needs more work.
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
Gin Sister
Directed by Elizabeth Millington
Performed by Emma Hall, Jean Goodwin and Alice Cavanagh
Trades Hall, The Ballroom
Poppy Seed Festival
