bball.txt --- http://www.nightnews.net/fringe2007.htm#bitch Title: The Bitches' Ball - Penny Dreadful 5 gold bats http://www.myspace.com/thebitchesball 17 08 07 - Hill Street Theatre is a special place at the Fringe where you will have the most 'Narnia' like experiences in the space of time it takes to see one of their shows. This Penny Dreadful and Scamp Theatre co-production has become another high point of the Fringe this year. Inspired by the life of Mary Robinson, 18th century literary figure, poet, actress and courtesan this is the story of an amazing woman whose life and work was suppressed by the overly moralistic Victorian era. The period cast in ones and two's are already draping the stage as the audience enter. Once seated, the production starts shockingly enough as a disabled, older Mary takes a piss into a tin bucket to the requisite sound effects! She drinks from a phial, the toy box musical accompanying this suggests magic and the narrative unfolds, backwards in time. The tone of the show is consistent not only with Mary's sympathies towards the rights of women but in its cutting social satire of her age, her ardent and sympathetic support for the ideals of the French revolution. So as we see young Mary emerge as a literary talent, we also see her make her progress through society, from early finishing school to 'society' but not without reflections on the repulsiveness of the upper classes and social hypocrisy in general! The cast excel at this and don't hold back with their facial expressions or revolting behaviour at appropriate moments, as when they shower latecomers in the front row with spit and cake fragments! Mary's suitor, HRH the Prince of Wales is portrayed as a fickle upper class imbecile. The press is embedded in the gutter then as now, eager to print rumour and gossip as fact, to a readership with an appetite for scandal. The overall effect is of a subversive, revolutionary spoof on a restoration comedy that is as clever, intelligent and cynical, as Mary was understood to be from her writings and sympathies. References to Mary's dark future is never far away as the flashbacks unfold. Abandoned by HRH, Mary's situation demands an insatiable need for monied suitors and protectors. Ultimately this yields a miscarriage, possibly the pox, partial paralysis and other sad rumours of her ruined health. The show makes slick and smooth transitions from one scene to the next, one rich visual tableau to another. The cast are all excellent and Mira Dovreni as Mary Robinson enters into the role with great talent and a rollicking gusto. Though a comedy, the show's ethos is that of biting social comment and satire and in that way that of the pamphleteers of the age and the then revolutionary notions of 'the rights of man.' The last word goes to Mary and the Reynolds portrait of her that inspired the production blinks conspiratorially at us. This show is excellent, Penny Dreadful and Scamp are to be congratulated. By John Vassallo