‘IF you had a time machine, where would you go?” It’s a game that, thanks to H.G. Wells’s famous 1895 sci-fi novella The Time Machine, most of us have played.
Some of us might fancy travelling back 4.4 million years to east Africa to see some of the earliest humans or to Copenhagen in August 1910 to hear Clara Zetkin address the historic International Socialist Women’s conference. The possibilities are, of course, endless.
In The Time Machine: A Radical Feminist Retelling, theatre company Jordan & Skinner (aka Melanie Jordan and Caitlin Skinner) opt for a dystopian near future in which four feminist activists are holed up in a survivalist bunker. The late-capitalist apocalypse is, they believe, right around the corner, and it is down to them to come up with strategies for survival, revenge and the eventual creation of an egalitarian society.
Fear not, however, the play – which is devised by Jordan & Skinner with the company and directed by Caitlin Skinner – is not a po-faced political treatise. Imagine, instead, a collaboration between comedian and activist Kate Smurthwaite, Samuel Beckett (whose dystopian drama Endgame comes to mind) and the makers of Channel 4 film series The Comic Strip (in its 1980s/90s heyday).
Jordan & Skinner may have an avowedly progressive political agenda, but they are perfectly happy to have a laugh at the expense of the intersectional movements against oppression that they support. In one scene, the quartet (who are a sort of feminist version of Dennis and his anarcho-syndicalist commune from Monty Python and the Holy Grail) squabble after one of their number announces that she has taken a shower.
The problem is, these ablutions were in contravention of the water rationing rules set down in one of the group’s carefully-minuted meetings. The ensuing argument does not suggest that these four are capable of setting down the foundations of a progressive, post-capitalist social order.
This self-satirisation is typical of the comic strand in the piece, which includes the pictured face of Donald Trump being stabbed with a digging fork. Soon after – while displaying a banner reading “Eat the Rich” – the activists are speculating energetically (and in graphic, booze-fuelled detail) about which members of the higher orders they would kill, mutilate and consume.
By this point, it’s clear that their feminism has taken a turn towards Valerie Solanas and her SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto and a particularly bloodthirsty variant of anarchism. The flipside to this explosion of high-octane revolutionary cannibalism is the scene in which the hungover characters engage in sober, fatalistic reflection about the hopelessness of the human condition.
There are things to admire in these bold speculations. However, too often, the writing displays the anger of a Comic Strip film without the essential wit to make that rage truly funny.
The lack of subtlety in the writing is exposed when it is placed beside Wells’s elegant prose, which tops and tails the show. Frustratingly, for a play of political futurism, this adaptation generates more heat than light.
Touring until November 9: jordanandskinner.com
