There are few more thankless
tasks known to humankind than housework. You wash and wipe, dust and sweep, but
every effort is in vain: skin continues flaking, meals need making, detritus
gathers; blink and it's time to wash and wipe and dust and sweep all over
again. Endless meaningless cycles without progress. No wonder patriarchal
forces ordained domestic labour women's work.
It's typical of the
playfulness of Domestic Labour: A Study in Love that its three female
performers abandon the cycle of cleaning – with a wet cloth and a dry cloth –
to pose on a bicycle, wedged incongruously in the ranks of an old-fashioned
radiator. With huge coloured goggles and puffed-up hair, wielding ancient
cotton-bag vacuum cleaners, the women look like models in a 1960s advertisement
– an image they subvert by exploding an inner tube, makeshift insurgents
enacting what small protest they can. Throughout, there are intriguing glimpses
of women refusing to conform: in the memory of an Iranian grandmother who,
outraged by new, progressive laws banning the chador, refused to be seen in
public, instead criss-crossing the city via a ladder and its roofs; in lengthy
extracts from the western Johnny Guitar, Joan Crawford sharp, self-possessed,
“more man” than woman. The hangdog housewife whose voice dominates, longing for
a room of her own yet not even allowed a desk, sounds insipid by comparison.
The women's stories sit on
stage like pieces of broken china; it's not always clear what the connection is
between them, or what generation or country they exist in. A male voice – also
spoken by the female performers – could act like glue, but instead muddles the
fragments of narrative further. He is Iranian, more concerned with distant
revolution than dust motes on the furniture, apparently unaware of how
unsympathetic he comes across. Does he really mean to suggest that his wife's
pregnancy is a failing of character, since none of his previous girlfriends
were so afflicted when he withdrew? The double-play with that word “withdrew”
is subtle but acute. If we married in my country, the man assures his wife on
their wedding day, you wouldn't be able to go out without my permission. Such
are the consolations of geography.
If writer/director Mehrdad
Seyf is the male force rupturing a female/feminist agenda, artist Chris
Dobrowolski has a more positive influence, jolting proceedings with
electricity. His fully functional helmets constructed from colanders and
blenders, pedal-powered comic stunts, and ingenious solution to the need to
screen Johnny Guitar, fill the stage with fun. Like a scene in which the sight
of a bus at Marble Arch transports the male character to the heart of a
revolution, Dobrowolski's wizardry lets us see the homely and banal in magical
new ways. If only domestic labour itself could be as transformative an
experience.
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