Is She For Real? is an ambitious cabaret of chaos of Camden Fringe 2024 at the Hen & Chickens Theatre
“This show contains themes of misogyny, misandry, and Andrew Tate”
For all the advances made in so many areas, there’s a bit of a depressing inevitability in the way misogyny finds places to thrive. Oriel Evans and Rosie Pike’s Is She For Real? feels like something of a response to that, even as it takes a wider lens to the matter at hand, examining the tropes that have been assigned to women throughout history, with a view to keeping them under the heel.
This they do through a dizzying kaleidoscope of vignettes that range from comic skits to poetry readings, satirical take-offs of advertisements to punchy dramatic scenes, with cream cakes, movement sequences and more inbetween. As with many a devised show of this nature, the sheer level of variety does result in an unevenness but at the same time, the paciness and short scene length ensures nothing lingers too long.
Ultimately, there’s not a huge amount of originality in the substance here, well-worn archetypes are by their nature hugely familiar and this format doesn’t allow for much depth to be achieved in individual scenes. The hint of Caryl Churchill is the businesswomen section does stand out though and presentationally, the frequent divergence to the unexpected does hit that unique marker to make its message resound.
