Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Zosia Jo.
It is in the words and actions of someone’s story into which details and connections are made, you might not hear the whole story without both and for that lives can become lost and destructive behaviour can go unchecked.
History has always been made from the words from the top of society down, it is only in the last seventy years that has been allowed to be challenged and only in recent times that there is rightly more to be gained by listening to Herstory, listening more than ever to the words and thoughts of the women in society, really taking stock of the situation to which some women find themselves in and the trials they go through.
Zosia Jo’s combined narrative and dance takes the audience through the life of one such woman to whom life holds much and yet seems determined to take it away and as seems so painfully apparent in the wide world in which the 21st Century holds mastery over, what goes on behind doors never gets truly seen until sometimes shamefully it is far too late.
Herstory centres upon one woman who may have experienced happiness but to whom the present is filled with slow lingering decay and abuse and in the greatest of knights in shining armour tarnish, then rust, slowly shows its true face. The bully, no matter the gender, will always try to justify their actions and will be plausible in their delivery but only because women are still not actively encouraged to speak up before it is too late.
For Zosia Jo, the dramatic interpretation of the issue, the discombobulated taped voice in the background as part of the narrative is being spoken is almost as if it is a final plea from beyond the grave, a statement in which her life can regain control over her oppressor and an explanation given to which no mouth can actually say. It is a role that is so intense, so concentrated that the physical and mental exhaustion felt is a true reflection upon what many women suffer every day.
A performance which steels the soul to keep up the fight against such domestic issues, on either side and to which Zosia Jo must be congratulated upon bringing to such a wide audience at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
Ian D. Hall