Revolt. She said. Revolt again
Challenging societal norms and language surrounding women
Alice Birch author Dr Marissia Fragkou editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:28th Dec '23
Should be back in stock very soon
This play explores the forces shaping women's lives today, challenging societal norms and language. Revolt. She said. Revolt again is a powerful call for change.
In Revolt. She said. Revolt again, Alice Birch presents a compelling examination of the language and behavior that influence women's lives in the 21st century. Through a series of striking vignettes featuring nameless characters, Birch delves into the societal forces that shape women's experiences, questioning what holds us back from enacting genuine change. The play serves as a powerful reminder that well-behaved women seldom make history, challenging the conventions that have historically constrained women.
The narrative interrogates problematic language often associated with women, from lazy sexist clichés to the norms surrounding marriage proposals. By doing so, Revolt. She said. Revolt again critiques the societal expectations surrounding work, sex, motherhood, aging, and love. Birch's work is both an assault on the language that has perpetuated violence against women and a rallying cry for radical change.
Originally performed at the 2014 Midsummer Mischief Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon, the play later transferred to the Royal Court Upstairs and was produced at New York's Soho Rep. This Student Edition includes insightful commentary and notes by Marissia Fragkou, who contextualizes the play within contemporary political and cultural movements, such as second- and third-wave feminism and the #MeToo movement. Through this lens, Birch's work resonates deeply with ongoing discussions about women's rights and empowerment.
Alice Birch doesn’t want this work to be unseen. Her angry and frantic play Revolt. She aaid. Revolt again is an experimental work focused on using a feminist voice which is loud; a feminist voice which seeks to change the world not through small increments but through a revolution: through the destruction of language; through the destruction of society... * Guardian *
Ms. Birch’s play, which became a hit for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2014, has a way of making you question everything you say when it comes to discussing women and their relationships with men, one another and a world in a state of unending upheaval... Linguistic confusion plagues the frantic souls portrayed... Even the play’s title, with its use of periods instead of commas, suggests the difficulty of getting words out and how inadequate they seem when you do... Yet Revolt teems with the same anarchic fury that possessed Jimmy Porter [in Look Back in Anger] and the same frustrated awareness that there are no easy fixes for an unsatisfactory social system... Instead, Ms. Birch is articulating the alternatives that come to women’s minds in dealing with how they are dealt with — as objects of love and lust, as employees and employers, as mothers and daughters. * New York Times *
Acts One to Three are dialogues. Issues of gender language change into material questions of marriage, of women in capitalism, women raped and colonised, women desperate for refusal of the roles imposed on them. By Act Four, everything is deconstructed and there isn’t dialogue anymore... We witness conversations, haunting solo performances, disturbing statements about or directed to women, and a lack of genuine solutions provided in a system that benefits from oppression... In many ways, this play is a call to arms. It exposes the contradictions in simply refusing sexism in words, which is promoted as “revolutionary” by the very agents of the status quo. * Diva Mag *
ISBN: 9781350264403
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
96 pages