Society
I learnt that it could be a liability and an adventure, having a vagina
Published 25 February 2002
How lovely it was to be "An Actor" again last week. I knew I'd made the right decision to take part in V-Day 2002 when the sassy director, Eithne Browne, came all the way from Liverpool to meet me at the Commonwealth Club. No sooner had I sat down than she thanked me profusely and presented me with a large bunch of red tulips. Ah, what bliss! When you freelance for national newspapers, you get automated responses saying "Your e-mail was received"; you do not get flowers and hugs.
V-Day UK is part of a global movement that raises funds and awareness for charities dealing with violence against women and children. It does this by putting on performances of the Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler. Now, the word "vagina" is not something you often see in the New Statesman, but don't be afraid: I've discovered in the past weeks that it's not such a scary word once you say or read it often enough. Little did I know that, by accepting a role in the Liverpool production, I was committing myself to saying "vagina" 23 times. I would also be saying "pussy" five times and describing in detail a cervical smear - all this, to an audience of more than 400. No wonder I got hugs and flowers.
In the show, "my" vagina needed to be "angry . . . pissed off . . . furious". During the first read-through with the director, it was more mousy, hidden and shy. "Go on, girl," she urged. "Have some fun with the piece. Yell it, shout it. Enjoy it." She left me for a few moments in a downstairs conference room. Geeing myself up, I started yelling: "My vagina's angry. It is. It's pissed off and needs to talk." The door had swung open and two men peeked in. When I met their wide eyes, they scuttled off to their meetings - at the nearest thing to an indoor sprint I've ever seen.
By the day of the show, I was in full diva mode, and no residual shyness about women's nether regions was going to get in the way of my chance for rapturous applause. The other 16 women at the Neptune Theatre were all in the same mood. The grotty basement dressing room was abuzz with cackles and screams of laughter as I arrived for the dress rehearsal.
"I love that c***'s new haircut," yelled Clare, a very prim-looking Irish lady in her late fifties. The C-word flew from her mouth like shards of stained glass from a Catholic church, brightening up the room.
"Jaysus," she sighed in between bouts of singing and swearing. "If me ma was alive to hear me do this, she'd stop breathing, so she would."
Backstage was a non-stop joke shop for the next three hours. Actresses from Brookside and Coronation Street applied very professional make-up and swapped soap gossip. Meanwhile, the older women - poets, housewives, singers and shop workers - swapped red accessories and life tips. We were having such a good time we (almost) forgot that the performance was not being put on entirely as a social event for ourselves.
Finally, the audience took their seats and the stage lights went up. All laughter died in our throats as we listened in the wings to testimonials written by battered and tortured women from Alderley Edge to Afghanistan. One woman read, in a trembling voice, the letter she had written to her dead mother. It told how she knew her father had tormented her mother into an early grave. Then he had turned his violence on her. Eventually she fled, after years of bloodied misery, and had her father put in jail. The abuse she suffered was so bad that he got a very long sentence and died before being released.
Women in the front row were wiping their eyes before the monologues even began. It can be a sobering responsibility, an adventure and a liability, having a vagina. One fact memorised from my contribution has stayed with me: 50,000-70,000 women were raped as a systematic tactic of war in former Yugoslavia. In the UK, 55,000 women call rape crisis lines for help every year - and, in theory, we're not at war.
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