Showing @ The Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh until Sun 24 Aug @ 11:00
Lucy Porter brings her comic skills and a clear love of history to this tale of young Edinburgh women in the early 18th Century trying to find fulfilment outside of their proscribed world of marriage and ‘female accomplishments.’
For the sake of secrecy the women take the names of the muses as aliases. Polyhmnia (Samara MacLaren) has a love and talent for poetry, but living in genteel poverty she is to be married to Mr Swinburne – who we never see but get a litany of his ailments. Thalia (Caroline Deyga) is the flightier of the three interested in improving her mind, but also more earthy matters and Clio (Jessica Hardwick) is the serious mathematically talented and religious member of group with a love for Issac Newton.
This is fun and the performances are excellent but it doesn’t do great service to the real women it’s based on. Beneath gossip and bickering we never really see the character’s intellectual power or achievements. Porter’s love of an historical fact in unsubtly deployed and you can almost picture the corkboard full of notecards as yet another topic is shoehorned into the story. In terms of entertaining whimsy and well written, pleasingly performed storytelling, this is a fine production. However when it comes to doing service to the early Edinburgh Enlightenment and its forgotten daughters, it fails to hit the mark.
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