Not All Dictators

Here is an anarchic mash-up of Shakespeare (Macbeth but here called MacPutin), Euripides (Medea), the Bible (I think), verbatim accounts of war crimes against women and some original text.  Three raunchy witches or goddesses – Hecate (Victoria Haslam) [the goddess or Shakespeare’s witch?], Jezebel (Prue Daniel) [the evil queen?] and Morgan (Melina Wylie) [Le Fay?], each with a band of black across their eyes, greet each other, josh, tease, roll about, giggling as they take photos of each other’s crotches.  It’s a rather ad hoc assembly.

They gather around a cauldron, but instead of ‘Eye of newt and toe of frog, etc., they throw in various ‘female’ appurtenances – such as sex toys, or a copy of The Female Eunuch - some things happily, some reluctantly.  Much later, Lady Macbeth’s line – ‘Unsex me here – comes up, confirming the rejection of ‘the female’.  The witches are making a potion, or elixir, and each takes a tiny bottle of the stuff, which they drink to give them strength before they tell their stories.  Delivered sometimes in rhyming couplets, these are stories of abuse, mistreatment and their raging desires for revenge.

Performances here and often throughout are loud and impassioned – with Melina Wylie much given to shouting – and poor diction means it is difficult to make more sense than this of what is happening.  But it’s also difficult to see, on reflection, how this opening sequence fits with or develops into the final, horrific and deeply serious scenes. 

On the way through, as we come to realise that Not All Dictators is quite specifically about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we get a gross impersonation of Trump in which his very small penis is revealed.  Smug and knowing laughter from some.    Morgan has a voodoo doll with Putin’s face: she stabs the doll with hatred and long needles.  Footage of battles in the Ukraine and the Ukrainian flag are projected onto the cyclorama and curtains – together with sounds of gunfire and explosions.  I think I detected some relief in the audience when the battles and the flag are projected: ‘Ah, so that’s what this show is really about.’  (Indeed, Natali Blok, one of the writers, is Ukrainian.)

The show is billed as ‘a no-holds-barred drama about the impact of war and what happens when women fight back.’  I’d question the word ‘drama’ in this context, but more seriously, the women don’t ‘fight back’. 

They’re angry, sure, but they rant, they speechify, they crack lewd and sometimes childish jokes, they sing.  ‘Russia’ is a figure in a black bearskin coat which opens to reveal balloons instead of genitals – the balloons are then popped.   Metaphor?   

And at the end, what we learn is that all this rage and satire is impotent, and any fighting back is effectively negated when the witches or goddesses or whatever they are become simply mortal women, the bloodstained or dead victims of that familiar Russian war tactic: rape and murder. 

You can see the purpose and the intention behind all this.  When they’re not shouting, you can see that Victoria Haslam has real stage presence and Prue Daniel can be very touching when she’s not doing blatant ‘sexy’.  That said, Not All Dictators is one of the most chaotic, make-it-up-as-we-go-along presentations I’ve sat through – unfortunately unredeemed by its serious subject matter.  It’s a mess that becomes coherent and focussed only when it relies on verbatim accounts of real crimes.  So, is the play agit-prop?  If not, what is the point?  Clearly, dramaturg Zane Alexander had no influence.  The three writers and the director, Helen Doig, all have a string of most impressive credits behind them, so I think we have the right to expect better than this.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Darren Gill