BITCH: THE ORIGIN OF THE FEMALE SPECIES by Edith Podesta

“A raw and intelligent exploration on gender and species”

Reviewer: Meera Nair
Performance: 21 January 2016

Edith Podesta’s BITCH: The Origin Of The Female Species is an intellectual exercise packaged in a more pleasing form than textbooks. It is feminist, but it’s also very human. It delves into personal stories but also explores wider issues relating to patriarchy and gender differences. This is a lesson that keeps you interested, and at no point do you feel the urge to walk off and raid the fridge instead.

Central to this lesson is the idea of a ‘bitch’. She’s an ‘unfeminine’ woman, one who needs to be suppressed for the patriarchal system to remain unchallenged. Yet she is also a female dog, one who provides loving companionship . Through the bitch and the human (or rather, hu-MAN, the ‘storytelling animal’), Podesta explores issues ranging from the divisions between genders, divisions between species and companionship.

By juxtaposing the woman/bitch, dog/bitch and man, the play shows rather than tells how gender differences are treated as species differences. Ironically, it is the dog/bitch and man, who are of different species, that form a closer bond than the woman/bitch and man. Podesta’s script is beautifully poetic, despite the seriousness of the subject matter. The storytelling is the best part of this play. From start to finish, it hooks and draws you in. The play is free from theatrics, and Podesta and Helmut Bakaitis give performances that are very natural and raw.

The performance space itself is integrated seamlessly into this play. The wooden floor and wooden doors are part of what the dog/bitch sees. The backstage door is used to good effect when it is partially opened to allow light to stream in, giving the impression of light filtering into a home through half-opened windows. In fact, the use of lighting in the whole performance is very effective in conveying the mood of the moment – whether introspective, optimistic or dark. For the audience, all these work towards making the performance more believable and real within that performance space.

What I find interesting is that an actual dog makes an appearance at the end of the play. It’s a brave move, since animals are unpredictable. However, the collective ‘awww’ and squeals of ‘so cute’ following the dog’s appearance pretty much show that the audience has left the play and are enraptured by the canine presence.