A surreal, unflinching reminder that women’s battles are far from over.Summary
Rating
Excellent!
The Handmaid’s Tale. The Stepford Wives. I Who Have Never Known Men. The Substance. From page to screen, literature and media have long grappled with women’s place in a world built for men. The subject feels especially urgent now, in an era where injustice and violence are brushed aside by those who insist that “men and women are equal nowadays” or that “it’s not a problem anymore.” The Womb refuses that complacency. It demands that we don’t “sleep” through the daily violence women endure, delivering its warning in a stylised, off-beat, and bloody fashion that lingers long after the curtain falls.
Written by Aylin Rodoplu and directed by Elise Xiaqi Eriksen, The Womb offers a dystopian yet disturbingly familiar reflection of women’s lives. Three unnamed women (Rodoplu, Tara McMillan, Gabriela Mahé) are trapped in an enclosure with no escape, remembering nothing of themselves or the world outside– infants in women’s bodies, suspended in a perpetual present without past or future. Over 50 unsettling minutes, they unravel through the guise of children’s games: tag becomes a memory of being chased and assaulted; “playing house” spirals into a fight over who gets to be the “human” (the man) and who is forced into the role of woman, marked as lesser. They satirize NASA’s infamous decision to send 100 tampons with a woman on a three-day mission, and even stage a birth– only to “put the baby back” once they see it’s a girl, and therefore not “human”. With caricatured depictions of patriarchal roles and an unflinching fixation on the body, the show keeps its audience both unsettled and intrigued.
The performers sustain the uneasy tone with flashes of comedy that never dilute the gravity of the material. Together, the women create a kind of sisterhood through shared play and shared suffering. Yet the continual erasure of memory leaves them profoundly alone– forgetting one another, and even themselves– so that a quiet isolation underlies their frenetic games. The piece leans heavily on movement, executed with precision and vigour, as existential questions surface – “What is sex?” “What is love?” “Do I want children?”– only to dissolve just as quickly, never remembered, never answered.
Some moments cut especially deep. In one sequence, they debate “the guilty ones” in cases of sexual assault. Moving from nipples to fingers to legs, they ask which body part could possibly have provoked the attack, crystallized in the chilling line: “If you don’t wanna be touched, don’t exist where the fingers are.” Another haunting moment arrives when one woman admits she doesn’t want children. Asked to justify herself, she opens her mouth, but produces no sound. Woven through restless play, these moments give the piece its surreal, almost sci-fi edge, amplifying its already unsettling atmosphere.
Design work is central to The Womb’s impact. Writer and performer Rodoplu takes on the sound design, which is layered, atmospheric, and full of unexpected choices. It shapes the characters’ world with clarity and tension. Yasin Gültepe’s lighting plunges us into a dystopia of bodies and violence, with the opening tableau – three women in period-stained bodysuits, waiting in a blood-red room scattered with tampons– immediately gripping. Paired with strong performances and Eriksen’s thoughtful direction, these elements make the production both a compelling exploration and an entertaining watch.
The show’s deliberately off-beat nature is one of its strengths, though it occasionally undermines its pacing. Jokes falter, abrupt tonal shifts jar, and pauses sometimes feel slack. Yet, once the performance settles, these issues fade, and the work’s strengths come into focus. Some may argue the piece treads familiar ground rather than breaking new territory, but that repetition is precisely the point: the fact that women must still raise the same issues speaks volumes about how persistently they remain unresolved.
Ultimately, The Womb is a thought-provoking and visceral piece that confronts what it means to be a woman in a world built by men. Through bold imagery and uncompromising choices, it leaves its audience unsettled, challenged, and asking the questions that matter.
Written by Aylin Rodoplu
Directed by Elise Xiaqi Eriksen
Sound Design by Aylin Rodoplu
Lighting Design by Yasin Gültepe
The Womb plays at the Arcola Theatre until Saturday August 30
