Review: Five Lesbians Eating a Quiche, Melbourne Fringe Festival

“Sharp, smart and hysterically funny!”… “A cult hit….gleaming with comic polish.”… “A frothy, sill, saucy and spectacular affair.”

These are just some of things critics have said about 5 Lesbians Eating A Quiche, a play written by Evan Linder and Andrew Hobgood, currently being performed for Melbourne audiences as part of the Fringe Festival.

And it was the reviews that initially attracted me to the show, although, as I realised afterwards, no words could really describe what I had witnessed.

The year is 1956, right in the middle of the Cold War and the constant threat of a nuclear disaster. It’s in this context that we meet the Susan B Anthony Society For The Sisters of Gertrude Stein – 5 feminist widows who are preparing to celebrate their annual Quiche Breakfast.

The 5 women who star in the play are hilariously drawl and camp, and absolutely obsessed with quiche. They tremble and coo as the time for the first quiche tasting draws closer. At this point I thought the play had already reached peak absurdity, and I was wrong.

Suddenly, right after the first quiche tasting, a nuclear bomb goes off and the women are thrown into survival mode. The good news is that the Susan B Anthony Society For The Sisters of Gertrude Stein centre is bomb proof and they have enough rations to last 4 years. The bad news is that they’ve left the rest of the quiches outside. And as I said, these women really really love quiche.

I’m not going to spoil the rest of the play for you, but let’s just say that the action rises into higher and higher levels of absurdity in such a clever and shocking way that you’re left on the edge of your seat.

The play is flawlessly acted, and sends up the naivety of the white female suffragette with incredible sharpness. In particular, Lauren O’Rourke, who plays a slightly hysterical and very enthusiastic southern belle, is wet-your-pants funny, particularly when she takes her first bite of quiche and basically has an orgasm.

After the show, I felt utterly entertained, but a little flat. It’s hard to critique this show, but I’d say that the storyline was possibly a little one-dimensional. There was no real tension between the characters – they all had the same motivation – and there was no self reflection within the script.

I think I would have liked this story better if one of the characters, at some point, stepped outside the story world and questioned it, or helped me relate to it to my 2016 perspective.

Then again, that’s perhaps what the show is playing on – the fact that the original American feminist movement, the values and beliefs of these women, can look absurd from a modern perspective. Perhaps, in another 60 years, they’ll be making fun of today’s feminists in absurd comic plays. Instead of a quiche breakfast, it’ll be a feminist club meet up over lattes at a hipster café.

Written by Beth Gibson.

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