The Girls of May
The Zoo, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Group: F*cking Furious Theatre

James Panton

The Girls of May is a self-consciously political play. It tells the tale of girls involved in the uprisings in Paris in May 1968 - the communist and anarchist agitators, the partners of male revolutionaries, the upper-class bourgeois girls who rooted for the revolution. And it asks us to compare those events of 35 years ago with the demonstrations at Genoa, and the movement of contemporary anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, anti-consumerist, activists.

It is interesting, then, that for such a political work, actual politics is almost entirely absent. Instead, it is based on poems by participants in the events. From these, we learn that the girls of May 1968 were disapproved of by their mothers. We learn that some of the girls were left at home while their boyfriends went out to fight. We learn that the authorities were brutal. We learn that some of the upper-class girls who could not take part were excited by the promise of freedom. And we learn that the attempted revolution failed. These things are all surely true. But just what were they fighting for?

What is interesting is that, although towards the end of the piece we are told that 'Things will never be the same again', we are nonetheless left in a position in which things are entirely unaltered. Were it not for the signposting, the interpersonal hardships and intergenerational conflicts that dominate this play could describe almost any uprising or revolution from 1789 to the present.

Of course, interpersonal relationships and conflicts are the stuff of great theatre. But this work fails to shed any light on these, while at the same time constantly suggesting that it is actually a work about something different. This is suggested by a film projected onto the back of the performance space that begins, as the audience takes their seats, with interviews with protestors involved in 1968, and ends, as the dénouement of the play, with the memorial to Carlo Guiliani, the 23 year old protestor killed by the police in Genoa at the G8 summit demonstrations. Hundreds of people gather together, sitting on the ground and standing, clapping.

The Girls of May is performed by young anti-capitalist protestors, and captures something of the paradoxical anti-politics of that movement. The tragic death of a young activist at the hands of the police becomes a moment of celebration and unity for a movement that seems unable to find its purpose, and that, as a result, is more about being seen to protest than it is about taking action or seizing power. Moving as the memorial is, there is also something utterly depressing about the sight of so many people brought together and finally united over the tragic, but ultimately banal, death of one of their number.

The Girls of May is not a great play, even in the tradition of agitprop. It is, however, a sobering insight into the absence of vision and purpose in contemporary radical politics.

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