Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2004

Warrior
Quaker Meeting House

David Bowden

Warrior is based around the life of historical figure Hannah Snell, a woman who concealed her gender and joined the Royal Marines in the 1750s. The twist in this production is that there is an all female cast, which cleverly shows the difficulty Snell must have had pretending to be a man.

The production is not bad, with impassioned performances from all the actors. However its easy to lose track of what's happening on stage; the cutting job from the original clearly making a smoothly running narrative difficult to sustain. There is a lot of flailing about and physical aspects to this production, and also singing, which again is interesting given that the physical and the voice are often the most obvious distinguisher between the sexes. On this level the play works well and has clearly been well thought out.

According to director Phillip Tong, the politics of the play is wide ranging, touching on from the role of women like Clare Short as well as tapping into very contemporary themes of what exactly counts for treason (it's a war play of sorts too). Frankly its too ambitious to argue that this play moves beyond a commentary on gender. The director claims to want to move away from male oriented questions of how she got away with it, toward a discussion of what motivated her and what her life has to say about the relations between the sexes then and today.

I'll be honest that I was wondering whether Snell was one of those few so-called 'Amazons' who could cut it in the Marines today, or whether the standard of fitness and strength is higher today. But for the feminist, its rather worrying that Snell decides to join the Marines to pursue her boyfriend. For me the show should have asked questions about whether we should admit women to our armed forces, despite them being organisations geared to kill and dominate other human kind?

I wanted them to challenge my feeling that perhaps, even regardless of physical ability, there are still roles we rightly assign to men only. Unfortunately they didn't do this, but nonetheless, for what they seemed to be attempting to do, it was worth seeing.

Till 28 August