Outrageous and political as it is hilarious and empowering, the dynamic female-led theatre company Scissor Kick brings Shrill, a collaborative clown cabaret performance to Glasgow this August. An immersive and emotional experience in a Glasgow nightclub, Revolution Glasgow, Shrill is an urgent theatrical response to the silencing and belittling of female and femme voices across time and place.
Three sirens find each other on the very edge of the world – they don’t know it yet, but this is the beginning of the end. Shrill is a show, a bouffon cabaret, and most of all, it is a call to the embodiment of the female voice. Welcome to Cabaret de Shrill, an evening serving rebellion and subversion with a heavy dose of escapism.
Drawing from multiple theatrical forms such as clown, bouffon and cabaret, Shrill seeks to use the tradition of these forms to expose societal injustice and satirise the rich and powerful. Reinterpreting myths and fairytales such as Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid and the Sirens from Homer’s Odyssey, Shrill places the historic voices of women in a contemporary setting, striving to be inter-sectionally feminist in their retelling.
Shrill is a cutting-edge new work by trailblazing theatre practitioners, directed by Melanie Jordan (co-Artistic Director of multi-award-winning feminist theatre company Jordan & Skinner: Sanitise; At A Stretch, A Brief History of the Fragile Male Ego), conceived by Amy Conway (Summerhall Autopsy Award winner; longlisted for The Women’s Prize for Playwriting, recipient of Fire Exit’s Pyromania bursary for experimental playwriting), and produced by Scissor Kick’s Stephanie Katie Hunter (UPTOPIAN, UK Tour; Scotland Through Time, Edinburgh International Book Festival; Lipsync, Summerhall).
Seeking experience from gig culture, Shrill uses music and digital sound design to tell the story sonically, exploring the female voice and addressing the inherent societal inequality in the value given to female and feminine voices. At the core of Shrill is the fact that women’s voices are arbitrarily discriminated against – women who have a platform are described as shrill, screeching, caterwauling and whiny. Women who don’t have a platform are silenced, talked over, interrupted and ridiculed. Through a bombastic cabaret, placing women’s voices at the centre, Shrill exposes the vital dangers of silencing women.
Writer Amy Conway comments, We’ve all been affected by the pandemic in countless ways and Shrill could have been a casualty – many shows in various stages of development had to be abandoned altogether because they lost momentum or lessened in relevance after 2+ years on hold. But Shrill stayed in my consciousness and as the world changed, rather than diminished, it only grew in urgency. The idea was first conceived at the height of the #MeToo movement, but since then we’ve seen Roe Vs. Wade overturned, Black and Trans voices demand to be heard, and the right to protest in the UK fundamentally threatened. This new context is an even more fertile ground for the themes of Shrill, for us to take on more radical performance practices and creative processes. Shrill has a brilliant team of collaborators, all of whom feel like radical makers in their field, and I’m so excited to create with them and share that with Glasgow audiences.
