This kinetic, subversive and slightly maddening piece of cabaret-styled theatre from US playwright Jen Silverman follows five New York women who are indeed called Betty on a surreal journey towards self-actualisation. The title suggests something strident and politicised, and there is some of that there, but in fact ‘Collective Rage’ delights in mischief and marginalia, with Silverman’s script frequently giving the impression that she’s sending herself up even as she’s writing it.
Director Charlie Parlham has rounded up a superlative cast, headed by performance artist Lucy McCormick (whose solo show ‘Triple Threat’ was one of the best of 2016) as the naive, lonely Betty Two and Beatriz Romilly (recently seen as lead in the Globe’s ‘Much Ado…’) as the excruciatingly forthright Betty Three, who sets Two down an emancipatory path by encouraging her to get in touch with her own vagina, and also forms a fulcrum to the play after she decides to become a theatre director, sucking in Betties One to Five into her
wildly over-ambitious inaugural production. (As best I can tell, ‘Betty’ is old fashioned US slang for an attractive woman, FYI)
In fact, the through-thread about Three’s show is not desperately compelling – although the show as a whole asks some smart questions about identity as performance, the play-with-the-play feels like a creaky contrivance that isn’t necessarily improved by all the self-reflexive gags about theatre audiences.
Break it down to its constituent Betties and it’s pretty wonderful, though: Romily’s Three is a wonderfully bolshy study in DGAF-itude; McCormick is a one-woman journey through the looking glass as the disintegrating Two; and the blossoming romance between One (Sara Stewart as a wealthy, married socialite increasingly concerned that her life might be a sham) and Five (Genesis Lynea as a tough ex-con boxing trainer who finds something in her tough facade softening when she meets One) is delightful. It’s only Four (Johnnie Flori) who doesn’t really hit the spot, a blue collar straight woman (so to speak) who doesn’t have a huge amount to do apart from get a bit hacked off with Three.
Silverman is very good at delving into the thorny tangle of modern identity politics and skipping out unscathed in a play that is, kind of, about self-definition as form of emancipation. But by the end her relentlessly ironic approach feels like it’s perhaps taken something away from it all, with the ending – McCormick singing a song about her vagina – more of an amusing fudge than a genuinely potent moment.