An exciting piece of student-written theatre is finally coming to the Corpus Playroom this week after its first performance in London in April. Wife is an ambitious one-woman show that explores the stories of nineteen women which have typically been overshadowed by men and erased by history.

Written, directed and performed by two Cambridge graduates, Ella Duffy (actress and writer) and Robbie Taylor Hunt (director), Wife is inspired by Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife. Ella mixed fragments of her mother’s poems with extracts from real letters and interviews as well as the imagination to create her script. I was lucky enough to sit in on a rehearsal and to talk to Ella and Robbie.

“Through this kaleidoscope of disturbing and powerful female lives, Ella hopes that the audience will be able to trace a thread connecting the women”

Their enthusiasm and excitement was palpable as we discussed the play’s conception at a house party in Edinburgh and its objectives to tackle gender stereotypes and our preconceptions about what one’s sex entails. Ella chose to write a play in which there were a plethora of interesting, multi-faceted and punchy female parts as a reaction to the problem that there are still many more exciting male characters than there are female characters in theatre.

Ella explains the twenty different women she plays are “unapologetic, funny, loud, dark and feisty”. They span the ages, the real, the mythological and the imagined, the typecast and the named. From Queen Herod, to the Devil’s wife, to Mrs Michelle Obama. Through this kaleidoscope of disturbing and powerful female lives, Ella hopes that the audience will be able to trace a thread connecting the women, some element of a ‘shared female experience’, an impression of the ‘world’s wife’. One reason why Ella chose to act all the different characters herself was to emphasise through her one physical body the shared experience of all of the women.

Ella has a commanding and powerful stage presence and I had the uncanny impression that her ‘terrifying’ yet ‘inspiring’ women were talking with me directly. When she ‘flips’ to another woman, the contrast is clear-cut as Ella effortlessly dons another persona, another accent, another experience of womanhood.

“Ella has a commanding and powerful stage presence”

I was particularly struck by Ella’s manipulation of a puppet-man (with which she explores the pressures and the expectations of manhood). The puppet’s modest and gentle movements had a life of their own. Little moments, such as when the puppet-man loosens his tie, tell a moving story and are a credit to Ella’s remarkable talent and Robbie’s perceptive and imaginative direction.

There is, however, something to be said for questioning how seriously effective this play will be in challenging gender stereotypes. Is there not something reductive in the suggestion that all women are connected in arc of a ‘shared female experience’? 

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What this powerful play will do is trigger a nuanced and reflective discussion about gender. I urge you to see this ambitious and exciting show.

Wife runs at the Corpus Playroom at 7:45pm from Tuesday 30th May - Saturday 3rd June