Premiered at the annual Shut Up Shakespeare Showcase, Lady M Sees Red is an incredibly emotive performance, both written and directed by Zuza Soltykowska.
Hung upon the stark white washing line that crosses the stage, Lady M’s blood red mark defaces all sense of her rapidly diminishing girlhood, as she powerfully reflects on what this means for her future.
The scene opens with her desperate scrubbing, torn between admiration and terror for this new passage of her life, and fear of the unknown yet now-certain fate of her future, Lady M experiences torment both sole and universal. This is the very experience of being a woman, historically defined for centuries.
Lady M’s blood however signifies less her own womanhood, but more the certainty that it will soon be somebody else’s. She reflects with increasing hysteria on the prospect of the new name she will have, her helplessness and lack of autonomy over the matter of her marital future, a harsh condition of her new state of being.
Her powerlessness is reflected in her deliberations about her future of wedlock. Her anxieties surround the cruelty of her husband, or for his potential “lack of ambition” powerfully prescribe her social and domestic helplessness in the state of matrimony that is now soon to befall her.
Despite the difficulties and uncertainties abounding her transition, Lady M too reflects on herself as a person of gravity and stature, all societal placement and economic value now contained fully in this “damned bloody spot.”
Isabella Dellazari Velarde’s acting is electric, poised between gravity and grief, childish outbursts and womanly poise, she perfects and universalises the experience of womanhood which for so much of history has subsumed the female sex.
As she resolves to tell her mother, and to begin her new life and livelihood, Soltykowska’s verse brings perfectly to light the crossroads Lady M stands at …
“Until this day I could have been anything I wanted, and now I am a woman.”
Image courtesy of Edinburgh University Shakespeare Company