STAGS AND HENS

by Willy Russell

Directed and performed by final year B.A. Hons. Drama students, University of Cumbria, Lancaster
15 - 19 January 2008
At the Dukes, Lancaster
Reviewed by Lane Sunderland

Popping into the Ladies in the interval of Stags and Hens is somewhat disturbing, and it feels distinctly quiet. This is because the play itself is set in the male and female toilets of a club. This is not just for dramatic effect. Dancing and drinking mean trips to the loo.

On a hen night and a stag night (here, both being held, unknown at first to the two groups, at the same club), the stags and hens spend most of the time meeting and talking in their allocated areas, in part because they are supposedly keeping an eye on tomorrow’s groom and bride – the first, legless, and the second having second, third and fourth thoughts.

Public toilets are also the place where people display their identities though graffiti – and wonder at the identities (and other worlds) displayed by others. Most obviously, the use of toilets means (and symbolises) a distinct gender boundary (though Robbie (Benjamin Rickards), Billy (James Faulkner) and Kev (Lee McNulty) do cross this briefly, but with great – and comic - trepidation). The single-sex talk this gender boundary brings with it is largely that about the opposite sex. This includes the men casually referring to women in general as ‘tarts’ and being critical of a man ‘letting your tart behave like that’.

Despite this spatial boundary, however, Stags and Hens does not give us two monolithic groups of young women on a night out and young men on a night out. Some of the men follow, others lead; some of the women are softer, others harder than the others. There are many masculinities, many femininities. Laura Langley’s funny, dippy Maureen is a classically comic character; Bernadette (Sophie Lea), Carol (Lucy Russell) and Frances (Laura Holt) are all very much individuals. But, with the exception of Linda (the bride-to-be, played by Hayley Simpson) the women are all conventional, drawing unambivalently on superstition and cliché to make claims about what brides-to-be should and shouldn’t do.

Only Linda drinks pints, refusing Babycham, and acknowledges that she feels trapped. And the men are not only conventional but have aspirations lower than the gap under the toilet door: when Peter (Joseph Greening) – who managed to leave and, now a successful pop singer, has come back to do a gig – apparently non-ironically asks Kev, “D’y’ go to Art School?”, Kev’s response is “The only artist I wanna be is a piss artist” (followed by appreciative laughter from Billy, Eddie (Arthur Perie) and Robbie).

For Billy, Eddie, Robbie and Kev, Peter (in his ‘tart’s boots’) is as much a reminder that there is another way to live as the graffiti done by anonymous female students on other toilet walls – but is much more threatening. Despite (and partly because of) their self-defeating misogyny, the pathos in this play is centred on these young working-class men: there seems much less hope for them than the women. The men live in a world of bravado, complacency and illusion, and even their questionable ‘mateship’ seems less likely to sustain them than the women’s (admittedly sometimes flaky) solidarity.

This is a good play and a good production; Willy Russell would have enjoyed it. First performed in 1978, it has been appropriately updated for the here-and-now, and the dialogue is straight 2008. The set – toilets in the corner, bathroom tiles and a bin overflowing with paper towels in the foreground – is appropriately bleak. Unfortunately, from my particular seat, I missed some of what was going on in the corner. And occasionally some words got lost – the performance was in the Dukes Studio, hence no radio mikes, and some of the actors projected their voices better than others. But the University of Cumbria Drama students performed this play with all the sustained vitality, vulgarity, and sadness that Stags and Hens deserves. A good night out!

Jane Sunderland

We are sorry that we don't have any pictures from this production but if anyone has a good one that they wouldn't mind sending us, we will be very happy to add it to this page.

The Dukes (Studio), Moor Lane, Lancaster (Box office 0845 344 0640)

Useful links

For details of another University of Cumbria production

Past University of Cumbria productions

Willy Russell website

Previous productions (with photos)

Purchasing the script

Willy Russell on directing a 2008 version of Stags and Hens in Liverpool