The Vagina Monologues. Canal Café Theatre.

First staged almost 30 years ago, Eve Ensler’s seminal work, The Vagina Monologues, gets a welcome if subdued revival from director Lorna Dempsey. Built around interviews with more than 200 women from different cultures, classes, and sexual identities, the work explores their relationships with sex and genitalia. Opinions vary as to whether the show is more evangelical crusade than theatre, but there is no doubting its impact. Three decades on, how does this production, here delivered with manifest competence by actors Juliet Prew, Cara Kiri, and Aurore Padenou, stack up?

The most emotionally wrenching of the 12 monologues remains My Vagina Was My Village, the meditations of a Bosnian villager victim of a brutal wartime gang rape. Clad in a cleaner’s tunic, an expressionless Kiri pulls on a cigarette and meditates on “the dead animal smell” that reminds her of her suffering. She can no longer bare to touch herself. It is a stark reminder that war and rape are never far away, and perhaps one origin of an oft-quoted criticism of the show: that man are only portrayed as attackers, violators, or at best women’s antagonists. Perhaps some men need a reminder that this is a play about women, not men.

The funniest monologue remains The Woman Who Loved To Make Vaginas Happy, which tells of tale of a sex worker whose fascination with (and love for) vaginas drove her to swap a career as a tax lawyer for the heady pleasures of a life as a dominatrix. Frew, in snappy corporate attire and slugging on champagne, has tremendous timing in the piece, particularly as she demonstrates the many and varied moans she entices from clients as her handiwork unfolds. The section, which foreshadows much of today’s sex positivity agenda, offers laugh-out-loud moments – welcome in a production that curiously underplays many of the show’s other comic scenes.

Reclaiming Cunt, Ensler’s strident polemical demand to reclaim the C-word for women feels distinctly dated.   In most productions it invites audience interaction. Here it is delivered as a kind of soft meditative soliloquy by Kiri, perhaps because the word has lost much of its power to shock over three decades. You might well hear it repeated more often, and with more obviously carefree abandon, on the tube home than you do on stage at the Canal Café.

Another oft-quoted criticism of the show is that is anti-transgender. It is certainly the case we hear nothing from non-binary or trans male vagina owners. A thirteenth monologue, written in 2005 from the perspective of a trans woman, does not get an airing in this production. In any event, viewing a show written three decades ago through the lens of today’s sharp gender debates feels incongruous.

Does this production of The Vagina Monologues still shock? Perhaps not, but it still has something important to say. The Canal Café audience, all but two of whom were vagina owners, loved it. Decide for yourself.

Writer: Eve Ensler

Director: Lorna Dempsey