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A Fictional Play's Topic: Germaine Greer's Kidnapping

by Zoe Strimpel
Sun, 20 Jul 2008 at 10:40 PM

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Injecting a little zest into the dull, dull summer season comes the new play, "Female of the Species," at the Vaudeville Theatre. It's a dressing down of feminism based on the real-life kidnapping of Germaine Greer eight years ago, when a student briefly held her hostage in her home. Ms. Greer has certainly risen to the occasion, spewing invective at the playwright, Joanna Murray-Smith, reportedly calling her "an insane reactionary."

Whether audiences will pity, applaud, or disagree with Ms. Greer depends on the limits of their sense of humor: "Men aren't our problem; old feminists are," the kidnapper says. It does sound funny, and there's no doubt it skewers academic vanity and ego as much as old-school man-hating feminism.

Still, society — much like the state of modern feminism — isn't so advanced that we can all afford to just take this with a big rumble of laughter at the expense of those hairy old feminists. But men probably will. Indeed, the Telegraph critic Charles Spencer talks about the "tightly-pursed lips" of a lady colleague. Ah well, maybe we can afford a laugh at Germaine's expense. She is certainly capable of giving as good as she gets.

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