Figs in Wigs will reprise their gloriously uproarious and critically acclaimed live art, feminist adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel Little Women – Little Wimmin as part of WOW – Women of the World – London 2022 Festival prior to a UK tour. Running at the Southbank Centre from 11-13 March, the London edition of the WOW is the world’s biggest, most comprehensive festival celebrating women, girls and non-binary people.
Figs in Wigs are Alice Roots, Sarah Moore, Suzanna Hurst, Rachel Gammon and Rachel Porter – a feminist performance art collective. And their production of Little Wimmin is a take on Louisa May Allcot’s much adapted 19th-century classic, but the Figs turn it on its head with this riotous, irreverent and very funny version.
Little Wimmin is at WOW Festival London, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre on 13th March. Tickets are on sale here.
You’re bringing your critically acclaimed Little Wimmin to WOW, what can you tell us about the show?
It’s a post-apocalyptic, feminist, noisy retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. It’s a cocktail of creative forms: dance, live art, sound, theatrical performance, film, and a buffet of themes including, feminism, astrology and climate change. It’s ‘just the juicy bits’ of a classic text, with some extra Fig for good measure.
It’s a feast for the eyes and a recipe for disaster. It’s a love letter to theatre that eats itself in the act of doing. It’s a boisterous piss-take that falls apart and rebuilds itself on stage, leaving a trail of chaos in its wake. It’s five women performing a shared attempt to become one cannonic story. It’s hard to explain, you have to see it, really.
What inspired you to create this adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel?
We had been touring around a different show for some time, a more conceptual niche one (aka something no one would want to see) and weren’t receiving much interest from venues or funders. Which is very fair enough, it was pretty ‘out there’. Anyway, we started joking about doing an adaptation of a classic.
We have always loved acting, even though we aren’t very good at it. So we knew it would be a laugh. And, hey! We might even make a profit at Edinburgh Fringe! Little Women has lots of female roles, so it felt like a good fit. But the more we laboured over the joke, the more genuinely appealing the idea became.
Whilst the presentation of gender in Little Women was quite radical for its day, the outcomes for women depicted are pretty bleak: get married or die. We thought this was very outdated and quite funny, so we decided to take it on. The more we researched Louisa, the more we grew to appreciate her position and the more we wanted to make a different version of the tale. We think she might have liked our adaptation, so much so that we have dedicated our book* to her!
*Little Wimmin, the play (text). Available to buy NOW
How difficult was it to deconstruct the book, and at the same time create something so uproariously entertaining?
Not hard at all! (Well, maybe a bit). We are motivated by what makes us laugh and what gets us excited. More often than not we have an idea that seems too ridiculous to be possible. But the more we ignore it, the more we realise that we have to do it. Little Wimmin is the result of a series of these ideas. So actually, lots of it felt completely impossible, or at least quite difficult, and yet here we are…
What do you think Little Wimmin says about theatrical adaptations in general?
We think our show presents a different take on the idea of an ‘adaptation’. On the surface, it appears quite a severe, cut-throat approach – taking exactly what you need from the original and leaving the rest for dead. But we actually did do a lot of research when making the show, into the book and the author as well as the times it was written in. Did you know that lobster is a local dish to Massachusetts? Maybe you did. But what you probs didn’t know is that it hasn’t always been the fancy haute cuisine dish it is today. It was a poor woman’s food – so common and in such abundance that it was used as pig feed! Fascinating.
But seriously: using a story written and set hundreds of years ago actually offered us a really cool opportunity to look at the present and towards the future. That book was written on the eve of the suffrage movement in the west, and at the birth of the Anthropocene. Both of those things are so hugely relevant to where we are today and where we are headed in the future, that making comparisons between then and now came quite naturally.
We would definitely recommend the process of adaptation to any Avant Garde performance maker: If no one wants to see your experimental theatre show, disguise it as a classic and you will most likely sell some tickets! We call it ‘The Trojan Horse’ approach.
How does it feel to be performing at WOW ahead of your tour?
To begin our tour at WOW is a dream come true. And the Queen Elizabeth Hall – such a big platform for such little wimmin! We love and admire the festival, always such an eclectic and interesting line up and if we weren’t on the stage we would definitely be in the audience. We honestly can’t believe we are a part of it this year.
Any time we go on tour we laugh at the ridiculousness of it all; lugging our favourite trinkets for miles, spending hours setting them up in meticulous and ridiculous positions, only to display them for a couple of hours then pack them up again and be on our way. But we can’t wait to get on the road again!
