You have to know your Shakespeare to follow the thread of HARLOTS playing at the Old Fitz until September 6. Playwright Emma Wright has selected women characters from Hamlet, Much Ado about Nothing, A Midsummer’s Night Dream and The Winter’s Tale. Emma imagines the women together in an underground ‘safe house’ founded by Paulina, the Queen of Sicilia. Paulina has created the space for the wrongly accused daughters, silenced young women and outspoken women who refuse to conform. The play presents the story as if most women are powerless subordinates. The irony is that in Shakespeare’s time, a large chunk of the world map was ruled by a woman, Queen Elizabeth.
The set is an underground space where tree roots spread and mushrooms grow. Powerful drugs are made from the mushrooms, consumed by the women to accept their underground fate. The takeaway from HARLOTS is that women cannot escape their fate as subordinates by hiding away in some refuge or through taking drugs. Doing so only bolsters the patriarchy. In the play, all the women eventually understand this and return to the world above to rejuvenate their positions in society. In other words, ‘they aren’t going to put up with it any longer’.
Director Janine Watson has put together a wonderful team. Megan O’Connell plays Paulina with subtle nuance, as the role demands. Her husband, the King, wrongly accuses her of being unfaithful. She rebuts “I am not prone to weeping, as our sex commonly are.” No, she’s a ‘doer’ and sets up a refuge for women who have also suffered at the hands of men. Madeline Li plays Hero, the bride wrongly accused of not being a maiden while standing at the alter in her wedding ceremony. Li’s magnificent final speech caps the play. This speech is a recitation of many famous feminist quotes from Mary Wollstonecraft onward. Ana Ika plays Ophelia, Hannah Waterman plays Paulina, Jo Downing plays Beatrice and Ella Pruce plays Helena.
Kate Beere’s underground set is well-imagined and executed. Aloma Barnes Siraswar’s period costumes complete the Shakespearean atmosphere.
Presented by New Ghosts Theatre company, Emma Wright’s HARLOTS could be a disappointment for many in the audience who don’t know the Shakespeare plays and therefore could easily get lost in the story. The play could also be a disappointment to men (yawn, here we go again, we’re the oppressors) and to older women who might find the story out of date (haven’t we been through this with Mary Shelley, Gloria Steinem and Madonna?) Some might see this heartfelt work as an esoteric or an intellectual exercise.
Warning: references to suicide, physical abuse, violence and infanticide.
HARLOTS is playing at the Old Fitz until the 6th October 2026.
Production photography by Phil Erbacher.
