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Woman Alone - first impressions, disecting the script

Woman Alone is a short play written by Franca Rame and Dario Fo. It is the monologue of a woman who has been locked inside the house by her seemingly very abusive and controlling husband who is talking to her neighbour across the gardens. It is a very comedic script: full of sexual innuendos, hilarious anecdotes and clever one-liners. However, this comedic language juxtaposes some very serious and sinister themes: domestic abuse, sexual exploitation, self harm, suicide, mental health and murder.

Upon first read, I found the extended monologue to be very confusing as the woman changes train of thought very quickly and jumps from subject to subject very often. The language itself is very simple and the anecdotes can be followed easily but her character as a whole is very hard to understand as her intentions seem to change every second and she is constantly contradicting herself.

I immediately thought that it was going to be a very challenging script to work with, however for our performance piece we are taking a section and splitting it between four characteristics which will each be portrayed by a different actor. Our group has been assigned the middle section in which we find out about various sexual encounters that Susan (the woman) has experienced. Within this we decided to split the personalities as follows: a reserved, old-fashioned mother character; a psychopathic, angry, rude character; a rather ditsy, gossipy housewife character; a sexually excited, suggestive, promiscuous character. We thought these four sub-personalities covered all the main thought processes of the woman and as we began directing the script and deciding who should say which lines, we found that these sub-personalities fit very well within her personality and the script was in fact easier to understand and follow once we had divided the lines up in this way. I am going to be taking the role of the sexually suggestive personality.

We will be performing this piece in the style of Stephen Berkoff despite it not being written by him, it is written in a very similar way to his plays and the language lends itself very well to his style of physical movement as it is descriptive, absurd and interesting.
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