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eye WEEKLY                                             October 27 1994
Toronto's arts newspaper                      .....free every Thursday
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ON STAGE                                                      ON STAGE

                                review

                            THE GUT GIRLS

    Featuring Ellen-Ray Hennessy, Allegra Fulton, Jennifer Roblin
                          and Deborah Lambie.
       Written by Sarah Daniels. Directed by Jennifer Capraru.
 The Theatre Centre, 1032 Queen St. W. To Nov. 6. $10-$12, 538-0988.

                                  by
                           GEORGIANA UHLYARIK


If you ever wondered how a slaughtered cow turns into plastic-wrapped
beef, The Gut Girls shows all in a vividly bloody opening scene. Those
with light stomachs, be warned.

British playwright Sarah Daniels' The Gut Girls takes us to
turn-of-the-century England, and depicts the lives of the relatively
well-paid women working in meat sheds who gutted animal carcasses prior
to them being hacked up by butchers.

This Canadian premiere features a strong cast of eight actors (playing
some 17 different characters) and a bath of realistic meat props. The
Theatre Centre has been cleaved into a long bloody ditch, with dead
cows at one end and a proper English parlor at the other.

The Gut Girls essentially slaughters the glorified, romantic premise of
My Fair Lady, illustrated here with necessary graphic violence by
director Jennifer Capraru. Do-gooding aristocrat Lady Helena finds five
of these creatures elbow-deep in blood and intestines for 13 hours of
the day, spewing dirty jokes and wearing no underwear. Full of charity,
proper manners and Christian dogma, Helena vows to turn these scary
women into respectable housemaids. But her heavy-handed meddling only
manages to destroy their one shred of dignity -- their independence.

The well-crafted script and talented cast allow the show to get beyond
its Marxist-feminist rhetoric and present us with fully-rounded
characters. But though the production's heightened realism makes it
easy to suspend disbelief, the show fails to coalesce into a
dramatically charged whole.  

The second act, with its many scene changes and sudden turns of event,
doesn't unfold at the pace it requires. The show just doesn't sustain
the power of its gory and demoralizing punch throughout. In the end,
Capraru cannot unite each character's story into the hard-hitting
climax promised by the first act. It's like all that raw meat turned
out to be realistically painted styrofoam.


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