So the Maggie Muff farewell tour has reached The MAC after thirteen years of shocking, delighting, tickling the funny bone and yes, sometimes moving us. Caroline Curran pranced onto the set with trademark enormous pink bed and reprised the previous shows.
It began with a precis of Fifty Shades of red, White and Blue, whose first night I vividly remember. This is possibly the best plot, borrowed from ELJames’s Fifty Shades of Grey. There’s an intense, ultimately abusive relationship with Neville, Mr Red, White and Blue who has a thing for whips and handcuffs and spanking.
Curran acted this well, producing the trademark openness about women’s needs. So it was all bucking and gushing and fun, until it wasn’t. Not quite as powerful as the original outing, it was still a shock to realise our heroine, and she is in spite of the language, is being abused and physically hurt. She rejects the man who illustrates her old mum’s dictum that ‘All men are bastards’.
Vulgar? Magnificently so in Leesa Harker’s writer’s hands. Yet we have a lot to thank Maggie M for. She is a survivor and she is open about physicality, women’s sexuality, which is liberating. Je t’aime belted out whenever there was a full on sex scene, so quite often.
The packed audience, as ever, was 90 per cent female, 100 per cent entertained and committed to the Muff philosophy. Like Bridget Jones, Muff has had an eventful time, producing a daughter named Prosecco, running through men like bevvies and finding out her dad was (shock, horror for this East Belfast female) Catholic, Seamus O’Flaherty no less.
She makes us laugh, a lot, and while most of the script isn’t easily quotable, there are lines about thunder farts and smells, not to mention sex which really cause a giggle.
The Maggie Muff phenomenon, and the shows have toured the world as well as finding audiences across the UK, has opened theatre to new customers. Which is a good thing, and while Harker’s description of her oeuvre, which started as a blog written in cafes, as feminist is maybe pushing it, there is a female strength here.
While Maggie wasn’t quite as sharp as previous outings, partly because the material is familiar, the shock value lessened, the production, well directed, warmed up well. At the end, Ms Muff becomes a granny when daughter Prosecco has a baby. There was moving material about whether the granny to be was needed in the labour ward – initially not, but things turned out ok. And then we learn Maggie Muff is menopausal, truly the end of an era.
Maggie Muff, we’ll miss you.
Jane Hardy