Source : the age
Riot Women ★ ★ ★ ★
British screenwriter and director Sally Wainwright has a particular magic with dialogue. Her words, tuned with a scalpel-sharp precision and grounded believability to each character, make you forget they’ve ever graced a script.
It’s the case with grieving Sergeant Catherine Cawood in Wainwright’s award-winning series Happy Valley; 19th century maverick Anne Lister in Gentleman Jack; the Bronte sisters in To Walk Invisible; and late-in-life lover Ceila Dawson in Last Tango in Halifax. Wainwright writes female characters spectacularly (male ones do all right, too).
Behold a new ensemble of finessed, deeply distinct and dialogue-blazing characters in her latest work, the six-part drama series Riot Women. Set in Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire, it’s led by five mostly middle-aged women: Beth (Joanna Scanlan, Slow Horses, The Thick of It), Kitty (Rosalie Craig, The Hack), Jess (Lorraine Ashbourne, Alma’s Not Normal), Holly (Tamsin Greig, Black Books) and Yvonne (Amelia Bullmore, Happy Valley, The Crown).
Ground down by life to varying degrees, these women – a teacher, a retiring police officer, a pub landlady, a midwife and a shoplifter with a prison record – decide to form a punk band.
For Beth, dealing with self-centred family members, a departed spouse and increasing invisibility at work (“They’ve all had the best of me,” she says of her son and ex-husband. “And now that I’ve got nothing left to give, I’m dispensable”), the musical collaborations literally save her life. She is midway through putting a strung-up noose around her neck when Jess phones to suggest they start a band for a charity gig.
Riot Women is about these women – funny, furious, smart, tired, hopeful, striving women – having fun but also them finding a place to declare (loudly with amps!) who they are, what they think and their oft-forgotten value.
It’s about the million ways middle-aged women deal with children, partners, parents, work, retirement and love (new and old) while still pursuing wants and needs that aren’t necessarily tedious, old-boring-fart predilections.
It’s about presumptions made about women over 50 and, in the hands of Wainwright, it’s delivered with unbridled reality, wisdom and wit.
Scanlan as Beth is particularly compelling. Watching her unfurling joy and sense of regained power as she writes and performs songs conveying burning feelings and thoughts is marvellous. The moment when her self-centred son Tom, and his girlfriend, are put in their place is quite satisfying. Greig’s hilarious first date and unflinching investigation of a nasty co-worker’s despicable act is riveting. And Ashbourne’s ever-volcanic ability to speak her mind with quick-mouthed candour shines on here.
Wainwright has assembled many past collaborators for this show – Scanlan, Anne Reid (Last Tango, Hot Fuzz), Bullmore, Amit Shah, Kevin Doyle and Oliver Huntingdon. It’s great to see new ones joining her, too. Wainwright also makes a cameo in the last episode at a recording studio bar. And there’s great original songs – Seeing Red, Just Like Your Mother and Riot Women (“Let’s start a riot/We won’t be quiet/We run the world and we’re not even tired”) – all belted out to increasingly adoring audiences.
Riot Women is a winner. Three of its episodes were directed by the late Australian director Amanda Brotchie, who is also known for her work on Doctor Who, Gentleman Jack, Lowdown, Renegade Nell and Picnic at Hanging Rock. A definite must-watch.
