Unneeded Baggage is a devised piece in which Elea Ineson, Tilda O’Grady, Eleanor Rushton try to find out ‘what it is to be a goddess in our time’. The audience is introduced to these young women through reading out typical Facebook profile style details (age, relationship status, interested in), a series of childhood photos and carefully selected facts about themselves, balancing the whimsical with their blossoming and morphing views on the f word - feminism. The questions and issues raised about feminism here are largely the obvious and the popular, covering abortion, slut-shaming, concepts of chivalry and our bra-burning assumptions.
Their personal explorations were offset, and ostensibly paralleled, with stories from Ancient Greece. The predominant focus was on the story of Apollo and Cassandra, with the occasional diversion into the tale of Paris being forced to choose the most beautiful goddess, commencing the Fall of Troy. Powerful stories indeed, but frustratingly the link between these tales and the problems referenced in the twenty first century was hard to see; the show felt a little unstructured, seeming to flip-flop between classical tragedy, women’s relationships with magazines and unfortunate ex-boyfriend Johnny Bell without a definable linking process. Furthermore, the occasional inclusion of physical theatre seemed sloppy and unnecessary, with Unneeded Baggage undoubtedly finding its most powerful moments by letting the words speak for themselves.
The show concluded with a lament of whether you could be a feminist and still let men carry your heavy bags; or could you still be a feminist and enjoy reading women’s magazines, although you can see their destructive potential. So often these questions were raised and simply left at face value. For example, O’Grady explains her week without wearing a bra inspired by the bra-burning protests of the 1960s, concluding that - as she failed on day six - she had ‘already been indoctrinated into the dark world of wearing a bra’, without fully explaining why the previous generation had done it in the first place and therefore what she was hoping to gain by recreating it.
Unneeded Baggage was entirely lacking in answers or solutions as to the problems it presents, but it is an engaging and affecting display of the realities of how confusing it is to be a young woman, and more specifically a feminist, in today’s world.
