Review by Simon Jenner, June 11th 2025
A woman stands in school uniform. She’s John Lennon. “This was me at fourteen. I liked being fourteen, fourteen was a great age to be…” She’s leader of the Fab Four, skirling tomboy schoolgirls rebelling against gender conformity. After more cheery introductory remarks, Claire Dowie continues at the Finborough with her second solo play of four: the 1991 Why is John Lennon Wearing a Skirt? Like its predecessor yesterday (Adult Child/Dead Child) it won awards, becoming perhaps Dowie’s best-known early work. It’s also more closely based on her own life. Claire Dowie’s Swansong, a quartet of solo plays staged in rotation, comes to Finborough directed and designed by Dowie’s collaborator of over 40 years, Colin Watkeys, till July 5th.
Claire Dowie. Photo Credit: Colin Watkeys
Lasting like all the plays 70 minutes, it’s possible to see all four without overload.
Punchlines are like running gags and set-ups, including the very last line. I said about Adult Child/Dead Child that “entering the litanic world of Claire Dowie is like hearing a Victoria Wood joke drawn over a hot piano wire. Without the piano.” That’s in a sense truer of this work: it’s a bit like lightning sketches in a gallimaufry of costumes; some fantastical, like joining the Soviet Army after a bust-up with MI6; which closes the first half (there’s no interval though). And it’s like reading Dowie’s early life by lightning. We start at fourteen, get to about twenty, reverse into childhood for the second half leading up to the Fab Four; then accelerate into Dowis’ twenties.
Dowie starts in that uniform but soon shimmies out of it into trousers, skirts, a pair of tights she invites others to scissor her out of; jeans, a dance dress, military fatigues. There’s painfully funny moments when she’s mistaken for a very attractive boy by a Russian woman (this in the fantastical sequence) and indeed by some scantily-clad, frozen girls when Lennon-garbed; despite being with the other three and four boys. Each time she’s outed. More painful though is how the other three peel away, literally as they begin donning tights. Cue the tights and scissors moment, the latter hoiked from a make-up drawer that’s an old school desk, Dowie’s sole prop bar its content and a sprawl of discarded gear.
It’s no good Mum trying to encourage “body” in her daughter’s hair, and Dowie draws on left-field analogies to show at how different an angle to the universe she stands. “An arm? A leg?” and “pink suits toy” trounces “but I don’t like pink”. And don’t play football: ”I might ge kicked in the stomach and drop my womb.”
Despite singing ‘Glad to be gay’ there’s less about sexual identity (that comes in another play), and more of a decisive moment. A young man who might be gay too, there’s rapport, and consequences.
Dowie’s language is sometimes a bit like Anglo-Saxon on speed. One full of anaphora (think the Beatitudes), of layered poetic use of the everyday. Otherwise great slabs of prose with internal repetitions are delivered with pace, aplomb, and delighting in repetition, building layers of emphasis.
Claire Dowie. Photo Credit: Colin Watkeys
Claire Dowie. Photo Credit: Colin Watkeys
Dowie’s particularly adept at the self-correction, the trip-up line, the confiding and the sudden speeding-up to indicate panic or frustration.
It’s already fascinating to have visit two of the decades under siege from Dowie. Dowie’s never mellowed, and her pioneering stand-up theatre remains essential: taut, inordinate, alone, unreconciled. If you see one Dowie, this might be it. But I wouldn’t have missed the howl of Adult Child/Dead Child, and there’s two more to revive.
Stage Manager Ted Walliker, Production Photography Colin Watkeys
General Manager Tara Marricdale, Assistant General Managers, Esther Knowles, Jenny Crakes, Assistant Resident Director Jillian Feuerstein,
Producer Neil McPherson for the Finborough Theatre