Manipulate 2016: Threads @ Traverse, 4 Feb

Threads is a story of lineage and lifelines of mythical proportions. Through the tale of a mountain woman and her daughter, it sears with the quiet roar of female resistance in a world dominated by the fearsome war-ogre.

José Babin and Nadine Walsh set the scene, stringing a cord into obscure shapes which begin to settle into a mountain, apparently springing straight from their hands. From here the archetypal mountain woman appears in puppet form, washing and singing to drown out the sound of battle. But music cannot keep the war at bay, and she is soon left wretched and trapped amongst the dead and spoils of war.

The story changes scale as a live performer becomes the mountain woman. Inside her grows the child of the ogre, a little thing with a will to sever its ties from its monstrous father, even before her birth. Switching between puppetry and live performance, Threads brings together the universal and the personal; the natural and the supernatural.

Its weakness is found in its attempt to articulate this beyond form and primal sounds. The voiceover narration may sound poetic in its original French, but in translation it sounds more like an overwrought television voiceover (think Vanessa Redgrave in Call the Midwife).

Nonetheless, Threads is a powerful piece, not only about the will of women to endure, but their will to fight back and fight hard for a better fate. For themselves, for their daughters, and for generations of women to come.

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Threads, part of Manipulate 2016, Traverse Theatre, run ended.