Edinburgh Fringe: A roundup of shows putting women centre stage – dressed., Queens of Sheba, It's True, It's True, It's True

The young woman (Lydia Higginson) sits in the shadows, only a small light illuminating her face, as she sews furiously on an old-fashioned sewing machine. The needle stabs into the material. She is totally absorbed.

There are many ways to deal with trauma and making a new wardrobe is one. So is making a piece of theatre as the four young women – Higginson, Josie Dale-Jones, Imogen Mahdavi and Olivia Norris – do in dressed. (Underbelly, to 26 August). It’s a show that fashions something rich, brocaded and gossamer beautiful out of dark shadows.

Every performance of this show is an act of friendship, but also one of healing and defiance. At the end when the women dance wildly across the stage they are claiming it for themselves and for all the Lydias. In the act of performing they are remaking the show and themselves. Every single night they perform the past and remake the future.

In 2012, Lydia Higginson – a costume designer – was stripped naked at gunpoint and assaulted. On her return to the UK she began to make herself a totally new wardrobe. An act of redress.

One that has now been taken up and transformed into a new shape by her and the three friends that she has known since they met at dance class when they were 10. Dance is threaded through the show, sometimes jagged, occasionally jaunty but most often expressing a bruised tenderness.

This is by no means the straightforward story of trauma and healing that you might expect. At one point the performers themselves ask out loud whether or not the whole thing might be “too abstract”. But its vibrant messiness and the sense that it is feeling its way into coherence and not just thinking it all add to its cumulative power.

But don’t be deceived, this is a layered show and one that is put together with real rigour: in the way it finds an ending in its beginning of four little girls dancing their hearts out, the way it distinctly draws on the particular skills of each of the women involved, and in the way it uses clothed and naked bodies to express both power and vulnerability.

There is a moment towards the end when Higginson lies like a bird in a nest of clothes and Mahdavi sings to her. Watching it, I thought my heart might burst. Dressed. is one of three shows in the Underbelly/ New Diorama Untapped Award strand of programming, and all are theatrical fireworks.

open image in gallery

None more so than Queens of Sheba (Underbelly, to 26 August) in which four terrific black performers – Rachel Clarke, Jacoba Williams, Koko Kwaku and Veronica Beatrice Lewis – burst across the stage using song, movement and spoken word to examine misogynoir, a term used to describe how black women experience a double whammy of prejudice based on race and gender.

Inspired by a 2015 incident in which the door policy of a high-end West End club was exposed as racist for turning away women with darker skin, this is a sharply observed piece of agitprop theatre that has fun too.

There is a satirical edge as it examines the white men looking for “exotic” women to date, the sexism of black men and the unthinking racism of the workplace where conformality is demanded and cultural difference wilfully misinterpreted.

Is this a theatrically sophisticated show? No, but it is a gloriously entertaining one, and like dressed. it is unafraid to wear its sorrow on its sleeve and present four young women supporting each other as they cope with the daily trauma of the racism and sexism that “lay equally on my skin”. This quartet own the material – written by Jessica Hagan – and they own the stage.

Breach is a young company which burst, apparently fully formed and with an impressive theatrical lexicon, out of Warwick University and onto the Edinburgh Fringe back in 2015 with The Beanfield.

That was a bold angry show about the erosion of civil liberties, and It’s True, It’s True, It’s True is just as fiercely political and bang on the money as it looks to the past to examine issues of rape, consent and the injustices of the legal system that exist to this day.

Four hundred years ago in Rome, the Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi took on the powerfully well-connected Agostini Tassi who she accused of raping her when she was 15. But who was really on trial?

Breach use the transcripts from that trial and a terrific all-female cast – Ellice Stevens, Kathryn Bond and Sophie Steer – to recreate it. It feels startlingly modern, not just in the final sequence in which 17th-century Rome rubs up against Patti Smith’s “Gloria”.

It is a magnificently self-sufficient piece of theatre that offsets its own questing intelligence with rude rage as Gentileschi sees off those – including another woman – who collude with Tassi’s lies, submits with coolness to torture designed to test her truth-telling and continues to paint.

Her canvasses, including Judith Beheading Holofernes and Susanna and the Elders offer a very different narrative to the one previously presented by male writers and painters.

Breach give Gentileschi the chance to have her say, but time gave Gentileschi real revenge. Tassi is now pretty much remembered only as a rapist, but Gentileschi’s paintings – stark, savage and always offering another way of seeing – are on view in galleries around the world.