Domestic Labour: A Study in Love

A vacuum cleaner is raised to a performer’s shoulder, handle aimed threateningly at the audience. Helmets are adorned with whirring blenders and whisks. A yellow rubber glove is inflated until it explodes, the sharp sound rippling out through the room. If the home is a battlefield, then 30 Bird are armed to the teeth.

The company’s unique take on love and feminism dramatically reconfigures the domestic sphere, transforming familiar household appliances into instruments of power and playfulness. Performers Betsabeth Emran, Sara Zaltash and Nicki Hobday find more inventive uses for household objects than you would imagine possible, their tickling tableaux interspersed with recited exchanges between an Iranian man and his English wife.

Through both this central relationship and their ingenious use of domestic appliances, 30 Bird question where the lines are drawn in the continuing battle for gender equality. The show’s snippets of conversation touch on everything from contraception to household chores, suggesting how women’s social role has been both liberated and restricted by advances in technology. You can have it all, as long as “it all” includes the housework.

But while the issues are vital and the images striking, 30 Bird’s story is frustratingly confused in its telling. On one level, the splintering and sharing of the narrative allows it to speak beyond just one woman’s experience, but on another it becomes messy and difficult to follow. With a little development, however, this could be an engaging, witty and impressively inventive addition to ongoing feminist debate.