London, 1885 - a time of great passion, great confusion - virtue is barely holding down its petticoats. People are bursting their corsets with unbridled desire. Mary, a charismatic ex-suffragette in her 60s, runs a school for secretaries, aided by her zealous teacher-lover, 30-something Rhoda. When Rhoda literally bumps into childhood friend Virginia on the street one day, she finds that Virginia, her sister Alice and their much younger sister Monica are living in poverty. They are all invited into the school for secretaries, even though the older sisters are deliciously inept at the keys and Monica is more interested in sexual revolution than a career in business. Enter Everard Barfoot, Mary's cousin, an ex-doctor in his 30s about to embark on a life of leisure, and suddenly all the characters in this lavish sexy ensemble piece are erupting with discoveries, contradictions and epiphanies. Genre busting, rule-bending and ambitiously original.
View the trailer for Age of Arousal (Edinburgh)
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Articles:
The Gazette (Montreal), "Linda Griffiths pays a visit to her home town", Mar 2009
view online article | view/download pdf
Winnipeg Free Press, "Age of Arousal: Play wins arousing round of applause", Mar 2009
view article | view/download pdf
Toronto Star, "She's Arousing Interest", Nov 2007, reproduced with permission by Torstar
Syndication Services. view/download pdf of article
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“Griffiths inspires greatness. Endlessly witty, vigorous, funny… brilliantly inventive… the play tells a story that reaches far beyond its late 19th-century trappings and the accompanying confusion over women's rights, to tap into current slippery notions on love, marriage and sex.”
Calgary Herald
“Sex, power and total liberation are the driving themes of Linda Griffiths and Nightwood Theatre’s highly stimulating Age of Arousal”
Toronto Stage
“Age of Arousal…deliciously tosses the conventional wisdom of repressed and chaste Victorian women right out the boudoir window…. joyfully, this script…plunges deep into the secret longings of ladies…the confusion experienced by the characters – intelligently revealed through sophisticated writing that never fails to feel true – resonates even now.”
UWishunu, Philadelphia
“Both Griffiths and Stoppard take us to other times to illuminate the social changes of those eras. Both tell their stories through the highly verbal interaction of individuals whose lives intersect the great issues of their time.”
Broad Street Review, Philadelphia
“What we see and hear seems, at times, like the trios and quintets of a passionately erotic opera.”
Now Magazine, Toronto
“Passions explode when, mid-conversation, her characters suddenly voice their inner thoughts. Discussions turn musical: polite restrained melodies juxtaposed by outbursts of forbidden desires in orchestrated struggle.”
Philadelphia City Paper
“A hallmark of the work is Griffiths’ remarkable way of representing communication between and within characters almost simultaneously…. Secret anxieties that ride just beneath the surface of social intercourse keep bubbling up like verbal thermal springs…”
Curtain Up, Philadelphia
“The wrenching delights of touch, food, sex, outrage, and power surge constantly through the characters. Ardently sexy inner monologues vie with staid dialogue, but never leave us in doubt about what the character has and has not voiced to an unsuspecting companion, leaving us intimately acquainted both with the characters’ repressive propriety and deepest desires. In a rapid-fire succession of overlapping dialogue, the most shocking admissions in the mouths of these Victorians are both poignant and hilarious.”
The Edge, Philadelphia
“Linda Griffiths has written a deftly poetic and profoundly witty play in Age of Arousal…enjoy one of this country’s best playwrights at the top of her game.”
The Toronto Star
“Linda Griffiths has created a world full of ideas and attitudes…emotionally and politically charged.”
Lynn Slotkin, CBC Radio
“Sexually progressive and at times uproariously funny – certainly not the usual connotations of the Victorian Era - Age of Arousal finds the perfect balance between intelligence and sensuality.”
FFWD Weekly, Calgary
"... The strength of Griffiths's re-creation of these women's lives lies in the absorbing political details and her juggling the comic with, if not the tragic, then the theatrically melodramatic."
The Globe and Mail, Toronto
"“It’s literary and it’s literate and it’s theatrical. It really is a marvel. What I’ve said can in no way give you the full impact of Linda Griffiths’ fantastic dialogue…Director Karen Hines has choreographed the... what I call “a dance for the music” of this dialogue and for the interplay of relationships. Sometimes there’s an explosion of voices with all the women talking at once, which reminds me so much of the kitchen in my daughter’s house with all my five daughters talking at once. The playwright has an interesting stylistic device, where she has inner thoughts spoken in the midst of external dialogue, which is very difficult to do and the actors handle it wonderfully, switching back and forth from those inner thoughts.“"
Sharon Pollock, CBC Radio
