Femoid (Old Fitz Late) ★★★

Written by Iris Warren. Presented by Vixen Theatre Company. The Old Fitz Theatre. 31 Mar – 10 Apr, 2026.

Femoid wants to incite your rage about the “manosphere” but instead it elicits a feeling of inevitable sadness.

Rory, Olive, and Piper are thick as thieves, buzzing with excitement and nervousness about the future — sex in particular. From brash and braggadocious to nervous reticence, these Catholic schoolgirls are taking their first steps toward adulthood. When they decide to attend a party to celebrate the end of Year 12, they let themselves loose — but after one drunken night their lives will changed forever.

There is a natural, organic rhythm to all three actresses on stage in Femoid. Iris Warren, Roisin Wallace-Nash and Natasha Pearson make for convincing teenagers, naive to the world around them — Warren pulling double duty as playwright. There is an irrepressible energy to them as a trio that makes their impending split to go to university feel genuinely disruptive.

Elegant design work by Wallace-Nash — flowers strewn across grass, with plastic sheeting hovering above onto which the rancid discussions of an incel chatroom are projected (vision designed by Jacques Cooney Adlard) — gives the two worlds a nice juxtaposition without being overbearing. Under the direction of Izabella Day, the production has a confident visual identity.

Maybe this was just me, or the late hour (Femoid is part of the Old Fitz’s late night programming) but one thing that wasn’t clear was the passage of time. The play exists in roughly two time frames — all three girls in high school, and two of them reminiscing as adults. These time jumps needed more clarity, but even within the high school period, time got a bit confusing. The girls go from a basic sex education class to leaving Year 12 very quickly. They seemed to be portrayed much younger than they were — a clear device to preserve their innocence for the tragedy ahead, which took a lot of the sting out of the finale by being a touch too obvious.

But my main feeling at the end of the play was… and? The seductive dangers of the online manosphere are well documented at this point, and I’d hazard a guess that the people this story most needs to reach aren’t sitting in the stalls. Simply pointing at something that’s awful and saying “that’s awful” lacks dramatic punch. As a self-professed piece of critical feminist theatre, I was waiting for Femoid to make me think about this in a new way, to subvert the issue and reveal a truth behind the blinkered view of traditional patriarchal theatre — not just try to manipulate me into feeling anger I already felt toward this toxic subculture.

At just 55 minutes this is feels like an interesting Act One to a more complete work, a setup in search of a real investigation into the lives of teenagers and the gradually mainstreaming philosophy of the manosphere. Femoid tells us Who, Where, When and What, but doesn’t tackle the Why and How. It doesn’t clear the bar of “In-yer-face” horror, nor does it give us a fresh insight – the emotions and thoughts both feel stuck in first gear.

With genuinely funny dialogue, engaging characters, fine acting and presentation, Femoid shows us a horrific slice of modern life. Ultimately, though it falls short in its lack of genuine inquiry — it’s a shallow tantrum, not a fiery challenge — and this topic urgently needs to be explored, dissected and understood to be counteracted, not just mirrored back at us on stage.