Tanqueray, Chekhov, And A Balanced Look Into Female Drinking (While Drinking)

"Tanqueray," Alice Canavagh says, almost before we've finished asking what her favourite gin is. "Simply because it's amazing, and at the moment we've got about four or five empty bottles on the shelf at home."

As to whether she and fellow performers Emma Hall and Jean Goodwin (who, alongside Cameron Stewart — "our amaaaazing producer" — make up Man With A Plan) will be drinking on stage, Cavanagh reveals an earlier conception of the show involved an element of Russian roulette amongst the props.

"Initially we were going to be drinking on stage, but every night we would be not knowing which of us would get the real alcohol. But we've moved away from that concept now, so we're all going to be sober on stage. We wanted to give the audience the experience of being drunk, rather than presenting them with drunk actors on stage."

"Initially we were going to be drinking on stage, but every night we would be not knowing which of us would get the real alcohol."

While these are interesting questions (likewise whether or not there will be a dry opening night — "No") they do kind of miss the point, or illustrate it — there's a somewhat sinister obsession with booze in this country, though the scope of Gin Sister is wider than that, and looks in particular at the relationship women have with alcohol.

"[Man With A Plan] has a passion for doing work that is through a female perspective and looking at the world through a woman's perspective. This show looks at alcohol through the women's perspective. When we were bumping out our first show, Like A Fishbone, and saying it would be beautiful to work again, and Three Sisters came up initially, simply because there were three women, and we were talking about how much we love Chekhov's text. Then we started to look at how alcohol plays such a huge part in that play, but it's never mentioned; they're always sitting down at the table, there's always a bottle nearby. So Three Sisters spring-boarded us into this discussion about alcohol.

"We're trying to be ambiguous as we can so we can be any woman," says Cavanagh, before launching a little more than timidly into a brief excerpt of Whitney Houston's I'm Every Woman. The singing makes sense. Song and dance emerged as a useful tool while developing the show.

"Throughout the research we started seeing these themes emerging, something that connected alcohol in all of our lives, and things that started connecting these women who would be drinking — Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin — so we started directing our creative material and our research through those themes."

Despite the rigorous research, and the inevitably confronting results, Cavanagh stresses Gin Sister isn't overly didactic; this isn't an intervention. We're back to the humidity of the opening night.

"We're not aiming to create anything that's judgmental towards alcohol but I kind of feel like at the end of the show we'd love the audience to reflect a little bit on their own drinking, but not to never want a pick up a glass. Hopefully they'll have a drink with us after the show."