Revolver review – Beatlemania gets a captivating feminist rethink

Pleasance Courtyard, EdinburghEmily Woof draws a connection between the female adulation around the Fab Four and radical artist Valerie Solanas’s 1968 shooting of Andy WarholA revolver is something that spins around. It is also a weapon. In this captivating piece of storytelling theatre, Emily Woof

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Emily Woof draws a connection between the female adulation around the Fab Four and radical artist Valerie Solanas’s 1968 shooting of Andy Warhol

A revolver is something that spins around. It is also a weapon. In this captivating piece of storytelling theatre, Emily Woof makes a connection between the two. On the one hand, there is Revolver, the seminal 1966 album by the Beatles; on the other, there is the gun wielded by Valerie Solanas when she attempted to kill Andy Warhol in 1968.

The play is a perfect, if coincidental, companion piece to Philosophy of the World by In Bed With My Brother, playing elsewhere on the Edinburgh fringe. Where that show combines the story of the 60s girl group the Shaggs with the rage of Solanas’s Scum (Society for Cutting Up Men) manifesto, Woof’s play filters the female adulation of the Beatles through the same feminist lens.