Edinburgh Fringe: Issues of gender, power and autonomy create a thrilling mix

“Even if you're the President, your husband can still kick your ass.”

That gentle voice belonged to Fela Kuti, anti-colonialist, pan-Africanist and outspoken critic of the militarist governments of Nigeria in the 1970s and 1980s. Much revered as the father of Afrobeat, an empowering, invigorating fusion of funk, Nigerian highlife and jazz, he saw no contradiction in agitating for human rights while seeing it as “part of the natural order for women to be submissive to men”; for half of humanity to serve, as in the title of one his songs, as a “Mattress” to the other.

When pressed on that hypocrisy by a tenacious music journalist in 1983, he said: “I've never even bothered to to think about it. I just leave it to culture”.

Women's rights had not even presented itself as a question to him. From the leftist movement in Britain to the Black Panthers, that selective blindness has been commonplace throughout the history of liberation politics. Stokely Carmichael of the latter notoriously said that the “place of women [in the civil rights movement] is prone”, a sentiment that jars to this day.

In Expensive Shit, her follow-up to the award-winning HeLa, writer-director Adura Onashile draws fascinating parallels with gender relations in Western culture, where even places of supposed freedom, such as the nightclub, can become places of oppression.

Like HeLa, which told the story of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman whose cells were used in experiments without her permission, Expensive Shit uses real-life examples to explore issues of power and autonomy. Inspired too by the story of the Shimmy Club, a nightclub in Glasgow which sparked international controversy when it was revealed to have installed a two-way mirror in its female toilets so customers could pay to look at women without their knowledge, the key dynamic being investigated here is that of the male gaze - perhaps the most significant power relationship there is.

Sitting around set designer Karen Tennant's set of three cubicles, the audience function as those voyeurs while Tolu (Sabina Cameron) spruces and scrubs the toilets for tips.

Soon, she is encouraging women (Teri Ann Bobb Baxter, Jamie Marie Levy and Diana Yekinni) to pout and pose at the mirror, hiking up their breasts and pulling down their tops, all the better for “pulling”.

Tolu, like most people who scrub the detritus left by others for a living, wasn't always a toilet attendant. Like Onashile, she grew up listening to Fela Kuti.

More than that, she was a dancer living in Kuti's Kalakuta, a self-proclaimed republic where he lived with his entourage, including 27 wives.

Flitting between the Glasgow club and The Shrine, Kuti's legendary club in Lagos, the younger Tolu wants “real justice”, not just vying for the carnal attentions of Kuti in return for more food.

The others, that fire having been snuffed out of them, resign themselves to making the best of things. That shift, from the young Tolu as hot-blooded feminist agitator to older Tolu effectively pimping her sisters to survive, is fascinating, and Onashile's splicing of these two situations across time and country is genuinely inspired.

Though a narrative about one woman's will-he-won't-he dating struggles seems superfluous, the exuberance, choreography and sharp satire (the piece begins with Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines, a song that many women couldn't stop dancing to until they listened to the lyrics and saw the video) makes Expensive Shit a must for anyone interested in gender and music.

Until Aug 28 (not 8, 15, 22), Traverse (V15), various times, (70mins), £18.50 (£8.50, £13.50 concs). Tel: 0131 228 1404