A GLASGOW nightspot that allowed men to spy on women using the bathrooms is the inspiration for a major production at the Edinburgh festival this summer.
Expensive Sh*t by award-winning Adura Onashile is based on the furore over the Shimmy Club after it was revealed a two-way mirror had been installed to let men sneak peaks at women without their knowledge.
The club, part of Stefan King’s business empire, was forced to close for seven days after revelations surfaced in May 2013 that men could hire private rooms for £800 a night which would allow them to view females using the handbasins in the bathrooms.
The company said it was just a “bit of fun” but the city’s licensing board made the club shut for a week because of anger over the failure to inform women about the mirror.
Onashile says her new show, which is to appear at the Fringe as part of Scottish Government-backed showcase Made In Scotland, is based on three different ideas, including what happened in Glasgow.
It is described as “the powerful story of a Nigerian nightclub toilet attendant whose dark and conflicted journey is interwoven with a past in the toilets of Fela Kuti’s Shrine Club, Nigeria where she dreams of music, dance and freedom”.
“Three different ideas brought together – toilet attendants, the Shimmy Club in Glasgow where a story broke about a spy mirror in the female toilets where unsuspecting users of the toilets were being spied on by male punters who could pay for the privilege and the revolutionary music of a Nigerian artist called Fela Kuti and its relationship to women,” says Onashile, who was born in England and is of Nigerian descent.
She says the play reflects conditions in the UK today “where women are still grappling with the issues of objectification”.
The production is “set in a world where the male gaze reigns supreme” and tells the story of a fictional Nigerian toilet attendant working in a nightclub run by Fela Kuti.
“We have a giant of African music whose anti-colonial ideas and pan-Africanism were inspiring and still very relevant today but who also believed women were not equal to men,” says Onashile. “I wanted to explore his politics from a female point of view – how class and race revolution is impossible without gender equality.”
She added: “I’ve always had a really difficult relationship with toilets attendants, often of Nigerian descent and working in exploitative conditions, most of the time making all their money from tips nobody wants to leave.
“Here we have a classic intersectionality of race, class and gender and female spaces, and the intrusion of the male gaze within that private space.”
Onashile is no stranger to the Fringe, having previously starred in 2013 in a solo work about African-American Henrietta Lacks whose cancer cell sample was used without her knowledge or any financial reward for tests which helped made medical breakthroughs.
First seen as part of Edinburgh Science Festival in 2013, HeLa went on to an equally successful Edinburgh Festival Fringe run as part of the Made In Scotland programme.
Onashile also starred in the original production of Roadkill, Cora Bissett's multi-award winning Fringe play about sex-trafficking.
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