The emotional gulf between men and women
is unbridgeable and has
become even more so during the past half century or so now that neither
has a traditional role model of ‘maleness’ or ‘femaleness’ to
follow - at least, that is the theory
on which Defending the Cavemen is based.
Each wants to understand the needs of the other, but Man’s quest for answers to everyday questions relating to women (and vice versa) leaves him perpetually perplexed. If a man opens a door for a woman, he may elicit a look of puzzled pity: ‘doesn’t he know we can do it for ourselves?’ But, if he doesn’t open it, he risks being labelled a MCP.
Unlike in the old days, he cannot rely of the example of older men in the tribe: teen culture has all but obliterated respect for elders by rebellious young males.
So what is a man to do? Indeed what constitutes a man in contemporary society? To provide some kind of guidance, Mark Little’s virtuoso one-man dissection of the battle of the sexes seeks answers as to how today’s deep divisions between men and women arose and how they may (yet) be healed.
According to Little, all men are descended from an early proto-caveman whose advice he frequently seeks throughout an evening that is so insightful it has been granted the official blessing of Relate - ‘the relationship people’ as they refer to themselves in the programme. And it is from this deep-rooted behavioural pattern that ‘modern’ man has retained so many unfathomably mysterious characteristics: his untidiness, his inability to communicate with the woman who shares (and tidies up) his cave, his need for his own space, his ability to communicate with his mates only via coded outbursts of appreciative grunts or deprecating comments.
Little reduces every situation to such basic, forensically-observed, absurdity that you see the logic behind every acute apercu. The caveman within posits that when a man speed-changes TV channels, he is merely exercising an ancient reflex that sees everything as prey: “must kill as many channels as I can. Don’t need to watch. Just zap - and I’ve added another conquest…”
Employing a completely different rationale, a woman will pause the remote on each channel for sufficient time to assimilate a certain amount of information before moving on. She can stay on a channel that teaches the proper way to maintain a good amount of savings for just a few seconds then resume switching. This way, she can collect the nuggets of knowledge needed to successfully seed subsequent conversations with her friends.
Of course, she then cannot understand why her husband (who has ostensibly been indulging in the same exercise - albeit from a different perspective) has not retained anything at all to share with her from his own foray into channel hopping.
And so the misunderstandings multiply throughout a blissful evening that ends with a masterclass in audience manipulation by Little who ends his immaculate tour de force on a high. OK, so men may not be perfect he suggests, but by then we have eventually begun to understand (and accept) the reasons for much of our behaviour and acquired valuable historical insights into a woman’s mind.
This hilarious and deeply-insightful play by Rob Becker is life-affirmingly directed by Little’s long-suffering life partner, Cath Farr.
