The Sylvia Plath play Three Women is not an easy play. It’s not one to see if you are looking for comic relief, a light-hearted night out or somewhere to take a first date – but if you are looking for something moving, passionate and explosively emotional, then this is the play for you.

Three Women is a ‘poem for three voices’. It is the raw intertwining of three women’s very different journeys through pregnancy:

The First Woman is an excited but frightened first time mother.

The Second Woman has just experienced another miscarriage.

The Third Woman is young and has decided to give her baby up for adoption.

Their progressions throughout the play are fraught with emotion and wring out your insides with their honesty.

The First Woman begins sparkling with anticipation, but as she begins to go into labour she is struck by a panic that would have reverberated with every woman in the audience. She becomes horrified at the child that is trying to get out of her. The wrestle between “proper” dignified woman and terrified bellowing woman was powerful, and although they sometimes seemed a little clunky, her shrieks of childbirth sent shivers down the spine and were incredibly realistic – a feat that would be hard to pull off so un-selfconsciously in such a tiny space.

The Second Woman makes you want to cry from the beginning. She experiences her miscarriage while at work and reacts frankly: “I am dying as I sit.” In contrast with the other women who get to have children, her situation seems all the more devastating. She flips between sorrow, anger at the men who do not understand her, horror at the thought that she produced this death, and shame at herself for being a “barren one”. Her performance was probably the most convincing of all, the tears in her eyes seemed genuine and every word she said perfectly loaded with the each heart-wrenching emotion.

The Third Woman is a young scared little girl. She isn’t ready for a child and her only way out is adoption. Throughout the play she retains the air of fear and youth and you become afraid with her when she goes into labour and shouts “I should have murdered this that murders me”. She too pulls off an amazing and harrowing rendition of the pains of childbirth. She continues to be tormented by the birth, by the crying of her new-born child, by the memory of it. The happy scene was perhaps a little abrupt and not as convincing. But in the other scenes, when she shakes, you shake. Her youth and torment is incredibly real.

Overall, the play ended on a hopeful note, with the fragility of that hope masterfully portrayed by the three women. This play was incredibly powerful. It made you feel all at once terribly alone, terribly burdened and terribly miraculous to be a woman.

Three Women runs until 14 October at The Owl and the Pussycat. Tickets are $20 full-price or $18 concession.