In a spare moment when you are just thinking about life’s big questions have you ever asked yourself:  What would a vagina wear if it had the chance? Stockings? Male tuxedo? Evening gown?  Spectacles? Or if a vagina could speak would it say during sex? “Slow down?" or “Oh that’s brave?”

No? Well I was lucky enough to spend an hour and a half being enlightened by these sorts of important questions in The Vagina Monologues, which was held at Knights Park and stared Cordelia Howard, Tanju Duncan, Anne Doyle and Georgie Farwell. It was held in aid of the Croydon and Kingston Rape Crisis Centre.

Written by playwright and activist Eve Ensler, the play is famous for inspiring the movement for V-Day which was a global movement to end violence against women and girls.  The play is made up of monologues of women telling the audience the various experiences their vaginas have had whether it’s through sex, rape, birth, menstruation, orgasms and in some cases these experiences are very few.

It was described by a Sunday Broadcast columnist as the kind of work that allows “self important lovelies to feel radical and dangerous.” I could not have expressed my feelings towards this play better myself.

The show is meant to be controversial and shocking by touching on issues that are taboo to a lot of people by having very open and explicit, foul mouthed discussions about women’s bodies, sexual lusts, fears and desires. For example woman performed a monologue listing the inanimate objects that have given her an orgasm:

“My orgasms happened all over the place, on the treadmill at the gym, on a bike, in the bath. I have not had an orgasm in a while and I am getting terribly frustrated. “

The Vagina Monologues is a little out of date and fails to be controversial to most modern day audiences with its five minutes of different orgasmic sounds performed very loudly by the women on stage and the overuse of the word “cunt”. This is because most people nowadays swear like trooper and have heard orgasms sounds only forest woodmen can make out.

A lot of the monologues were rather self indulging and pointless, for example one lazy spent most of her monologue describing her vagina to the audience and described it as a “ a shell opening and closing.” She then continued to describe the first time she saw her vagina and compared it to cutting a fish open for the first time and “you see all those layers.”

Some of the issues touched upon by the play are important and sensitive concerns for women and relationships, such as a woman in one of the monologues described how her husband forced her to shave her vagina but when she refused to shave it again her husband had an affair. She concluded with the very significant message “you have to love hair in order to love a vagina.”

Despite the ultimate message of the Vagina Monologues being that the vagina is the ultimate power of femininity and the picture of individuality, I personally never want to hear the word “vagina” ever again.