The Butterfly Effect

Since the eighteenth century, feminists have been fighting for equal rights with men, while men like Bert Morris and George Broadbent have been fighting to maintain their male dominance and privilege. Caught in the crossfire is Doreen – daughter of Bert and long-suffering wife of George. She has watched her mother submitting silently to her father, having been taught that a woman’s role is to satisfy her husband. She has relinquished her dream of becoming a psychologist and, like Shirley Valentine, has settled for a ‘small life’, suppressing her frustrations while crying on the lavatory or escaping to the movies and dreaming of Mykonos, while self-medicating with Ouzo. Is she just selfish and ungrateful? Should she try harder to satisfy her husband?
Bert and George blame ‘German’ Greer and The Female ‘Transvestite’ and a bunch of angry ‘ball breakers’ who think they are better than men and seek to emasculate them. Doreen’s lesbian sister, Shazza, has escaped to Australia, her daughter, Gillian, has buried herself in academia and, according to George, her son, Norman, is a metrosexual who needs ‘toughening up’.
While George and Bert question men’s roles in a changing world, Doreen recognises that she has been emotionally repressed and abused all her life and escapes to England to become a carer. There she discovers that men, too, can be abused and that not all men are chauvinistic bigots - like Charlie, an artist and former butterfly collector, who has escaped an abusive relationship himself.
She slowly metamorphoses into a confident, independent woman while George, following a visit from Shazza and her partner, begins to reassess his beliefs and to acknowledge his failure as a husband. While he waits expectantly for his wife’s return, she contemplates her future: the prospect of a new assignment, a visit to an old school friend, a holiday in Mykonos or her return to her husband and family.
Will she risk sacrificing her newfound freedom and self confidence for an uncertain future as Mrs Broadbent?