Looking Through Gender
Looking Through Gender: Post-1980 British and Irish Drama
By
Samuele Grassi Looking Through Gender: Post-1980 British and Irish Drama, by Samuele Grassi
This book first published 2011
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2011 by Samuele Grassi
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-2873-4, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2873-4 Ai miei genitori
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ...... ix
PART I: ON DRAMATURGY
Chapter One...... 3 Gender on the British and Irish Stages (1980-Today): An Overview Introduction: performing bodies, performing genders The theatre and the “literary Canon”: an analysis of Britain and Ireland Structural and political notes
Chapter Two ...... 19 Women’s Bodies in the Plays of Caryl Churchill and Timberlake Wertenbaker “She’s not one of us”: plays for Margaret Thatcher Fairies, Folklore, and the “becoming-woman” Migrant and scary bodies in late capitalist Europe
Chapter Three ...... 37 Contemporary Irish Women Playwrights Between realism and experimentation: Northern Irish women playwrights “Decentring” the Celtic Tiger: Women playwrights and the Republic
PART II: PERFORMING GENDERS
Chapter Four...... 57 Queering Masculinities Socialism for the future: on Mark Ravenhill Queer Irish plays Wilde Stories: Britain and Ireland viii Table of Contents
Chapter Five ...... 81 Queering Femininities In the archives of black lesbian feeling: Jackie Kay’s Chiaroscuro and Mojisola Adebayo’s Moj of the Antarctic Lesbian futures and butch aesthetics: on Nina Rapi Queenie on stage: the theatre of Valerie Mason-John
Chapter Six ...... 103 Two Companies Charabanc Theatre Company Glasshouse Productions
PART III: CASE STUDIES
Chapter Seven...... 121 Neil Bartlett
Chapter Eight...... 137 Claire Dowie
Chapter Nine...... 147 Kevin Elyot
Chapter Ten ...... 163 Sarah Kane
Chapter Eleven ...... 177 Frank McGuinness
Afterword ...... 187
References ...... 191
Index...... 209 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This volume would not have been possible without the help and support of several people. First, I want to thank Liana Borghi and Fiorenzo Fantaccini at the University of Firenze, and Richard Cave (Royal Holloway University of London) for their invaluable insight into my thinking on queer and Ireland, and for their generous advice; I owe much to them. Ornella De Zordo (University of Firenze) gave her support over the research phase. My sincere thanks also to Paulene Healey for proofreading the English with a keen eye. John Gilbert, Ilse Girona, and Christine Richardson who checked the English of this work in its early stages. I am particularly grateful to Annabel Arden and Stephen Jeffreys for putting me in touch with playwrights and structures in London, and for letting me enjoy the Out of Joint rehearsal in an unforgettable evening in November 2008. Lynette Goddard (Royal Holloway), Gabriele Griffin (University of York), David Halperin (University of Michigan), Jamie Heckert (University of Edinburgh), Deirdre Osborne (Goldsmiths College, London), Marco Pustianaz (University of Piemonte Orientale), Dan Rebellato (Royal Holloway), and Brenda Winter (Queen’s University, Belfast) have been extremely helpful either through e-mail contact or in discussion over my research period in London in the winter of 2008-9. Anne Mulhall (UCD, Dublin), Gavin Brown (University of Leicester), and Stephen Knight (Cardiff University) sent me their essays for critical use at different stages of my writing. I am also grateful for the expertise of Giovanna Mochi (University of Siena) and Valerio Viviani (University of Tuscia, Viterbo), whose understanding aided me considerably in this work. The greatest contribution to my work and my greatest debt is to the playwrights and performers I have interviewed who have answered my questions and provided material: Neil Bartlett, Loughlin Deegan, Emma Donoghue, Claire Dowie, Kevin Elyot, Trudy Hayes, Frank McGuinness, Valerie Mason-John, Philip Osment, and Nina Rapi. I hope my writing shows even in a small part my gratitude for their sincere commitment and interest. For discussing the playwrights and their work and helping me with scripts and other unpublished sources, my special thanks go to: Rick Bébout, Paola Cavallin, Martin Humphreis (Cinema Museum, London), x Acknowledgements
Mel Kenyon and her staff at Casarotto Ramsay (London); Mary Nicotra; Julie Parker at the Drill Hall (London); Caroline Williams and the staff at Irish Theatre Institute (Dublin); the staff at Dublin Theatre Festival Office (Dublin); Colin Watkeys. I am also grateful to Rhona Trench (School of Business and Humanities, IT Sligo) and to the organising committee at IASIL 2008 Conference (Oporto, Portugal) for giving me an opportunity to present my work. The research phase was enriched by the kind collaboration of institutions and their staff. I am indebted to Kathleen E. Bethel (Northwestern University Library); Eliza Bent (American Theatre magazine, New York); Kathleen Dickson and the staff at BFI (London); Silvia Gallotti and the staff at Hall-Carpenter Archives, LSE (London); Paul Keith (Gerber/Hart Library, Chicago); Mairéad Lynch (Abbey Theatre, Dublin); Euan McArthur (University of Dundee, Scotland); Margherita Orlando (National Theatre, London); Sarah Steenson and Patricia Walker at Ulster and Irish Studies, Linen Hall Library (Belfast); the staff at V&A Theatre Collections Archives, Blythe House and Tate Enterprises Ltd (London). My thanks also to Arianna Antonielli (University of Firenze) for her suggestions on editing the thesis, and for compiling the Index; to Mike Markiewicz at ArenaPal (London) for the cover photograph, and to Alessandro Senatori/Musigraphia for producing the book design. I am indebted to Carol Koulikourdi and Amanda Millar at CSP for believing in this project and for bringing it into publication. My warmest thank-you goes to my family, to my friends, and to Gabriele all of whom have helped make this possible.
Note
A longer version of the section on Glasshouse Productions (Chapter 6) has been published in Deviant Acts: Essays on queer performance, ed. David Cregan (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2009) 151-69. PART I:
ON DRAMATURGY
CHAPTER ONE
GENDER ON THE BRITISH AND IRISH STAGES (1980-TODAY): AN OVERVIEW
Introduction: performing bodies, performing genders
On 14 February 1979 Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine opened at London’s Darlington College of Arts. The play offered an astute parody of gender stereotypes; the regulation of gender was illustrated by the performing body itself. While the first half of the play performed gender as a range of compulsory positions assigned by western social dynamics in a Victorian setting, the second half showed that England, in the period from 1970 to 1980, was not that different from the colonial reality in South Africa. This counter-reading embedded in Cloud Nine both provided a model for and represented a watershed moment for visions on gender which sprang up in Britain and Ireland throughout the following years and right up to the present moment. For Elin Diamond, Churchill was inspired by Michel Foucault in “her evocative ways of understanding gender oppression as the production of ‘docile bodies’ in the family that, by extension, buttresses schools, the military, and other branches of state power” (1988, 196). Foucault contested that there exists a physicality of the body “prior to its signification and form”; for him, “[t]he culturally constructed body is the result of a diffuse and active structuring of the social field with no magical or ontoteological origins” (Butler 1989, 607). Foucault’s theories have substantially altered the way playwrights and critics view the body in performance. Richard Allen Cave argues that there is a cause-effect relationship between theories on the body from different contexts of contemporary theory and the rise of physical performance in the 1990s. These different readings show “how to read both social and performing bodies and how to discriminate in the process between the performing and the performative; how to be alert to the individual body’s shaping under acculturating influences; how to determine the degree to which that body is constructed by external forces” (2001, 108). The 4 Chapter One presentation of the body in Cloud Nine was informed by a markedly materialist feminist agenda. This volume shares the assumption that, in theatre studies, as women working in post-war drama started to explore possibilities to find a voice of their own—at the level of playwriting, directing, and acting—they were developing radically new strategies of empowerment and resistance to normative regimes. These strategies proved to be a major turning point in British and Irish theatre histories and gender then became the point of entry into the articulation of human experience. For British audiences Churchill’s play was a daring, successful attempt to cope with times of radically changing politics, in particular to the conservatism which would dominate in England in the upcoming fifteen years. The text joined a wave of political writing which included women playwrights like Michelene Wandor, Sarah Daniels, and Churchill herself. In Ireland, the history of women’s performance since the 1980s is a mirror of the commitment of activist movements against a (hetero)patriarchal society hallowed by the Catholic Church. Theatre writing by women grew at great speed. Northern Irish drama by women acquired in Christina Reid and Marie Jones’s works its feature of “resilience, fortitude and ... the sharp and vibrant humour” (McMullan 1993, 120) which was able to respond to the local culture, thus giving a paradigmatic answer to the sectarian violence of the Troubles. The South was to undergo a period of economic crisis, from which the country would rise and in very little time ascend to the Celtic Tiger era. Brechtian and Artaudian influences are obviously interspersed in the various forms of experimentation and explosion of conventional theatre boundaries, and have been extensively reworked by contemporary criticism. In most cases, these influences pertain to the role of the body and its relation to power, and the depiction of violence. The contradictions of Margaret Thatcher’s government—of apparent freedom from state intervention while centralising power “within itself” (Peacock 1999, 41)— were unveiled by politically aware feminist theatres such as Churchill’s and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s, where the body was the favoured site for the articulation of resistance to political and sexual oppression. Post-1980s plays by Harold Pinter explore violence, torture, and silence as means of protest (Luckhurst 2006, 366-7). Conspicuous Pinterian roots can be found in Sarah Kane’s combination of “small scale and large scope,” (Quigley 2001, 21) as for instance in the bombing scene which leads from the hotel room in Leeds to the war in Bosnia in Blasted (1995), or in her version of Hyppolitus in Phaedra’s Love (1996). In Joe Orton’s exaggeratedly flamboyant farce, What the Butler Saw Gender on the British and Irish Stages (1980-Today): An Overview 5
(1969) sexuality and gender stereotypes are radically, anarchically caricatured to merge in “an orgy of cross-dressing, gender confusion, and hierarchical inversion,” as Jonathan Dollimore captures it, “an orgy of confused and refused gender identities” (1991, 315-6). Most obviously, there are elements of Orton’s depictions of sexuality in Mark Ravenhill’s social portraits, in which “sex is a commercial transaction and consumption sexually arousing.” (Sierz 2001, 128)1 Also, the “Dyonisiac chaos over order” triumphing in Orton’s successful hit finds resonance in Churchill’s and Ian Lan’s experimental A Mouthful of Birds (1986), and the same can be said of the “anarchic” sexually fluid communities of Claire Dowie’s Sodom (2006). If the character of Truscott in Orton’s Loot (1965), as Andrew Wyllie argues, incorporates “the inevitability of brutality and corruption within an organization whose masculinist culture fosters a kind of clubby criminality”—we may dare to trace its influence as far on as Gerard Stembridge’s gay detective Pat (The Gay Detective, 1996). It is a truism that What the Butler Saw plays with sexuality along “income and social position” (2009, 139). This informs the more striking and relevant treatments of sexuality especially in the 1990s, for instance in the plays by Martin Crimp, Patrick Marber, and Ravenhill; part of Alek Sierz’s definition of “In-Yer-Face” drama rests on this point. At the close of the 1990s, Dan Rebellato published his revealing account 1956 And All That (1999) and brought to attention the extent to which a theatrical counter- culture attributed to John Osborne and the “angry young men” of his generation had been well under way at least since the previous decade. One can really not think of the paradigmatic shift occurred on stage in the 1990s without considering the rise of queer culture and its spread in English speaking countries. The issue of the performing body as a locus both of power and of resistance staged by contemporary playwrights— Pinter included—has opened productive approaches to drama. Ashes to Ashes (1996) is structured, in terms of action and language, around a bodily relationship evolving as a “sadistic display or erotic power game.” This game is enacted by placing the speech act and bodily gestures on the same level of action and meaning, even more so when the body substitutes the voice in telling “truths, which the voice would often seek to deny” (Cave 2001, 117-8, 126). This mode of dealing with the body and power returns in Rebecca Prichard’s Yard Gal (1998).2 The play uses cockney slang and patois, evidencing how language rewrites histories of oppression, a cogent feature also for British black and Asian theatres (Griffin 2003; Goddard 2007). Just like in Pinter’s 1990s plays, in Prichard’s Yard Gal “the empowered and the victimised are identifiable from the start ... and they are symbolic of a larger picture of state 6 Chapter One oppression and abuse” (Luckhurst 2006, 359). There is nothing left for the two teenagers Boo and Marie to lose even if they still have a whole life ahead of them; this is the reason why Boo saves her pregnant friend from a murder charge and is sent to prison. The story is, as Boo says, “about me and Marie and the posse that we used to move with. It’s about chatting shit, getting fucked, getting high and doing our crimes innit” (5). There is even less girls like Boo and Marie can expect from others, as conveyed when, under their first arrest, the policeman who pays them “for a bit [of sex] on the side” (11) pretends not to know them. Prichard requires audiences to ask questions about British society at large: the two girls emerge somewhat as women successors of “the wives of unemployed working-class men, and the mothers of children with jobless futures” in Thatcherite Britain (Aston 1995, 76). But, as was the case with the recent production at the Oval House theatre (October- November 2008),3 the play may still bear the same meanings for the London of today. The students making up the audience reacted very well and could easily engage in the language of youth mirrored so well by Prichard’s style; through laughs and whispers, they also seemed to interact with the two performers. Yard Gal consists of a “shared, rather than single narration” (Aston 2003a, 73). Body language plays a fundamental role in Boo’s and Marie’s storytelling. In particular, the actresses have to re-create specific movements as markers of the characters’ identification with a specific class and its social contexts. Prichard seems to draw again from Pinter in showing that private experiences are “the source of appeal against anything political that loses touch with the personal” (Quigley 2001, 17).4 Yard Gal remains one of the most successful and harrowing examples of how gender, class, and a renewed notion of politics converge in a drama looking at the past and the present, yet with the future in mind. A year before Prichard staged her outstanding success, Crimp had destabilized and amazed audiences and critics with his highly experimental Attempts on Her Life, a “recipe for an avant-garde theatre” (Sierz 2006, 53).5 A leading example of post-1980s dramaturgy, the play alternates seventeen different “scenarios for the theatre.” Anne’s identity is acted out and evoked by a series of contrasting viewpoints and perspectives, the most awkward and challenging ones being a new brand of car and a suicidal terrorist. She is “a presence ambiguously conjured as an absence.” But for Crimp, she is essentially “a theatrical device” (Sierz 2006, 126, 237). Attempts on Her Life allows an unprecedented freedom regarding the performance of genders and theatre strategies. During its last Italian production by the Accademia degli Artefatti (Rome 2009), I was personally led onto the stage to impersonate a possible version of Anne. Gender on the British and Irish Stages (1980-Today): An Overview 7
Gender confusion was thus strategically employed to add to the humour of the overall piece. Despite its uncanny experimentalism, however, Attempts on Her Life remains a rather unified play, in that its characterisation is still the main issue, even though it is rendered in a decidedly unconventional way.6 In the 1990s, Ireland celebrated the advent of the Celtic Tiger, a period of economic boom whose first-hand effect on the theatre was to bring Irish playwrights to attention in Britain. This was true for new women writers like Marina Carr, as well as for the challenging theatre of Conor McPherson, Martin McDonagh, and Enda Walsh. Discussions over the new role that theatre could play within this process were channelled into how new writing hinted at “a series of micro-Irelands, all widely differing from each other in terms of the social reality they represent” (Roche 2006, 2000). This introduces the relationship between the new drama of global Ireland and issues of the postmodern—a relationship which is certainly harder to define than for Britain—to which I return in the following section. The new millennium opened with Sierz’s influential and still debated study, In-Yer-Face Theatre (2001). In its early formulation, the label referred to “any drama that takes the audience by the scruff of the neck and shakes it until it gets the message. It is a theatre of sensation ... it also taps into more primitive feelings, smashing taboos, mentioning the forbidden, creating discomfort” (5). Sexuality is perhaps the area in which this is particularly true. Marber’s Closer is a case in point. Its explicit sexual language and content, along with its treatment of love, dependency and betrayal, of art and sex, and especially of the increasing appeal of chat-room sex are dramatized as indicators of the need to control those who are loved and desired. Sierz is surely right when he claims that sexuality in 1990s drama was presented as “raw, aggressive and often very troubling.” More effectively, Closer addressed the ways in which innermost feelings can be turned into sexually abusive relationships, as well as sex which can be an escape from the constraints imposed by contemporary, affluent societies. Marber made it clear, though, that sex was “less seen as an exploration of liberating eroticism than of a desperate attempt to communicate” (Sierz 2001, 179), thus aligning himself with the playwrights of his generation. In his study, Sierz went on to clarify that “In-Yer-Face” playwrights’ use of shock tactics attempted to search a “deeper meaning” and that they were questioning “the distinction we use to define who we are,” (2001, 6) that is, the binary oppositions which structure society and Western thought. This seemed to justify his criteria for selecting the diverse 8 Chapter One playwrights included in the label. However, his undoubtedly well-informed study still poses problems. To consider the act of labelling a “democratic” and “political” process (Sierz 2002, 18) contravenes, in my view, the fact that the playwrights, as he himself wrote, were rejecting dualisms in order to replace them with “grey areas and ambiguous situations” (2001, 231) which lastly are not easily reducible to “good” or “wrong.” The next section will explain the comparative approach of the overall volume and provide the context of the subsequent chapters.
The theatre and the “literary Canon”: an analysis of Britain and Ireland
In a British context, the idea of a theatre canon is associated with the controversial rupture effected in post-war drama by Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956). From this point of view, Rebellato’s book can be considered the first major attempt to question the revolution which the play is thought to have started. For Rebellato, Osborne’s play made it clear that the decline of Britain and of Britishness happened “within British culture” (1999, 142). Together with other plays and playwrights converging at London’s Royal Court, Rebellato continues, Look Back in Anger sought to establish a conservative tradition with the purpose to “masculinize” theatre against the “queer” subculture staged in the West End throughout the previous decade, for instance in the works by Terence Rattigan and Noël Coward:
these were precisely what the New Wave felt were responsible for the crisis in British culture and identity; indeed, the whole revolution in British theatre can be seen as responding to the linguistic perversity of homosexuality which seemed on the point of constituting itself as an oppositional subculture, destabilizing the vital unities which seemed the foundation of a strong national identity. (1999, 190-1)
The book emerges, then, as a counter-reading of the dominant canon which had apparently been dismantled by Osborne and his fellow playwrights. This historical retrieval of queer sources in Britain has played an important role for some playwrights such as Neil Bartlett and Ravenhill. The association of a theatre canon in Ireland and of its deconstruction with the formation of the nation as narration is of primary importance for the rise of women’s theatres in the 1970s and their dismantling of conventional assumptions on gender and nationalism. I am obviously referring to Homi K. Bhabha’s assertion that narratives and nations are Gender on the British and Irish Stages (1980-Today): An Overview 9 characterised by a shared development as fictional constructs. For Bhabha, the language narrating the nation is essentially performative, a space “where meanings may be partial because they are in medias res; and history maybe half-made because it is in the process of being made; and the image of cultural authority may be ambivalent because it is caught, uncertainly, in the act of ‘composing’ its powerful image” (1990, 3). In my view, the stage could function as one such space, and the queer subjectivities in the works of Frank McGuinness, the resistance to the Celtic Tiger in the plays by Carr and Gina Moxley, or the ambivalent positions occupied by women in the productions of Charabanc Theatre Company I will examine here are cases in point. In their remaking of history—meaning a single exclusionary narrative involving domination and exploitation—they lay “the cultural boundaries of the nation so that they may be acknowledged as ‘containing’ thresholds of meaning that must be crossed, erased, and translated in the process of cultural production” (Bhabha 1990, 4). This aspect is complicated by the increasing interest in globalisation in recent Irish theatre studies, as well as by the new directions taken by Irish drama. Part of the problem lies in the use we make of “Ireland” and “Irish,” which I am now going to discuss. Patrick Lonergan analyses the impact of globalization on the drama of the Celtic Tiger era (1990-2005) and outlines four different elements to sustain his thesis, the most important of which seems to be the way globalization has changed the “the old vocabulary of analysis” available to theatre and performance studies. He goes on to write that “the performance of Irish economy was influenced by the international profile of Irish drama,” accelerating the process of internationalization present in literature since the eighteenth-century (2009, 5, 22-3). Lonergan points out that the term Irish has by now become “deterritorialized: it may refer to the physical territory of Ireland, but it also acts as a brand—a commodified abstraction that gives meaning to its purchaser instead of signifying the physical territory of a nation.” He uses the term with reference to plays and playwrights coming from the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in an attempt to “ignore those differences” (2009, 28). I acknowledge the value of Lonergan’s proposal; yet, for the purposes of my study, it remains crucial to distinguish between the North and the South of Ireland even when tendencies towards a global drama emerge. Despite the new directions, we still need to map the specific contexts from which alternative subjectivities and views contest cultural hegemonies and hierarchies. To affirm the locality of any particular strategic place—be it geographical or metaphorical—at the same time as to acknowledge its effects on a transnational context seems an efficacious method to see, as 10 Chapter One
Sara Brady and Fintan Walsh write, that “the categories of ‘Irish culture’ and ‘Irishness’ are highly performative, effected through a multitude of social practices, cultural formations, and discursive utterances, and in timely need of critical address” (2009, 1). I would therefore speak of an internationalization of Irish drama, to borrow a phrase from Bhabha, a drama defined by “a chiasmatic ‘figure’ [or, figures] of cultural difference whereby the anti-nationalist, ambivalent nation-space becomes the crossroads to a new transnational culture” (1990, 4). Such a position is embedded, for instance, in Loughlin Deegan’s The Queen and Peacock (2000) which will be looked at in Chapter 5. My second observation concerns the postmodern questioning of the legitimacy of a theatre canon in terms of the shaping and performing of gender identity on the British and Irish stages. As a strategy to read contemporary theatres, “looking back” is the method that has offered major inspiration for criticism. For instance, Wandor’s Post-War British Drama: Looking Back in Gender (2001)7 casts a look at sexual politics and its representation in British plays after WWII; Harriet Devine’s Looking Back (2006) analyses the changing politics of British plays staged at the Royal Court over the same period via a series of interviews with the playwrights; Melissa Sihra’s Women in Irish Drama (2007) surveys a century of (partially lost) women playwriting in Ireland, whereas Dimple Godiwala’s edited series, Alternatives Within the Mainstream (2006 and 2007) focus on post-war theatre histories of racial and sexual difference. Taken together, these works can be viewed as thorough, much needed archival accounts of post-war Irish and British cultures. Their analysis follows a more or less linear trajectory of time also recurring in my focus on the period from 1980 to the present. What is different, though, is how the analysis is articulated in terms of the orientation of gender in “space.” Their relationship to the canon may be summarised by what Dollimore calls “perverse dynamic,” that is, an opposition that means also “to be against (close up, in proximity to) or, in other words, up against” (1991, 229). I will try, instead, to “look though” gender; it will become clear that this looking through is also associated with a notion of politics rooted in the everyday, useful in coming to terms with the paradigmatic shift in “political theatre” that has taken place over the three decades under examination here. I take orientation to mean not only the relation towards objects, but also the way spaces are inhabited in relation to how one is directed towards objects (Ahmed 2006). Michel de Certeau’s concepts of “tactic” and “space” can explain the movement of “looking through” carried out in my analysis. In the ‘General Introduction’ to his L’Invention du Quotidien (1980), Gender on the British and Irish Stages (1980-Today): An Overview 11 de Certeau indicates a strategy which clears a space for “the other,” such as the structures of organized power which constitute what is generally perceived as the norm. It is the end result of isolating a subject of power from its own environment; this subject gains the status of “proper” and thus determines its own exclusivity from what it is in relation with (1988, xviii). Politics and economics are the results of such forms of production. Gender, as the effect of institutionalized coercive practices played on the body may well be another. The tactic, on the other hand, “depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing.’ Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities.’” To associate gender to a tactic as understood by de Certeau is to follow the ways in which “the act and manner in which the opportunity is ‘seized’” (1988, xviii-xix); which is also to say, in this case, the various ways in which gender identity is shaped and performed on stage. The stage, in this reading, may function as a space, for de Certeau a locus of passage and instability, yet one which gives everyday life a fundamentally political dimension. As a “practised place,” the stage becomes in this formulation “a term dependent upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts” (de Certeau 1988, 117)—hence, the gesture on stage is a political act.8 Indeed, the relation between the terms “performative” and “theatrical (performance),” as Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris note, has rapidly become one of interchangeability. This, for instance, “potentially fosters the illusion that all ‘repetitions’ of gender roles ... are equally ‘resistant,’ and alongside this that the imagining or enactment of transformations of the sex/gender system in this sphere is enough in itself to (performatively—as in instantly) effect a transformation in the world of the social” (2006, 11). In a profoundly daring way, a very outward one, gender becomes a means to deconstruct, via the gesture on stage, the dominant practices which regulate everyday life.
Structural and political notes
Contemporary post-structuralist feminist theories have informed my analysis of feminist and lesbian plays. In particular, Rosi Braidotti’s views on “becoming-woman” has offered political opportunities in this direction. Braidotti theorises a subject of feminism “simultaneously sexed and social; s/he is motivated by the political consciousness of inequalities and therefore committed to asserting diversity and difference as a positive and alternative value.” This subject “may no longer be a she, but the subject of 12 Chapter One quite another story: a subject-in-process; a mutant; the other of the Other” (2003, 44-5). It is an individual always in movement, as if in an on-going process of postmodern deconstruction of self and others; one who, as Gilles Deleuze’s Nomad which inspires Braidotti, thwarts power differentials in order to affirm fluidity and change, the “transformative flows that destabilize all identities” (2003, 52). In much more generalised terms, this position is akin to views on progressive (Brewer 1999) or inclusive (Aston 2003b) approaches to feminisms and feminist theatres.9 There is another consideration to be made. In this study, the term “feminist” will be used with reference to “factors and considerations (financial, political, social, personal)” (Goodman and De Gay 1996, 6) for women working in different theatre sectors, and in light of the developments in feminist and queer theories. For playwrights such as Churchill and Wertenbaker (Chapter 2) this will include the influence of and reactions to the “bourgeois-feminist” look (Peacock 1999, 25) embodied by Thatcher’s “masculine” look. The issue of feminist futures will also be addressed (Aston and Harris 2006; 2008). The chapter does not cover Churchill’s later, more experimental plays, in which a series of themes exceeding gender are paralleled with the search of a new theatrical language for discussing a politics ahead of globalisation. The critique on Western exploitation and politics is also more encompassing, such as in This is a Chair (1997), Far Away (2000), and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (2006). For the women working in Northern Ireland, women’s and feminist issues emerge in tandem with visions on the nation as a cultural production that has tended to exclude or ignore them. Chapter 3 focuses on works by Anne Devlin and Jones; the second part of the chapter looks at women playwrights in the Republic of Ireland, and the plays by Carr and Moxley. In the past two decades, some women have questioned their own “situated perspective[s],”10 contesting “the exclusionary operations and differential power-relations that construct and delimit feminist invocations of ‘women’” (Butler 1993, 29). Its effects in terms of the consolidation of a drama by black and lesbian women are the subject of Chapter 5. In the 1980s, lesbians in the theatre continued to claim a group identity even though they exposed the exclusionary mechanisms implied in sexual categories. The future of lesbian theatres seems to lie in replacing aspects of performing sex and gender with a fluidity of identity (Aston 2003a, 98- 9), as shown by the characters of Nina Rapi’s plays. Black feminist and lesbian voices have offered outstanding contributions to British drama often rejecting “simple, coherent or complete understanding[s] of the text[s]” (Goddard 2007, 52). I have chosen to look at the plays by Mojisola Gender on the British and Irish Stages (1980-Today): An Overview 13
Adebayo, Jackie Kay, and Valerie Mason-John as representatives of the three decades under exam. My interest in this transnational perspective is the reason why I have included a section on Rapi, originally Greek but based in London. Her bi-cultural viewpoint is also relevant in the critical work on lesbian theatre and playwriting.11 A recent collection of essays on “Cool Britannia” by Rebecca D’Monte and Graham Saunders demonstrates that the concern for the languages of political theatre is not limited to future perspectives. Here, it may be sufficient to comment on how these radical breaks have influenced sexual politics and gender performance on stage. The previous section has shown that in Ireland this aspect is intimately connected to the passage from the local towards a global contextualization of experience. It is a truism that, as Luckhurst writes, “for many in the 1990s ‘politics’ had become infinitely more complicated not just in terms of ethnicity, gender and class, but also in terms of the purpose of theatre and the dilemma of claiming to ‘represent’ anyone.” After the fall of the Berlin wall and the subsequent breach caused in the European Left, a decade of conservative government, and an economic crisis in Ireland, the parameters of political theatre had to change. We now associate the idea of a unified “political theatre” with the kind of drama initiated by Osborne and his contemporaries “and [it] is a term that suggests an unassailable claim to authority in the representation of the political” (2008, 58-9). To look at the implications of this process on gender is to see how the interrogation of identity politics has opened paradigmatic possibilities for a rethinking of exploitative mechanisms of the sex/gender regulations which have dominated Western thought since the late nineteenth-century—to such an extent that “state-of-the-nation” drama is now a matter of placing gender within a transnational perspective. Within this framework, queer has intervened in theory severing the link between gay and lesbian identities and radically left-wing political commitment; moreover, it has substituted the terms of discourse with non-normative discourses which do “not just apply to sex and gender, but to other axes of identity such as race, class or sexuality, none of which can be broken from its context and singled out as a person’s primary identity” (Gauntlett 2002, 136). Fluctuating economic structures in late- capitalist societies such as England and Ireland have also exerted their influence. A couple of texts chosen as examples of these phenomena in the context of gay may help to clarify this point. Towards the mid-1990s, Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing (1993) gained success for its dramatization of coming-out in a working-class context. Harvey’s theatre ventured as far as to present conventions of hetero/homo and of white/black equally 14 Chapter One disrupted, a rosy view which the film version possibly reinforced. Grae Cleugh’s Fucking Games (2001),12 by contrast, framed the anxiety over the lack of “political” concern in the gay community that characterises post-Aids uncertain times; it certainly did so in the words of the twenty- year-old Scot Danny:
The gay community?! Yes, you’re right. But then the idea of a community, as I understand it, is where people look out for each other. Most of what I’ve caught on the gay scene has been a bunch of narcissistic, tacky, cock- obsessed, sad fuck-ups who happen to share a common sexuality—I’ve never wanted to be part of that kind of community. (20)13
Sociology and cultural geography have recently drawn on the principles of anarchism and analysed the potential embedded in queer theory to create subjects aware of non-hierarchical, highly relational political interventions, and whose forms of aggregation are inspired by the collective gatherings of 1970s Britain. The commodification of gay culture, more the result of embracing capitalist consumption than of fading political ideals, is embedded in the figure of the affluent gay consumer, which Gavin Brown defines as:
a man ... assumed to be white ... well educated, and employed in a professional capacity. He lives in the city centre, probably in a minimalist loft apartment that is largely decorated in a normatively ‘masculine’ style ... well-dressed, and immaculately groomed ... He has a long-term partner, but they have a open relationship that allows each of them to enjoy casual sexual encounters within carefully negotiated parameters. (2009, 24)14
Cleugh’s play deepened this tension. But its refusal of reaching absolute political answers was used to accuse it of depicting old-fashioned moralities and stereotypes (de Jongh 2001; Taylor 2001). I think the play sounds very realistic in terms of what it portrays and the anger it raised at the time of its opening in London. Indeed, a parallel can also be drawn to the Irish context. For, the Celtic Tiger will be remembered also as an era of great motivation in making Ireland a leading example of economic, social, and cultural advancement (Lonergan 2009). The increasing appeal of the Irish queer communities figures the “Irish queer,” as Anne Mulhall writes, as the marriage of future and past, of “tradition and modernity rolled into one; totem of a tolerant and modernized state, and domesticated unit ensuring the continuity of white Irishness and the containment of irresponsible rogue elements” (2006, 215).15 The debate is wide open and cannot certainly be resolved easily. The past is still inextricable from questions around Ireland and Irishness, but theatre “must now tackle (or Gender on the British and Irish Stages (1980-Today): An Overview 15 exploit) the commodification and essentialization of identity within global culture in the present—a theme that makes Irish drama resonate internationally” (Lonergan 2009, 27). And, I would add, it is in describing this passage and the uncertainties it touches on, that adequate forms of seeing “the political” in drama need to be found, in Ireland as well as in any other Western context. Post-structuralist anarchist studies, in my view, seem to offer a very interesting approach to the whole idea of political practices and anti- identitarianism. This study will show that they sometimes bear similarities with how gender and sexuality are approached in recent drama, without underestimating in any way the contexts of their production. Jamie Heckert proposes that anarchism may draw from the rejection of binary thought of queer and other post-structuralist (feminist, postcolonial) ideas as to evaluate “the possibility of recognizing complex political positions that involve more than one form of hierarchy” (2005, 102-3). These complex positions will emerge or be alluded to in the form of intricate mappings of dissident gender performances. A case in point is Bartlett’s personal reading of what queer represents:
spectacle as transgressions, emotional excess as both a tactic and a goal, the all-importance of eroticism, gender as masquerade, image interpretation as the subversion of image production, the prioritising of wit and aggression over authenticity and positive images, of internal contradiction over narrative coherence, the profound sense of an autonomous sensibility that can run rings around the dominant sensibility. (1996, 50)16
It is a reading where the anarchic stance typical of 1980s punk when Bartlett started his devised performances at college surface prominently. Once again, for playwrights working in Britain, the sub-text of many of the plays analysed here will have to be traced back to Orton’s “anarchic indignation” (Dollimore 1991, 318) which defined his persona and the way he laid bare the moral values of British middle-class and Britishness in general.17 There is arguably a similar stance in Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004), a book which has provided a number of very interesting points for analysis, especially in Part Three. The challenge posed by the book is invaluable. Its strength lies in the call for “the ‘other’ side of politics ... the ‘side’ outside all political sides, committed as they are, on every side, to futurism’s unquestioned good,” (7) that is, a call to action and to live the present for the sake of life; in that, it seems an extremely responsible call. A recent approach to the influence of globalisation on playwriting seems to contain traces of the considerations carried out so far. I am 16 Chapter One referring to Rebellato’s theorizing of a site-unspecific theatre with which he indicates plays whose process of understanding is self-consciously transnational, and which “can be done elsewhere and otherwise.” What interests me is that, in Rebellato’s formulation, site-unspecific plays express “and articulate a kind of theatrical cosmopolitanism that give it a revolutionary ethical quality that is prior and profoundly resistant to global capital” (2006, 112-3). This last point, I would add, shares the concern of alternative readings of anarchism in providing alternatives to capitalist globalisation from within its economic structures as well as attempting to shape anti-identitarian, ethical communities. There is one last clarification to make. I have at certain points in this study used phrases such as “queer socialism” (Chapter 4) and “queer anarchism” (Chapter 8). I hope it will become clear that my purpose was in no way to coin a new label whatsoever. It was more inspired by the choice to insist on particular figures and their occurrence, or on instances of something which in my view makes the playwrights’ contributions to drama significant, instead of reaching towards any clear-cut identification on their or my part. In other words, it can be read very much as an attempt to counter-read the idea of creating a narrative as “a political act, and its first step is an act of labelling, or branding” (Sierz 2008, 24). So, Part I will go on laying out the potential created by women’s theatres in England and Ireland as a background to the following chapters. In Part II, issues of performing genders will be looked at from the standpoint of the notions of “masculinity” and “femininity” when these are turned against themselves, either with the objective to re-think socialism in late-capitalist Britain (Ravenhill) and the nation (the section queer Irish plays) in the new millennium, or to dismantle exclusive notions of “women” (Chapter 5). Chapter 4 also considers three interventions on Oscar Wilde’s canon. There, I have used the term “homosexual” in order to stress that it was only towards the end of the nineteenth-century that medical discourse coined the word to associate the sexuality with an identity. The sodomite, meaning “someone who performed a certain kind of act” (Dollimore 1991, 238) disappeared from normative discourse on sexuality. It seemed extremely pertinent to include analyses of Charabanc Theatre Company and Glasshouse Productions (Chapter 6) with which to conclude this part. The five voices chosen for the case-studies in Part III are Neil Bartlett, Claire Dowie, Kevin Elyot, Sarah Kane, Frank McGuinness. It is impossible, and it would be after all unjust, to find a common thread linking voices as diverse as theirs. The gestures on stage shall speak for the texts, and for their creators. Gender on the British and Irish Stages (1980-Today): An Overview 17
Notes
1 See also Wyllie (2009). 2 Prichard [1998] 2000; subsequent references are in brackets. 3 The play ran from 28 October to 15 November as part of the ‘33% Festival of Youth Arts’ supported by St Mary’s University College, Twickenham (London). 4 Austin Quigley is here referring to Pinter’s One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), and Party Time (1991). 5 Crimp 2005, 197-284; subsequent references are in brackets. 6 This point was also discussed by the members of the company Accademia degli Artefatti during a radio broadcast on their previous opening of Ravenhill’s Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat [Spara, trova il tesoro e ripeti] at Teatro Mercadante (Naples); see Audino (2009). 7 The book is a revised version of her Look Back in Gender (1987). 8 I wish to thank Dan Rebellato for the useful suggestions on this argument. 9 I am here drawing on the difference between an inclusive and exclusive form of feminism which Aston (2003b) outlines in her critique of Wertenbaker’s Abel’s Sister (1984). 10 Goodman has explained “situated perspective” as that position used by women to foreground “their differences and personal positions in relation to their politics”; the concept, Goodman stresses, “may be applied to feminist performance as well as to writing and reading” (1993: 21); Goodman derives her reading of situated perspective from Donna Haraway; originally, notions of “politics of location” and “positionality” had been theorised by, respectively, Adrienne Rich and Linda Martín Alcoff. 11 For criticism on other lesbian playwrights, their works, and the contexts of their production, see the following studies: Aston and Harris (2008); Goodman (1993); Goodman and de Gay (1997); Gale and Gardner (2004); Heddon (2008); Wandor (2001); Wyllie (2009). 12 Cleugh 2001; subsequent references are in brackets. 13 Quotation from playtexts have been included with due respect to their original published or unpublished versions. 14 I wish to thank Gavin Brown for kindly sending me a copy of his essay before it came out as a publication; the page reference are to the unpublished version of his essay. For the published version, see Brown (2009). 15 I am grateful to Ann Mulhall for sending me a copy of her essay. 16 The quotation refers to a conference paper Bartlett gave for the 1994 edition of the festival ‘It’s queer up north’, in Manchester. 17 For a survey on Orton’s influence on contemporary drama and British queer culture, see Coppa (2003).
CHAPTER TWO
WOMEN’S BODIES IN THE PLAYS OF CARYL CHURCHILL AND TIMBERLAKE WERTENBAKER
The body is still a primary concern for feminism. The body in performance relates to questions of empowerment and resistance. The site of articulation of difference(s), the performing body is invested with the authority to question patriarchal hetero-normativity. In the 1990s, feminist critics articulated several theories on the body by re-contextualizing the notion of materiality. Crucial in this regard is Judith Butler’s call to return to matter “as a sign which in its redoublings and contradictions enacts an inchoate drama of sexual difference,” (1993, 49) for it has fuelled a series of inter-related ideas and theories on the body itself. The present analysis assumes that the body is the interconnection of gender, race, class, and sexuality; or, as Peter Brooks has indicated, the body will be extended to assimilate “biological entity, psycho-sexual construction, cultural product” (1993, xii). It also presupposes that biology can only be considered through specifically situated perspectives, or locations for resistance. There is a relation between the body and its investment of power toward the empowerment of “difference.” Post-structuralist philosophers like Michel Foucault have taught us that power is not a pre-given, pre- discursive condition; rather, it is a complex set of relationships literally and materially shaping bodies. Butler’s studies on the body provide a groundbreaking contribution to theatre and performance studies. She reads materiality in terms of performativity—i.e., “One is not simply a body, but in some very key sense, one does one’s body and, indeed, one does one’s body differently from one’s contemporaries and from one’s embodied predecessors and successors as well”; she thus views the body as “always an embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention ... the body is a historical situation ... and is a manner of doing, dramatizing, and reproducing a historical situation” (1988, 521). This chapter attempts to demonstrate that whereas the performing body of “Women” has contributed to resist their exploitation by dominant, 20 Chapter Two patriarchal norms, it is primarily a discursive site for embodied feminist alternatives. The decision to deal with Churchill and Wertenbaker in the same study is motivated by the fact that they have both worked extensively in the mainstream and independent sectors. But there is a clarification to make here. Whereas Churchill’s role in contemporary women’s theatre has been cemented by several monographs, Wertenbaker has received far less critical attention; not least, perhaps, because she started playwriting in the 1980s, a time when Churchill had already acquired her status as a leading British feminist writer. Also, Wertenbaker’s mixed background makes her a rather exceptional figure in contemporary British theatre (Aston 2003a). The following sections will investigate instances of women’s bodies in performance through figures such as the body as political resistance, the body in fairy tales and folklore, and the exiled body victimised by capitalist consumption. My analysis will draw from the works of feminist scholars who have started from the body as “an historical idea,” as Simone de Beauvoir has claimed (Butler 1988), and look at how the two playwrights have cast a feminist perspective on the British stage and engaged in new possibilities for the future of feminism.
“She’s not one of us”: plays for Margaret Thatcher
The government of Margaret Thatcher gave rise to a counter tradition within British theatre which influenced gender representations well beyond the 1980s. Extensive cuts in subsidized theatre funding problematized even further the condition of women playwrights. Keith D. Peacock has argued that 1980s women’s theatre had by then lost its interest in techniques such as agitprop and documentary, “too simplistic and outdated” for an effective political theatre (1999, 152). Feminist parodies of Thatcher’s Britain, its values and ideals are central to the plays considered in this section. Churchill’s political theatre in the 1980s is said to bear similarities with her pre-1980 productions in the way it shows women characters as “surrogate men ... token representative[s]” of the male world (Godiwala 2003, 38-9). Softcops (1984)1 is inspired by Foucault’s Surveiller et punir (1975) and casts a feminist look on alternative measures of punishment and detention. It also takes inspiration from early Thatcherite policies of control, as Churchill writes: “In 1985 ... the Government are attempting to depoliticise the miners and the rioters emphasizing a ‘criminal’ element” (1990, 3). The play features no woman character, but it raises some interesting questions about prison as a means of social control, and on how Women’s Bodies in the Plays of Churchill and Wertenbaker 21 bodies are literally shaped by prison as an institution of power. Particularly, Churchill’s reworking of the prison system fits Butler’s description of an imprisoned body: “the soul, as an instrument of power, forms and frames the body, stamps it, and in stamping it, brings it into being ... there is no body outside of power, for the materiality of the body ... is produced by and in direct relation to the investment of power” (1997a, 91). These aspects become crucial in A Mouthful of Birds, where the Bacchae-induced bodily raptures provide the ground for a re-thinking of the gendered, raced and sexualized body under the impending force of “global capital.” Wertenbaker deals with alternative forms of detention in Our Country’s Good (1988). For the purposes of this section, I will focus on Liz, the “silenced/oppressed” body in the play.2 In 1788-9, a colony of convicts in Australia is rehearsing George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706). It is thought that theatre may influence the convicts’ social rehabilitation. Rehearsals alternate with ordinary life in the colony. The colony itself is the materialization of a bond between power and subjugation along gender lines. Unjustly accused of stealing food, Liz is sentenced to be beheaded. As a convict, she cannot question authority; as a woman, her words would not have any authority anyway. While talking to Philip, the “good-hearted” inventor of the convicts performance as an alternative to detention, she confesses:
Philip Why wouldn’t you say any of this before? ... Why, Liz? Liz Because it wouldn’t have mattered. Philip Speaking the truth? Liz Speaking. (271)
Liz’s body is oppressed and doubly silenced (Carlson 2000). But is it her guilt or her gender that stops her from affirming her own innocence? The message conveyed by the play is the transformative potential of the theatre. This potential might effectively empower Liz, but she gives up and does not act for change. Liz is aware of her own oppression. And as Esther Beth Sullivan notes, it also true that in her case “dominant values” are reinforced by how both the oppressor and the oppressed believe oppression is “natural and therefore to be expected” (1993, 144). Nearly a decade previously, Churchill had experimented with the rupture of temporal sequences in order to juxtapose the oppression of five women “drawn from history, myth, and literature” (Peacock 1999, 95) with a mother-daughter relationship in Thatcherite Britain. Reviewing a revival of Churchill’s Top Girls at Aldwych Theatre (January 2002), Lynn 22 Chapter Two
Gardner recalls the early 1980s as a time when “Thatcher was at the peak of her popularity following the Falklands war, the shoulder pad was just becoming fashionable and Madonna, the Material Girl herself, was having the first of many hits.” A play which shows “the dangers of feminism without socialism,” (Aston 2003a, 20) Top Girls (1982)3 is one of Churchill’s most troubled views on women’s empowerment. In the opening dinner scene, a group of women-characters are celebrating Marlene’s success at Top Girls employment agency. Each woman seems to be adequately self-empowered, but as the action progresses their overlapping dialogues harp on their shared history of exploitation. The scene takes place within a “homely” space, around a table, dinner waiting to be served. Peacock argues that the overlapping dialogue connects the women through “a continuum of sound,” while at the same time showing their indifference toward one another (1999, 94). The dinner scene demonstrates ultimately that these women could achieve empowerment and change only if they had given up their individual aspirations. This is also evidenced by the violence some of them have experienced: Griselda, who has been deprived of her daughter, tells Lady Nijio: “It was always easy because I always knew I would do what he said” (77); Pope Joan has been stoned to death in public. Similarly, Peacock notes that “The women may have in common gender and patriarchal oppression, but they have failed to derive strength from unity.” The “individualistic” bourgeois feminism to which he associates the women sets a distinction between them and the potato-pickers in Fen (1983). There, a group of women is united by a shared oppression sustained because of their working-class status. Whereas some of the women in Top Girls have achieved empowerment, albeit for a short time, the women in Fen can only face a “continuity of exploitation” (1999, 94, 96). Act two is a metaphor for the risks that women’s empowerment implies unless it is associated with a feminist consciousness, and remains within the terms of social climbing. Marlene, a woman who has given away her daughter Angie to her working-class sister Joyce, is the embodiment of such risks. Marlene invalidates the meaning of “sisterhood” (Gardner 2002). Truly one of Thatcher’s “daughters,” (or products) Marlene is distressed at her sister’s “laziness” and “stupid-ness,” as shown by her lines: “I hate the working class” (139) or, “You’ve got what it takes” (141). But if we read the play backwards with the dinner scene as the end, what Marlene is lacking is the consciousness of women’s oppression; she remains therefore the “body out of place” (Ahmed 2000), a stranger in her Women’s Bodies in the Plays of Churchill and Wertenbaker 23 own place (among women). This observation is paralleled by the other women, whose dis-abilities have prevented them from progressing “toward a healthy autonomy or integrity of self” (Godiwala 2003, 12). Mary Brewer faults the play for “backing the artificial boundary between ‘feminine’ caring values and ‘masculine’ commercial values, which works to reaffirm traditional notions of sex/gender difference” (1999, 59). I detect in Top Girls a reiteration of this binarism as effect of the increasing disaffection towards the values of socialism and feminism. Also, the question of situated perspective seems to be as useful here as in others of Churchill’s political plays, such as Cloud Nine (1979) and Serious Money (1987). Breaking the conventions of realism, the play makes it possible to view Marlene and Joyce as two materialized options for the same person. Marlene’s doom, the play seems to hint, is due to her being a “commodified body” unaware of its own subjection to the realm of the “symbolic.” She is only dimly aware of her subjugation to capitalism; or, her awareness is unaccompanied by any ability to effect change. Marlene is aware of loss, but still remains unable to progress. By contrast, Joyce could be Marlene’s Other, a woman who knows how hard it is for women to find their way in this realm, and thus in tandem with Churchill’s working women in Fen. Angie’s “canonical” exclamation, “Frightening” (141) which closes the play would then seem a comment on more than an anticipation of pain in response to the forthcoming future of England. And, Angie could represent a subversive “baby-girl oracle” who foresees her real mother’s failure. Churchill’s next play shifts to the neglected areas of Thatcherite Britain. Fen4 dramatizes the divergent conditions of women when oppression works along class lines. Here, women’s bodies are the labouring bodies of working-class women living in the Fenians, “bodies ... disciplined into silence” (Diamond 1988, 200). Val’s attempt to surpass the limits imposed on her and elope with Frank fails for the same reason as the other women’s apparent lack of any impulse to resist. Only some (women’s) bodies matter in the new, capitalist “truth.” Potato-picking will be a permanent job for Fenian women. Shirley’s speech to Val is illuminating in this regard:
You’ve too much time on your hands. You start thinking. Can’t think when you’re working in the field can you? It’s work work work, then you think, ‘I wonder what the time is,’ and it’s dinnertime. Then you work again and you think, ‘I wonder if it’s time to go home,’ and it is. Mind you, if I didn’t need the money I wouldn’t do any bugger out of a job. (168)
Unable to choose between her lover and her children, Val gets Frank to kill her, and later re-enters the scene as a ghost. Val has been identified 24 Chapter Two with the “‘subjected subjects’ of class” (Godiwala 2003, 58); her re- appearance as a ghost demonstrates her being denied the chance to break with tradition, which certainly happens. I would add that Val is a de- materialized body, a lost body of feminism. De-materializing, turning to “signifying space,”5 she is bound to take part in the lost history of women’s oppression. In this view, the end of the play is a prelude to, and not a successor of, Top Girls; the dinner scene is the materialization of the ghosts of all oppressed women in history. Churchill’s widely known critique of Thatcherite Britain to date is embedded in the rhyming, fast-speed gobbledegook of Serious Money.6 Here, the bodies that matter are those high up on the social scale whose agency is based on their appropriation of the rules of “the masters.” For the women in Serious Money, “surviving means speaking the same language” as men (Aston 2001, 72). The Big Bang at the close of the 1980s has shaped women like Scilla, “rehearsing” maleness—she “always enjoyed fighting” (206)—to the extent that her selfishness prevents her from caring about her brother’s murder/suicide. The family too is a commodity, and she is concerned for the money Jake might have made. She abruptly reclaims her share: “If you’ve been making a fortune, I think it’s very unfair of you not to have let me in on it. / ... / So you haven’t Aids. That’s great. / ... / Nobody sleeps in the middle of a deal” (220). If there is one thing money cannot buy it is a future of gender equality, as emphasized by Scilla’s exchange with her father after Jake’s death:
SCILLA. What about me? GREVILLE. I protected you, Scilla. It’s bad enough to see a woman get work Without her being part of an old boy network. SCILLA. Fuck off. I want my share. (281)
Serious Money depicts a reality in which morality and affect are replaced by uneven displays of commodities, “serious money” being the only claim made by the yuppie, cross-border gang in the play. The capitalist greed encompasses women of different contexts, from the U.S.A. to England, to South America. Much in the same way as the men they seek to remove from power, these women annihilate their background, their “histories of arrival, as histories that involve multiple generations.” Hidden from view behind their own success is what Sara Ahmed calls “the ‘work’ of bodies, which is of course the work of some bodies more than others” (2006, 41-2). In the global flow of capital dealt with by Liffe’s traders are concealed the histories of a submerged mass of bodies at the Women’s Bodies in the Plays of Churchill and Wertenbaker 25 service of Western consumption. Churchill’s paramount critique of the Thatcher’s years is also intended to account for the invisible work of subjected subjects unworthy of mention for the economy/economics of the play. With the scream “Sexy greedy is the late eighties” (287), women like Scilla deploy their own body, appropriating stereotyped male sexist discourse and behaviour; this aspect is overemphasized when she, together with Corman and Starr, participates in setting up a sex scandal in order to draw attention from Corman’s business. She hands over her own body for money, she prostitutes herself in exchange for male power and an inane sense of empowerment. The other women in the play share the same unheeding greed: “Hurricane” Jacinta Condor is a Peruvian woman with excessive expectations from the market trade; Marylou Baines is an American arbitrageur, a brash business woman, convinced of being “in the trade/deal” with her “equal[s]” (239). Marlene in Top Girls and Scilla in Serious Money seem to hold a pact with monetarism, “buying” their freedom at the expense of other women around them. In Wertenbaker’s The Grace of Mary Traverse (1985),7 the protagonist Mary is also tempted by a similar “faustian pact” (Wertenbaker 1996, vii) which thrusts her within the realm of a Lacanian “Law of the Father.” Here, Wertenbaker attempts to “free the people of the play from contemporary preconceptions” on women and gender exploitation (66). Since early childhood, Mary is subjected to her father’s “promise” to make her “agreeable,” a “brightest adornment,” a totally absent body, to the extent that she may even doubt of her presence: “Air. You must become like air. Weightless. Still. Invisible” (71). Her isolation as a child surrounded by a precarious political situation is something Wertenbaker borrows from her own childhood, when she was “inculcated with this idea of emotional privacy” as she has said in interview (O’Mahony 2004). This emotional privacy is featured as Mary’s empowerment in the key theme of the play. Drawn by her maid Mrs Temptwell, Mary sets herself to know more of the world. She is invested with an authority which comes from her upper-class background and learns how to use it rather ungracefully. The action develops as if we were looking at her body entering the Lacanian symbolic: first, Mary hands Lord Gordon a poor girl, Sophie, just met in the streets, and together with Mrs Temptwell witnesses her rape; she visits a brothel, where she pays to have sex with Mr Hardlong; she then joins a male circle playing cocks’ race and, there, she again humiliates Sophie. What she really learns, however, is that the acquisition of power is never a happy process. At one point, Mary uses her newly-acquired (male) power at the expense of an old woman (a “hag”) she has made fun of. After she 26 Chapter Two has made the old woman participate in a race, we see her coming back and begging for money. Mary’s response is a reminder of an abusing gender power relation: “Look around. Do you see kindness anywhere? Where is it? ... She takes the whip and beats her ... There is no kindness. The world is a dry place” (109-110). In The Grace of Mary Traverse, power invests subjects with an authority worshipped by the people “that mocks, abuses and eventually kills them” (130). Mary’s last unfortunate venture sees her as leader of the Gordon Riots. Some fight, others die, too many suffer: the only hope at the end of the play lies in her baby girl which she had handed down to Sophie. The baby is called Mary, but unlike her has no father, thus disclosing the hope for a better future. Wertenbaker’s “18th-century feminist morality play” (O’Mahony 2004)8 closes on a moral unbeknown to Mary: “how quickly private dreams become public nightmares” (149). More than this, I think the play seems to leave open the question, is there really a place for all women in the symbolic? Directed by Max Stafford-Clark, Wertenbaker’s Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1991)9 is a progressive, feminist “look-back-in-anger”/state-of- the-nation play on 1980s Britain and on the redemptive power of art through “the character of Biddy ... as imprisoned in her own way as a convict, who found her freedom through being in touch with something of beauty” (2002, ix). My analysis will try to show how Wertenbaker uses this power to call for a place women can occupy in the future. Biddy is an upper-class woman who has entirely devoted her life to her second husband, Anglicized Greek Yoyo. Again, in the 1980s a woman’s body and identity are bound up to a man, as her friend art collector Julia reminds her: “Your identity has to come from a man. Otherwise it’s worthless. That’s sick. Mind you, my identity comes from my boss and I’ve just realized how stupid he is. I’m the Julia who works for Jeremy” (379). The play depicts an awkward body-politics, whose dependency on money is emphasized by Jeremy’s association painters/whores at the end of act one (410). Considerations over the role of women in art question the objectification of women (Brooks 1993; Sullivan 1993). I view the return to painting in the play as an indication of women’s potential to re-gain possession of themselves no longer as mere subjects or objects of art, but as conscious agents. This is the message conveyed by Biddy’s closing speech. Yoyo has died, leaving her with the burden of his long engagement with his woman lover, Katrina, whose only line resonates with an understanding between women “(goes to Biddy) I thought you knew. I am sorry” (441). Biddy’s self-imposed appreciation of paintings aimed at raising her husband’s Women’s Bodies in the Plays of Churchill and Wertenbaker 27 interest point her to a different future in which money is no longer “the only recognized value” (Wertenbaker 2002, ix). While sitting for a portrait by Stephen she admits: “I’m sorry now ... I was always afraid of being alone. And now it’s happened, it isn’t so bad. / Stephen goes to rearrange some drapery on Biddy. She looks down on herself. / It’s rather good, my body...” (445). Rejoicing over her own body, Biddy regains a consciousness of her self and, for herself she does set a future of freedom. Jean, “an androgynous ... [who] looks around critically” (401) deserves one last consideration. She appears only in one scene but with great resonance for the economy of the play through her line on going “back to myth because the world is so fragmented. It’s a distillation of modern sensibility” (408). If we read her line as subverting binary conventions of masculinity and femininity, we may perceive her as an indication of England’s lost capacity to adjust to change. I think that Jean crosses social climbing and affluence which, especially in Thatcherite Britain, had been accorded along gender lines. I also think that Jean’s transgressive gender may have its counterpart in the Romanian Constantin. Constantin’s ex- communist home-place is dispelled as a commodity for the sympathizers of the Left in Three Birds, as his self-conscious “we carry your soul for you” (437) emphasizes. These considerations would lead us to view Jean and Constantin as two subjectivities trying to find a place in the new world order. They would finally embody the “satire on art and English identity” outlined by reviewers of the play (O’Mahony 2004). In 1995, Wertenbaker turned to the effects of Thatcherite Britain in The Break of Day (1995).10 Here, she focuses on the relationship of three ex- 1970s committed feminists through their attitudes on motherhood in contemporary, middle-class England. The 1990s are the years of “New Labour. No ideology. Going with the flow. Being gay is stylish. Trees. No cars” (37). A play where “gender identity is questioned and suffered” (Wertenbaker 2002: vii), The Break of Day juxtaposes the distressed lives of April (teacher of Classics), Tess (director of a women’s magazine), and Nina (songwriter in a crisis). Tess and Nina are obsessed by their mothering desire, whose different outcomes are a key theme of the play. April cannot understand her friends’ longing after having shared the glorious sixties, when women’s resistance to motherhood was viewed in terms of empowerment policies and resistance to hetero-patriarchal conventions. Closely looked at, “It is not just their own lives that generate a sense of disempowerment, but the overwhelming sense of England as in a state of collapse ... a country in which social and cultural systems ... are underfunded and failing” (Aston 2003a, 153). Tess’s speech is effective to show her and 28 Chapter Two her friends’ anxieties:
I felt I had a right to what I wanted. It goes with the empowerment I felt all my life. Born into this heroic empire—that’s what they taught us— educated, national-healthed. Then the sixties when all you had to do was be very young. Being a woman in the seventies, then being in London and clever in the eighties, making money despite myself, buying this house. And now. (9)
A bleak and painful sense of impotence and a lack of control over their bodies haunt both her and Nina. By contrast, April, characterised as the woman out of place with no desire for motherhood, is the one who keeps her own moral integrity till the very end: “April Having a child isn’t the only purpose of a woman’s life. That was our credo. / Tess We were wrong. / April Don’t say that” (39). Act II opens in the airport of “an Eastern European country” (47) where Nina and Hugh have gone to “get” their little daughter. “The new chaos” (51) awaits them. Meanwhile, Tess and Robert are trying several courses of In Vitro Fertilisation in London. Eventually, Tess’s desire for motherhood turns to nightmare and hallucination: “why my only identity is motherhood ... Women used to be my sisters. Now they’re objects: eggs vessels...” (75). Aston sees Nina’s “cross-border child” as a call for “a transnational community: one that crosses borders and involves the collaboration of two sets of apparently outmoded beliefs, Western feminism and East European communism” (2003a, 154). I would also say that neither Nina nor Tess seem to have fully accepted a motherhood deprived of political feminist implications. Nina (I would say, plausibly) is helped by a corrupt society on its newly found way to capitalism, the fall of communism being the failed promise of a better future for the European Left. On the other hand, Tess is figured as a “self-violating body” at the mercy of progress, undergoing several further treatments. This section closes with a character who has not received the attention it deserves, Tess’s servant Natasha. An exile, “possibly a Bosnian refugee,” she is the “strange body” in the play. As a lesbian, her only appearance suggests that “violence and oppression continue” in 1990s new Labour England (Aston 2003a, 156). April says, after Natasha has kissed her, mistaking her for a lesbian:
You can’t be gay and a war victim? ... we don’t know where she’s from, and her life has ceased to interest us, although we cry for her on television, because our imagination has been depleted by this terrible century— because words like compassion and humanity have cracked in the last fifteen years and we’ve let it happen— (27-28) Women’s Bodies in the Plays of Churchill and Wertenbaker 29
Seen in this light, the play leaves open the possibility of reading Natasha as embodiment of the failure of the “multicultural promise,” for she can only be one of many commodities in Western middle-class England. Natasha is one of the exile figures Wertenbaker sometimes chooses in her plays to discuss the directions of feminism in a post-capitalist society/context as shown by her After Darwin (1998) and Credible Witness (2001). In their post-mid 1990s plays, Wertenbaker and particularly Churchill have addressed broader political issues of capitalism and globalization. The next two sections will also show their greater concern with the experimentation of theatrical forms and languages.
Fairies, Folklore and the “becoming-woman”
The fairy-tale thread in Wertenbaker’s The Ash Girl (2000)11 is the protagonist’s journey to “discover and affirm her own identity before she can find the Prince” (Wertenbaker 2002, vii). The play reminds one of Angela Carter’s radio drama, The Company of Wolves (1979): re-tellings of a (would-be-feminist) quest always meant ascertaining the protagonist’s own sexual (and personal) freedom. Ashgirl’s self-discovery is intimately associated with a haunted forest, as for Carter’s Rosalind: “In the forest, dear girl, you need yourself” (294). Ashgirl’s body literally cannot materialize under the threat of a significantly unnamed “Mother,” and her two mean sisters. I feel that the play has been undervalued because of its source. Michael Billington, for instance, has viewed it as an “archaic” version of the Cinderella myth; he has considered the playful nature of the play as something “that should appeal to children” (2000). Though the play may not to be one of Wertenbaker’s most accomplished works, some interesting points can be recorded in her mixture of the ethereal certainty, typical of fairy tales, and the bleak and degraded world of Ashgirl’s sisters and Mother, set up by social conventions. Not least because she has gone to the roots of a commonly sanitised story by retrieving some elements which in the fairy tale have been removed.12 I want to focus particularly on the mutilation scene which takes place after Ashgirl has lost her shoe.13 Sacrificing her two daughters to have one of them become the Prince’s wife, Mother gets their toes mutilated to fit Ashgirl’s shoe. As several feminist re-tellings of fairy tales have taught us, things are not what they seem. Mother’s plan is exposed in front of everyone. But, seemingly untouched by her act, she asks: “Whoever had love and compassion for me? Keep up appearances, that’s what I was taught, crave power, grasp riches, I was told. Love and compassion rotted underneath. I only ever did what was done to me.” 30 Chapter Two
Wertenbaker is one of many writers parodying the sub-stratum of “cruel convention” (315) portrayed by one of the most conventional of fairy tales. Churchill’s The Skriker (1994)14 displays the machinations of a “shape- shifter and death portent, ancient and damaged” (243) on the lives of teenagers Lily (pregnant) and Josie (recovered in a mental hospital after killing her own baby). The Skriker is a character from British folklore who speaks a “Joycean-like language, part fairy-like, part gibberish” (Reinelt 2000, 188); she is “an ancient fairy ... I have been around through all the stuff you would call history” (257). Through several shape-shiftings, the Skriker haunts the world of the two teeenagers and carries both of them to the underworld. Highly experimental, the play marks a crossroads in Churchill’s breaking of theatrical conventions which has shaped all her later productions.15 Feminist criticism of the play so far has focused on two main aspects: the single-motherhood theme as a result of “neo-liberal globalization” (Amich 2007); and the Skriker as the embodiment of Deleuze and Guattari’s capitalism and schizophrenia or as a “Nietzschean anti-christ and the Deleuzean anti-oedipus” (Godiwala 2003). Also, despite its fairly recent publication, the play has stirred critics’ interest to a very high degree. My analysis will try to develop further two aspects already dealt with: the Skriker’s relation with both women’s past and future; and, related to this, the possibility to view it as a new figuration for feminism. The Skriker embodies women’s exploitation in history to such an extent that it seems impossible not to read her violence and cruelty as a feminist backlash. But there are some distinctions to be made. Critics have diverged in their consideration of the Skriker’s gender. Here, I will assume the Skriker to be female, because it was played by a woman actor in its first London production at the Cottlesloe Auditorium.16 While the Skriker could be strategically located as “a repressed body, damaged by an ancient past, birthing a catastrophic future,” (Aston [1997] 2001, 102) Godiwala refers to s/he as “non-genderized.” S/he might therefore be progressively viewed as disavowing a reified, oppressive form of patriarchal authority and capitalism through its very subversiveness of traditional gender binarism. Additionally, the Skriker could be read as a “Carnivalesque body” in a Kristevan sense. In her Desire in Language (1980), Julia Kristeva defines “Carnivalesque discourse” as that which “breaks through the laws of language censored by grammar and semantics, and, at the same time, is a social and political protest. There is no equivalence, but rather, identity, between challenging official linguistic codes and challenging official law” (65, my emphasis). The Skriker challenges both the law and the conventions Women’s Bodies in the Plays of Churchill and Wertenbaker 31 of language. Her language ruptures grammatical structures, whereas her body dismantles the norm which would define women as unused to committing acts of violence, but doing so only in order to sustain their subjugation. Such a reading would also relate to Churchill’s interest in the ways gender stereotypes can be contested, as can assumptions over what constitutes truly masculine or feminine behaviour (Manera 2003). A contextual reading of the play can be given that distances the Skriker from her associations with what I sense are “pessimistic” views like those indicated earlier. These readings are plausible, but leave perhaps unquestioned the possibility of thinking of the Skriker in light of recent theories by feminist scholars, particularly Rosi Braidotti’s view of the “virtual feminine,” or “becoming-woman” as a new figuration of womanhood. Retaining the Skriker’s gendered character, she may embody a woman in-becoming, that is, a “multicentered, internally differentiated female feminist subjectivity” (Griffin and Braidotti 2002, 171). Shape- shifting, metamorphosing, the Skriker is both a body in resistance against a centuries-long exploitation, and a discursive space for re-casting a new feminist consciousness in current, global capitalism.17 In a world where “damaged” bodies are exploited at the expense of capitalism, the Skriker is the ultimate bearer of lived, historicized and strategically located experiences informed by the hope of a better (feminist) future.
Migrant and scary bodies in late capitalist Europe
Power and identity are the issues in Wertenbaker’s plays. Her political engagement has often shifted from a specifically British setting to a wider concern in global Europe and the dynamics of late capitalism. Despite their differences in thematic development, setting, and action, the two plays considered here share an underlying theme of the effects of power on the bodies of migrants and exiles as figures for resistance. After Darwin (1998)18 is made up of two different, though inter-related plays. One is based on the young naturalist’s voyage on the Beagle with Captain Fitzroy (1833-38); the other is its re-telling in rehearsal for a performance by a company of three: Bulgarian director Millie, Tom (Darwin’s character), Ian (Fitzroy’s), and black American playwright Lawrence. Temporal shifts between the two settings are intensified as the action progresses. Millie is a key character. Directing a story from which women are cut out, her presence on stage stresses the possibility for history to be re- written, something she acknowledges in rehearsal: “he [Darwin] will evolve into what we make him here” (113). Or, in Tom’s words, “history’s 32 Chapter Two shifty too, I mean, isn’t it supposed to be rewritten all the time? Things have happened that we were told never happened” (122, my emphasis). In this regard, Aston has keenly noted the play’s reference to the recurring theme of women’s absence from major historical enterprises: “The ‘past’ has no roles for women, except as middle-class domestic creatures in English homes, or as a colonized other in territories charted by Fitzroy ... as the voyage of intellectual and geographical discovery was gendered, raised, classed and nationed, Millie could have no part in it” (2003a, 164). After Darwin investigates possible connections between feminism and Darwinism, and they background the play. Elisabeth Grosz has recently dealt with this issue; accordingly, feminism may well embrace “self-overcoming,” that is a transformation endorsed as an oppressed group/category, since such transformations “in nature as in politics ... are precisely about overcoming what has happened to the individual through history”; Darwinism, says Grosz, is also open to future and change, it occupies “the place of futurity ... a future different, but not detached, from the past and present ... capable of many possible variations in current existence.” What interests me here is the way she remarks the relevance of historicity in Darwin: “While time and futurity remains open-ended, the past provides a propulsion in directions, unpredictable in advance, which, in retrospect have emerged from the unactualised possibilities that it yields” (1999, 41-2, my emphasis). Millie’s attempt is motivated, primarily, by her situated perspective (see also Aston, above). Her attempt to re-trace Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle is thus both an attempt to re-write history from the lived, embodied perspective of a woman (and a migrant, a stranger located within the dominant culture), and, again, an affirmation of the potential of theatre for change. In this picture, theatre would feature as history’s “unactualised possibilities” through the rehearsal and reiteration of specific acts. The next play examined here concerns the bodily subjection implicated in politics of asylum-seeking in contemporary Britain. Credible Witness (2001)19 is set in a “dilapidated community centre in England ... It could be a refugee camp anywhere in the world” (188, 192). Alexander Karagy is a Macedonian teacher and exile; his mother, Petra, leaves home to try and track him down, but because of her invalid passport is blocked at Heathrow airport and confined to the detention centre. The centre is a “‘global village’ of detainees from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East” (Watkins 2001, 483). The stage setting of the play is captivating in terms of re-creating the feeling of bodily subjection experienced by the detainees. During the first run, Es Devlin had her stage arranged as “a large textured platform with upstage ramps” which “easily suggested an archaeological dig, a passport Women’s Bodies in the Plays of Churchill and Wertenbaker 33 control at Heathrow, a primitive detention center, and windswept streets strewn with garbage, supporting the production’s use of universal symbols” (Watkins 2001). The outer circle of this round structure was “ringed of barbed wire.”20 Aston argues that it reminded us of “a layered or fossilized history” (2003b, 11). The detention centre restricts the space available for bodily movement. The body of the exile seeking asylum is one of many Others figured as fetish (Ahmed 2000). The fetishization of the asylum-seeker requires that we view it not as a body out of place, but as a body with no-place. The exile cannot return to his/her home; neither is he/she accepted/allowed to enter the boundaries of another state. It is as if the detention centre became a no-where for no-body. Also, because the detention centre is a place where strangers meet, it has to do with the stranger’s specific (national) identity. I will focus on these two aspects of the detention centre to analyse Petra and Ameena, figured as “scary bodies” by regimes of authority in and out of the centre, at a physical as well as metaphoric level. To have her son back, Petra fights with the guards of the detention centre, to whom she vainly tries to tell the history of “the women who refused to kneel” (202) against the oppressors at home. Simon is the “tender-hearted” guard who seems to change from compassion to rage when she begins a food strike. When Alexander is tracked down and carried to the centre, Petra pretends not to recognize him as she sees him “British-ized,” and rejects him:
Petra What kind of a life is there when you’re a nobody, without a past, without a name, without a heart, a man who doesn’t even cast a shadow, when maybe you’re not even a man anymore? ... Alexander Why should I die for your obsessions? You dripped them into my food the water I drank. You called it history, maybe it’s only your anger. Petra History is full of anger. Alexander Because of mothers like you. (223-4)
Petra is a “scary body” because the guards want to depict her so, whereas she does everything (including a hunger strike) just to have her son back; but, she is also “scary” because she cannot dis-engage from the nationalist male discourse which frames her as the embodiment of her own nation, the “Mother” Macedonia. The play seems to infer that, in order to find happiness, she has to refuse her troubled past and embrace an unresponsive future. She could achieve a sustainable motherhood only by rejecting completely the Nationalist ideology which keeps people captive 34 Chapter Two of gendered conventions. Or, Petra “must ... embrace a different view of the past, must move ‘outside’ of her own history in the interest of achieving a more democratic future” (Aston 2003b: 9). A different history of oppression tempts me to view Ameena as a “scary body.” The signs of male oppression are visible on her scarred body. Scene eleven highlights the concealment of her history behind the fact of her being figured as a whore.
Simon She screamed at the doctor, I have it on file. Petra Did you ask why? Simon I remember her first interview very well. The interpreter eventually got her to admit she was a prostitute. Petra Where was the interpreter from? Simon From Somalia, like her ...... All she had to do was say she was raped. It would have put her in a different category. Petra Three words. Do you know what it means to speak those words? (232-3)
If we read this scene through Althusserian interpellation, the fact that she is hailed as a whore and seemingly accepts this hailing leads us to think that she is the first one to acknowledge her own guilt. Ameena is a subject who, in the restricted space of the detention centre—the only space available to her—has been constructed as whore. In her case, becoming a subject means “acquitting one’s self of the accusation of guilt” (Butler 1997a, 118). Unlike Petra, whose body bears the marks of a metaphoric injunction of the patriarchal episteme, Ameena’s body is “the site/sight of a double violation ... of a violent heterosexist culture of the masculine ... and the colonialist imperial gaze of the asylum authority” (Aston 2003b, 17). Recently, in an interview Wertenbaker has lamented the lack of adequate responses to the play: “I was just sad it wasn’t seen by more people. People who had originated elsewhere but who had been living in England all their lives said they recognised their concerns: what it meant to be from another nationality and trying to fit into England; the kind of loneliness of not knowing to which country you belong” (O’Mahony 2004). Despite their differences, I consider the two plays analysed in this section as similarly relevant proposals for a feminist commitment. On the one hand, the relations of women with their own past are necessary means to move towards a sustainable future; on the other, the dramatization of submerged groups of women is confirmed as a fundamental moral imperative for the future of feminism itself. Women’s Bodies in the Plays of Churchill and Wertenbaker 35
Churchill and Wertenbaker have questioned theatrical conventions to break with “male” discourse. To do so they have shaped techniques of subversion. The plays considered in this study are part of a two-fold attempt. They question theatrical tradition and develop socialist and/or materialist articulations of an unconventional politics of the body. In their attempts, the body as social construction “will then be liberated, neither to its ‘natural’ past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities” (Butler 1990, 93). By pointing towards these possibilities, Churchill and Wertenbaker have questioned their own role as feminist playwrights to tell of a feminist past and future.
Notes
1 Churchill 1990, 1-50; subsequent references are in brackets. 2 Wertenbaker 1998, 161-281; subsequent references are in brackets. 3 Churchill 1990, 51-142; subsequent references are in brackets. 4 Churchill 1990, 143-92; subsequent references are in brackets. 5 I am here quoting from Diamond’s comment. She views Val’s re-appearance as an “ancient ghostly voice [which] does not rupture representation but marks a signifying space, the marginality of which bears witness to the ideology of permissible visibility—and audibility” (1988: 199). 6 Churchill 1990, 193-309; subsequent references are in brackets. 7 Wertenbaker 1996, 59-160; subsequent references are in brackets. The play is set in the eighteenth-century Gordon Riots, but Wertenbaker takes her inspiration from the early-1980s Brixton Riots. 8 The Gordon Riots were against the Papist Act (1778) which alleged that Roman Catholics to the British Army; British Anglican feared a possible coalition of Catholics (Irish, French, Spanish) against Britain. 9 Wertenbaker 1996, 355-445; subsequent references are in brackets. From here onwards, Three Birds. 10 Wertenbaker 2002, 1-98; subsequent references are in brackets. 11 Wertenbaker 2002, 239-320; subsequent references are in brackets. 12 I wish to thank Annabel Arden for her useful suggestions. 13 In Wertenbaker’s adaptation, the Prince is a Muslim, a fact which stresses even further her ironic reading of the Cinderella’s myth. 14 Churchill 1998, 239-91; subsequent references are in brackets. 15 See Aston ([1997] 2001) for the impact of The Skriker on Churchill’s later productions. Aston has claimed that Churchill, in particular, ruptured at various stages theatrical language “where rules are broken and meaning is constantly being made and unmade through the language of performance rather than the word of the dramatic script” (81). 16 The same perspective is shared by Aston and others. See also Amich (2007) in this regard. 17 Candice Amich provides a similar reading to mine, pointing out that “Churchill 36 Chapter Two
seeks to disturb the reign of commodity fetishism and a-historicity with her fierce wielding of affect. She relies on the primal emotion of fear to forge a space for affective expression that might serve as the basis of a renewed political commitment” (2007, 403). 18 Wertenbaker 2002, 99-178; subsequent references are in brackets. 19 Wertenbaker 2002, 179-238; subsequent references are in brackets. 20 For further production notes and information on the play themes see the Royal Court Resource Pack. CHAPTER THREE
CONTEMPORARY IRISH WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS
In terms of women’s politics, the playwrights included in this chapter started their work at a time when “feminist energies tended to focus on educational, cultural and creative projects” (Smyth 1993, 266). The work of theatre companies organized in the form of collective or collaborative projects played a fundamental role.1 Other factors have been taken into account by critics and scholars alike; among these, the debates on the state of Irish theatre in the 1990s evidenced a crisis in the male archetype (Murray 1997) which helped to make visible women’s theatres both in the Republic and in Northern Ireland. However, as Anna McMullan and Caroline Williams argue,
many of the male playwrights of Irish theatre tradition have contested dominant concept of both masculine and national identity, but their critical canonization has left little space for those whose imaginative world, stories or audiences fall outside the boundaries of what has become recognized as the national tradition of Irish theatre. (2002, 1237)
From this point of view, to invoke a crisis in masculinity is to concur with alternative readings within the confines of a male territory, at the expense of writing by and for women. One effect of this may be that “the sexes are [and remain] separated and the women are looked at through male eyes as embodying values which he has lost” (White 1993, 28). Although this may be a reductionist view which does not apply to all male playwrights, the permutations of a masculinist theatre tradition which have preoccupied theatre practitioners for more than three decades should not be underestimated. Recent studies on theatre and national identity are of relevance here. Margaret Llewellyn-Jones traces an overall trend in contemporary Irish drama towards “a more fluid, hybrid approach to cultural identity” (2002, 10). The fluctuation between acceptance and rejection of the past is paradigmatic for the women writers under consideration. The same can be said about their exploration of binary oppositions such as the local and the global, the private and the public, male and female. The territory they 38 Chapter Three share is a manifest intent to shape sites (spaces, subject positions) in order to resist dominant cultural values and forms. By doing so, they intimate the bridging of the gap between history and representation which registers the absence of subjects and stories subsumed and perpetually in the background of discourses on the Nation. The legacies of national identity still cause some problems for the affirmation of counter cultures of Irish theatre. However, women performance in Ireland at its best has shown that it is possible to re-work these legacies and turn them into a progressive movement forward.
Between realism and experimentation: Northern Irish women playwrights
This section will highlight the tension between realism and experimentation (in form and content) at the heart of Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone (1985) and After Easter (1994), and Marie Jones’s Women on the Verge of HRT (1995). This tension results from a series of strategies whereby both playwrights resist the “oppressive patriarchy” of Ulster society, at the same time as they reject the conventional assumptions of feminist theatre (Foley 2003). For Devlin and Jones the use of domestic settings is not intended to disengage from the political; rather, it shows that the personal, the domestic, and the political are contingent on each other (Lojek 2006, 335). Devlin, for instance, says she is obsessed by questions of feminism and republicanism, a choice “which haunts Irish history” (Edgar 1999, 97). With keen attention to issues of motherhood, womanhood, and sectarianism, Devlin and Jones elude all certainties. In their plays, easy solutions for private and public conflicts are dismissed in favour of a wider notion of identity informed by multiple possibilities for action. In Ourselves Alone (co-produced by Liverpool Playhouse Studio),2 Devlin represents a place women can(not) inhabit in a context of sectarian violence, such as 1980s Belfast. Female stereotyping is disallowed through the staging of three different versions of women: Josie is the would-be rebel, Donna the dutiful, exploited wife, a “perpetual victim,” and Frieda is the resisting body, “pert and sexy neutral,” ultimately doomed to exile.3 Connections between structure and fictional landscape spring from the two interior settings, the Belfast club, “centre of Republican activity, political and social” (13) and Donna’s flat. Frieda, her sister Josie, and their friend and sister-in-law Donna are precluded from these two places. But, as we shall see, only Frieda is finally allowed to inhabit an alternative space outside the male territory. Male comradeship and political allegiance burst Contemporary Irish Women Playwrights 39 into the privacy of the women’s family, as when Malachy (the father) approaches Josie:
How’s my mate! Hey! Josie (Resisting the embrace) I’m not your mate. I’m your daughter. (25)
By addressing her as “mate,” Malachy forcefully assumes Josie as a subject without an agency and intends to confuse her within the logic of sectarianism. For most of the play, Donna instead waits for Liam’s release from prison. In the scene where she “comes in like a ghost, unseen, and waits” (75), she is cast as the other. Her subjection, as in Charabanc Theatre Company’s political plays, serves to reinforce male allegiance to a unified Ulster. Metaphorically, Donna’s house becomes “a fictional construct ... seminal in enabling and upholding the unbalanced gender architecture at the basis of the notion of theatrical nationhood” (Cerquoni 2007, 162). Frieda seeks her way out of male discourse by singing in the club, but she is not allowed to sing her own songs on the pretext that they are “not as popular” as the men’s (14). The presentation on stage of the club and Donna’s flat leads, I would suggest, to view them as panopticons where the women are disciplined into silence. In his analysis of the prison system, Michel Foucault claims that “[a] body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved.” The production of docile bodies has a specific relation to time, space, and movement. In the same way as in Foucault’s prison system, in both the club and the flat discipline “dissociates power from the body” of the three women; “on the one hand, it turns it into an ‘aptitude,’ a ‘capacity,’ which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that may result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection” ([1977] 1995, 136-8). This has implications on/for the three women’s movement in space. Josie seeks freedom by “playing the man” and supporting her father and brother’s discourse, whereas Donna is secured into her domestic role and denied any movement in “time” and “space.” To contrast these two women-versions there is Frieda. By choosing exile, she disengages from the workings of power. Violence, here, is “always a function of control and always perpetrated by men” (Foley 2003, 82). We know that Frieda cannot sing the songs she wants, that “she will be applauded for renderings of orthodox material, but never for her own creativity,” and that she is thus the voice of “retaliation and anger” (Foley 2003, 77-81). However, Frieda twists what Foucault calls the “political investment of the body,” the “‘micro-physics’ of power” ([1977] 1995, 139) and turns it performatively into agency. This, at least, is shown by Devlin’s use of her exile, which is 40 Chapter Three not figured as a surrender but as a conscious act of self-affirmation. This feasibly positive note is hinted at throughout the text and resumed by the sea metaphor at the end of the play; there, Frieda recalls a day out at sea when the three women “slipped off from the campfire to swim leaving the men arguing on the beach” (90).4 Devlin says that Ourselves Alone groups together “three women representative of three paths available at different stages of my life, my own essentially” (Godiwala 2003, 167). There is a consideration to make here. She admits all her plays oscillate between (auto)biography and experience: “A biography is one life; experience is the knowledge of the stories of many who have touched your own. So they are also history plays and of course they are political plays too.” She wrote both Ourselves Alone and After Easter in England, with a break in Sweden during which she had her first son; and it is motherhood, Devlin stresses, which has dictated the directions her playwriting should take. The two recurring themes of motherhood and autobiography converge in the overall picture of private nightmares against political ones. Of After Easter, she says that it is about “the way personality unravels without its boundaries, when the personality has a history that can continually trip it up” (Edgar 1999, 97- 8). It will become clear as we now approach her second play that motherhood provides Devlin with the material, as well as with the language, of her writing. Past and present, realism and mysticism/spiritualism, sectarianism, motherhood, and autobiography are combined in After Easter,5 itself a reflection on Belfast women of today (Lojek 2006). At the time when she was writing the play, Devlin remembers that “My own personal journey had been towards the maternal ... because I had a son, I had, for a time, within a female body, a male and a female heart. This gave me a new politics, which was not a separatist feminism. The womb does not discriminate” (MacGurk 1996, 59). The influence played by Devlin’s experience as a mother reminds of the ways in which “autobiographical performances represent the already lived in order to beckon us towards, urge us to imagine or compel us to create the yet to be lived” (Heddon 2004, 20, my emphasis). Greta, an exile in her mid-thirties, is hospitalized for attempting suicide. When the play opens, she has failed to recognise her new-born baby, taken away from her during breast-feeding. Her husband is using her breakdown as proof that she is unable to look after it, and, we are led to assume, so as to start a new life with his lover. In her creation of “the yet to be lived,” Greta’s alternating manifestations of madness and visions become a means to “dialogue” with her past and her Catholic roots (Arrowsmith 1999). Contemporary Irish Women Playwrights 41
For Greta, to head towards a new future is to start again from motherhood. Her inward journey is centred on the “metaphysics” of motherhood. Her sisters Aoife and Helen, and their cousin Eilish all have struggled against a conventional motherhood—Eilish is a nun; Helen is a successful career woman in London; a convinced Catholic, Aoife has five children and is haunted by her desires for extra-marital sex. The mother figure’s position is made deliberately problematic in this play. Rose has acquired independence through her knitting business, but she invests it with her religious beliefs. Aoife accuses her of caring only for their brother, Manus, who turns out to be gay. By inscribing her own sphere of action within the male establishment—and often just for material pleasure—Rose’s character is built through her associations with a neglecting “Mother Ireland.” The women’s relationship with their father is no less problematic. A possible incestuous relationship between Greta and her father Michael is never explored in the play. It is however suggested by the “dark stories” (20) Greta tells before they know of their father’s heart attack, or by the discussion the sisters have in scene two; and, there is the moment when Greta is talking to her father dead in the coffin, and “Michael’s hand comes up out of the coffin and grabs her by the throat” (66). Perhaps, this likelihood is also embedded in the meaning of Aoife’s words to Helen:
Helen I’m sick of this—what did you call it, Aoife?—blood love. Aoife We are his children, she is only his wife. (64)
The exchange is a prelude to the undistinguishable borders between motherhood and madness in After Easter. Here, I would like to draw from Julia Kristeva’s observation that, by alternating the emotions of love and hate, motherhood calls into question its own association with “borderline states and perversions” (2005). Borders are ruptured at different levels in this play. Kristeva’s discussion of motherhood interests me for her invocation of a “detachment- depassioning” process, whereby a new time, that of the mother, is established—mother is a subject entitled to an opening, or new beginning, represented by the birth of her child, to the extent that a “duration by means of new beginnings” takes place. The achievement of this alternative notion of time allows Greta to shape her new (sense of) self, as suggested by the very end of the play. But before then we need to go back to Ourselves Alone. There, Donna’s final line, “How quietly the light comes” (90) follows Frieda’s decision to leave Belfast—here, the new beginning, though hinted at, is barely visible. Greta, I would argue, starts there where Frieda stops. After Easter closes with Greta telling a story to her child: she 42 Chapter Three is flying “on top of the world” on a stag’s back and journeys towards her origins: “And he took me to the place where the rivers come from, where you come from ... and this is my own story” (75). It is true that “Only by returning to her roots and re-evaluating the impact of her origins on her adult identity can Greta construct a new sense of self” (Fitzpatrick 2005, 327) and that, in order to be productive, this return needs to be “dialogical,” i.e. structured through negotiation and not through radical rupture, as Aidan Arrowsmith notes (1999, 141). However, it also seems that beyond Greta’s renewed sense of self lies an alternative way to freedom. No longer conceived of in terms of one’s own dismissed past, “Being free means having the courage to begin anew: such,” Kristeva concludes, “is the philosophy of motherhood” (2005, 2, my emphasis). The uniqueness of Devlin’s theatrical vision shows her own past and the Troubles as generators of change conceived of in terms of a new beginning which originates from women’s experience firmly rooted in the everyday. Jones started her playwriting career as writer-in-residence for the Belfast-based Charabanc. Criticism on her post-Charabanc plays has tended to note a lessoning as regards her political stance which earned her the reputation of the most promising Irish woman playwright of the 1980s. Some argue that she has indeed shown “little development” since then (Lojek 2006). The London production of Women on the Verge of HRT6 is a case in point. The cast—which included Jones as Vera—and direction— Pam Brighton—were generally praised; but the almost unanimous negative response was due to the sit-com clichés of the play.7 The two acts of the play may well be viewed as contrasting an attachment to and fracture of realist conventions. In particular, in act two Jones seems to explore the “possible creation of a liminal space for female desire, which is connected with and subversive of aspects of Irish cultural mythology” (Llewellyn-Jones 2002, 75). The Banshee appearing to Vera and Anna, both in their forties, is a legendary woman, a displaced subject, which haunts the women’s present affected by menopause and loss of appeal to men; hence the HRT-hormone replacement therapy of the title. Like Vera, the Banshee has been rejected in life by her husband (a “Pooka,” or bad fairy) for a younger woman. Vera’s distress is however intensified by the fact that her ex-husband’s lover has given him the baby boy she could not bear. Dessie can now extend his family line according to the aims of reproductive heterosexuality.8 Marriage as a bond which dispenses happiness and moral stability to women is also contested by Anna’s lamentations (her husband fantasizes with porn magazines). On the night of the famous Irish singer Daniel O’Donnell’s gig, Vera and Anna embark on a figurative journey in their own private lives, occasioned by Contemporary Irish Women Playwrights 43 the hotel waiter’s invitation on a Donegal beach at dawn. The beach functions as a metaphorical space, “appropriate for transformation” where folklore erupts to break the realistic linearity of time and place: first, the Banshee appears as a “female portent of ageing and death” (Llewellyn-Jones 2002, 76) and evolves into Vera’s other. Later on, Fergal discloses himself as a “shape-shifter” in episodes reminiscent of “hidden assumptions and attitudes ... brought to the surface and exposed.” Fergal thus allows Vera and Anna “to confront the sources of their grievances, and evaluate the possibilities of change, in themselves and others” (McMullan 2000, 40-1)—an effect that was cleverly rendered on stage with the same actor (Dessie Gallagher) performing all changes. The woman-Banshee parallel is reinforced by Fergal/Marty’s (Anna’s husband) ammunition, “where’s your broomsticks? ... I hope youse find your broomsticks” (35, 37). It is here that Vera realizes that the Banshee is “Just like us. You were not born a banshee. They made you a banshee” (22)— the bodies of women are subject to becoming, in male eyes, an abhorred fetishized other. Vera’s attempts to re-enact herself as an object of desire are emphatically negated in the climax scene where she approaches Fergal to kiss him, but he disappears into a puff of smoke (39). This occurrence represents a feminist moral, very warm-hearted though disguised. Having somehow undergone a transformation, Vera and Anna “will henceforth be stronger, more self-reliant and aware” (Llewellyn-Jones 2002, 76). Fergal may be (or may have been) whatever she desired him to be, but just not what she needs him to be, at this precise moment in her life. In Jones’s intent, women have to find other ways to resist. Such, at least, is what can be grasped from some verses of Vera’s final song:
So come on sisters Don’t let them win We may be over forty But we can still sin, sin, sin, sin. (40)
The use of songs to let the audience share the political message of the play takes Jones back to her activity with Charabanc. As for Women on the Verge of HRT, however, it has been objected that the freedom acquired through songs “is not a prerogative and is as prone to colonisation as any other construct” (Foley 2003, 50), which may be only partially true. The singing emphasizes Vera’s acquisition of her own language both as the one thing she has a hold of and as a tool to destabilize, through the strategy of humour, dominant cultural assumptions, i.e. to “achieve perspective.”9 Songs are used to express desires and worries, as Llewellyn-Jones (2002) 44 Chapter Three argues, and in fact the whole play centres around desire and how to use it as tool. It also presents a characteristic feature of Northern Irish drama, whereby the oppressive past embodied by the Banshee, as well as Vera’s and Anna’s dialogue with their own past and present, serve the purpose of “demythologizing the past and moving forwards” (Lojek 2006, 329).10 Jones’s later work shows that the strategic use of humour may lead to underestimate a play, and this seems to be the risk run by her recent writing. In A Night in November (1994) and Stones in His Pockets (1996), for instance, she wittily explores the possibilities of identity in postmodernity from a man’s point of view (Lonergan 2009), but losing sight of her woman’s perspective used more effectively elsewhere. The oscillation between realism and vision(s) of women playwrights in Northern Ireland seems to be required in order to respond effectively to the contextual sectarian conflicts in politics and gender. As women, Devlin and Jones show that it is possible to point to future, liveable spaces either by interrogating the past (Devlin) or by re-working folklore and strategies, such as humour (Jones). Similarly, in plays by women in the Republic of Ireland, a rewriting of traditional storytelling represents the in-between territories that separate realism and experimentation. I will now attempt to explore certain sites of resistance to the process of globalization opened up by the Celtic Tiger in the 1990s.
“Decentring” the Celtic Tiger: Women playwrights and the Republic
Devlin’s After Easter ends with Greta at home, “rocking a baby, telling it a story. The traditional empty chair is placed near the storyteller” (75). Storytelling is an art camouflaged as performance that subtly, yet pervasively influence the action, but in the plays considered here it is less materially present than in Devlin’s play. David Lloyd’s observations on postcolonial narratives seems interesting in this context. Reading subalternity in postcolonial terms, he calls for spaces “in simultaneity with and difference from” modernity that become the object of “‘new histories’” whose purpose is other than to replace dominant narratives. What Lloyd calls “non-élite” subjectivities resist dominant ideologies by reclaiming “persistent inassimilability to the state,” a site (or sites) of permanent contestation (2005, 417-8). Lloyd’s theories applied to the plays analysed here points to a postmodern aesthetics that replaces History with micro- stories—herstories in this case. Both Marina Carr and Gina Moxley act to dismantle gender dichotomies and roles, but at a more subtle level their exploration of themes of sexual discovery in teenage-years, motherhood, Contemporary Irish Women Playwrights 45 and incest seems to dig out purposefully the others of the Celtic Tiger in order to place them centre stage. I here rely on Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction theory for my use of “decentring.” I consider decentring as an “affirmation,” that is, a way to determine “the noncentre otherwise than as loss of the centre” (1978, 16). Derrida’s différance seeks to deconstruct binary oppositions, but in so doing it replaces the “either/or” logic with a “both/and” one (Bertens [2001] 2008, 104). Let us imply that the Celtic Tiger may function as centre, a Derridian logos. If there is a Celtic Tiger, then there exists, by definition, what is not the Celtic Tiger, through which the former seeks its own recognition by means of difference (différance.) The Celtic Tiger is associated with Dublin’s leading position as economic and cultural centre, as demonstrated by the rise in tourist migrations since the 1990s (Lonergan 2009). Conversely, and partly effected by this, the west of Ireland has rapidly undergone a process of fetishization. This process is exemplified by “the myth of the west as conjured up by the Literary Revival and commodified for popular consumption in tourism,” whereby a romanticised version of Ireland has re-entered modernity in the form of commodity (Kirby, Gibbons and Cronin 2002, 10). This direction is hinted at in some reviews of the London productions of the plays considered here. So, if Moxley’s Danti-Dan (1995) focuses on “teenagers with no prospects beyond a job in the chewing-gum factory,” Carr’s On Raftery’s Hill (2000) places “the hidden face ... of the urban Emerald Tiger” centre stage.11 The reaction to the uniformed production (and sharing) of values, subjectivities and issues of citizenship underpins plays as diverse as Carr’s Low in the Dark (1989), On Raftery’s Hill, and Ariel (2002), and Moxley’s Danti-Dan. Set in her teenage years (1970), Moxley’s début Danti-Dan12 is “totally autobiographical.” Long before Ireland rode the Celtic Tiger, Moxley stages the lives of a group of “have nots” (1996, 72). The action takes place near a monument “to those who died locally in the civil war,” a bridge, and a faulty telephone box in the Cork countryside (5). Metaphorically, the monument embodies a past unknown to the teenagers for biological reasons. It somehow becomes a sub-text in stark contrast with the theme of sexual discovery. Danti-Dan poses interesting questions about gender-troubling disguised as innocent child-play (Kurdi 2002). The sex game between Cactus and Dolores is particularly indicative of the fluidity the play promotes. There is the scene where they kiss while impersonating the couple of the novel they are reading. When the play closes, we seem to be invited to view their final good-bye as more than just the friends’ separation. Cactus “makes it 46 Chapter Three sexual” with the retarded Dan pretending to be teaching him how to play poker. But, through writing down notes of passing cars and dreaming of the Wild West, he waits for the day when Ber’s boyfriend, Noel, will finally take him to America. London critic Benedict Nightingale (The Times) views Dan as “the only non-sexual or presexual character.” This is certainly a truism, as is John Peter’s (The Sunday Times) comment that the play deals with “the febrile, coarse, insecure but cocky years when everything, especially sex, seems both menacing and possible.” This “menacing and possible” moment in which Dan’s sexuality is shaped affects the overall action. Cactus, Dan, and Dolores inhabit a space, and this space is open to change to the extent that it remains bound to its own logic; or, as playwright Frank McGuinness cleverly points out, they are “shaped by what happens to them in the play, and what happens to them is what they do to themselves. No outside influence affects them” (1996a, x). Dan’s accidental death and the subsequent dismemberment of the gang precludes these possibilities. We are left with the feeling that the adult world they will soon be entering will teach them to grow into men and women who accept the moral values of citizenship in 1970s Ireland. Through Dan’s idealized Wild West, Danti-Dan seems to communicate the “dangerous” and “immature” illusions about “the American dream” (Llewellyn-Jones 2002, 131). This is, I would argue, a particular aspect in the play and it stresses a pervasive resistance to dominant ideologies of capitalism expressed by the levels of dislocation that the play dramatizes. We are then in the context of the intensifying economic relationship between Ireland and the United States which have fuelled talk of a Celtic Tiger, as the “subservient integration into a radical free-market or Anglo- American informational capitalism, has itself shaped values, attitudes and forms of cultural expression which function within the contemporary Irish economy” (Kirby, Gibbons and Cronin 2002, 2). Moxley’s play attempts to lay out problems that may arise from a distinction of new economic and social structures according to specific geographical lines. By depicting younger versions of what would possibly become the “social outcasts” of modernity, she welcomes the 1990s as the era of the “Others” of the Celtic Tiger. Unlike many fellow playwrights, Carr is very keen on talking about her writing. Among the necessary tools for the writer, she mentions “the wisdom and circumspection needed when dealing with the dead or the past, with memory, knowledge” and “being in uncertainties.” The influence of storytelling is best emphasized by how she conceives the creative process in terms of “letting things pass through, letting things pass in or out” (1998, 191-2). Carr seems to be fully aware of herself as a seanchaí: Contemporary Irish Women Playwrights 47 of her most acclaimed The Mai (1994), she says it is “part autobiography, part creation,” and this is most evident in the character of Millie. She seems to return to an emphasis on storytelling in Portia Coughlan (1996)—and I would add, On Raftery’s Hill—where she deals with incest as one of the “oldest stories of what the world was born out of,” as she admits in interview (Stephenson and Langridge 1997, 147, 152). Telling anomalous, new histories (in Lloyd’s terms), Carr decenters the Celtic Tiger on different levels. Hers, like Moxley, is primarily a geographical decentring: she was born in the Midlands, Moxley is from Cork, and this admittedly influences their works. By concentrating on motherhood (Low in the Dark), incest (On Raftery’s Hill), and monstrosity (Ariel), I attempt to show how Carr uses gender politics to build and tell stories which co- exist with yet oppose a global Ireland disguised behind the mask of the Celtic Tiger. Performance of identity and rejection of essentialist notions of gender in favour of a celebration of subversiveness (McMullan 2000, 41-2) are at the core of Low in the Dark.13 Conventional motherhood is expanded; dramaturgically, this expansion is translated into a ruptured realism that is often challenging and cutting-edge. The troubling of gender is performed and reinforced scene by scene: Bender and Binder (mother and daughter) discuss motherhood as Binder gives birth to a number of children; Bone and Baxter embody fairly stereotypically husband and wife in a parody of the family (scene two). In scene three, act two, Bone is “hugely pregnant, wearing one high-heel shoe and one man’s shoe,” while Baxter is knitting (67). In Low in the Dark, the lack of communication between genders is emphasized by the moment when they are all on stage but “No one looks at anyone” (26). Actress Sarahjane Scaife (Binder) recalls the functional stage setting for the Crooked Sixpence company production: “The stage was split into two sections. Stage right was the ‘men’s area,’ composed of a wall that was in the process of being built—the men’s work. Stage left was the ‘women’s area,’ a bathroom with a toilet, bath and shower.” A body-that- does-not-matter, or a Kristevan abject, Curtains functions as the storyteller. She “was free to wander into either area. A very enigmatic character, she wore what could only be described as ‘a set’ as a costume. She was literally a walking curtain. She couldn’t be seen at all for the duration of the play” (2003, 9). Bit by bit, she tells her story of man and woman who are forever destined to inhabit two separate lives, two separate worlds that can never meet: “they had never met. And worse still, they never would, they never could, they never can and they never will” (99). Implicit in Carr’s play is the consideration of which (political) 48 Chapter Three subjects are accepted within the confines of the nation and which are not. By deconstructing and parodying motherhood, she develops a subaltern new history as Lloyd would have it, “open[ing] the spaces within which unsubordinated narratives can resonate” (2005, 417). In this case, (Curtains’s) storytelling takes the form of a failed attempt at self-affirmation—we know that Curtains is a woman, but a body constituted always in subjection. By the same token, we know that communication has broken down as Binder, Bender, Bone and Baxter simply confirm with their behaviours the story Curtains tells throughout the play. However, by parodying the founding institution of the State—the family—Carr’s launches the provocation that a pervasive patriarchy apprehends subjects “through social and gender conditioning inscribed on the body” (McMullan 2000, 43). She invites us to resist “the singular history through which the state seeks to incorporate and regulate its political subjects” (Lloyd 2005, 418). In the plays analysed next, I attempt to show the effects of Carr’s shifting of perspective from a reflection on the gender construction of family roles to a focus within the boundaries of the family where institutional violence is perpetrated on women. On Raftery’s Hill14 is a hallucinatory account of father-daughter incest and its legacies. Widower Red Raftery’s country household is made up of Dinah, in her forties, her much younger sister-possible daughter Sorrel,15 Red’s mother Shalome, and Red’s retarded son, Ded. The fact that here, as in her 1990s plays, Carr covers different generations of women in the Midlands enhances the sense of colonized bodies (and minds) under an ubiquitous patriarchy and an inevitable fate, especially in non-urban areas of Ireland. Dinah has been abused by her father since she was little. Red is the patriarch with uncontested power over his daughters. In a burst of anger, he also rapes Sorrel. We are left wondering whether her rape is due to the fact that he is not letting her marry local farmer Dara Mood until he leaves his mark on her, or because Dara’s words defy his authority. Critic Georgina Brown (The Independent) extends the incest thread to Ded and his mother, whose death “has left him a traumatised big baby,” and suggests that “[f]or Red, incest is a form of revenge, first against his sickly wife, second because Dara criticised him.” Or, it may be that Red’s act is a reaction to Dinah’s only moment of self-affirmation, which he perceives as a threat: “Don’t touch Sorrel” (29), itself an attempt at patriarchal authority. The role of the patriarch deserves closer attention. Judith Lewis Herman postulates that mother-son incest has received wider historical coverage than father-daughter incest because of its inherent insult to the Contemporary Irish Women Playwrights 49 authority of the father. With regard to the latter, “As long as he [the father] ultimately gives his daughters in marriage, he has fulfilled the local purpose of the rule of the gift. Until such time as he chooses to give her away, he has uncontested power to do with her as he wishes” ([1981] 2000, 60). By conforming to her role (and fate) as the protector of domesticity, Dinah seems to want to protect Sorrel; hence, to view her as Sorrel’s mother is a fairly acceptable opinion. This interpretation is reinforced later on when Dinah recollects memories of her mother:
She sent me into bed aside him. I was lanin on the fridge in the pantry and she comes in behind me and says ouh a nowhere, you’re to sleep in wud your father tonigh. She didn’t want him so she sends me in. I was twelve. (57)
Perhaps Dinah is simply trying to break her mother’s “line,” and is open to giving herself away instead of Sorrel. In On Raftery’s Hill, Carr decentres Ireland’s new-found glory by giving voice to a story in which “civilization has failed to civilize, failed to separate human beings not only from their savage ancestors in the caves, but from amoral beasts” (Leeney 2006, 515). The subtlety with which she interrogates the economic sub-text is at best represented by the association “women-land-money” which incidentally lead to Sorrel’s rejection of marriage, or by the association woman/gutted hare in Sorrel’s rape scene, at the close of act one. Both Dara and Red have more than learned how to make money and advance, although within the confines of the buried setting of non-urban Ireland. It is paradigmatic that, in this portrait, women become a commodity, an exchange value just like land or cattle—Sorrel could desert her father by marrying Dara, but by his and Red’s arguments in act two we infer that this would subjugate her to another man’s authority. Within the overall framework of stories which will never be listened to, it is then no coincidence that the play closes on Ded, Red’s only son, who lives in the cowshed. A real outsider, the music he plays on his fiddle is reminiscent of an alternative storytelling altogether, a substitute for words by he who “knows it all,” where “it” stands for the full-length history of familial mischief. In Carr’s vision, communication has broken down and it seems that not even death can stop the injurious cycle of conflict, violence, and murder. This, at least, seems to be the conclusion she reaches in her controversial Ariel,16 where Carr summons Greek mythology—a recurrent source in her writing—and bases her play on Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis. Sacrificed by her father on the day of her sixteenth birthday, Ariel is an emblematic woman victim of a patriarchal authority handed down through 50 Chapter Three generations. Carr’s recurring obsession with destiny informs the Cuura Lake “stories”—it is here that politician-to-be Fermoy drowns Ariel’s body, just like his father had done with his mother. Fintan O’Toole welcomes the way the play shows that “the three pillars of the Old Ireland—Church, State and Family—are in an advanced state of decay” (2003, 188). It is undoubtedly a predominant feature of the play, but at the same time we cannot fail to consider that this is a common expedient in Carr’s drama. Deconstructed, unruly institutions such as the family are more or less marked influences in plays such as Portia Coughlan, By the Bog of Cats (1998), On Raftery’s Hill, and, possibly, her earlier The Mai, although not in the terms and along the generalized territory that appear in Ariel. I will not discuss here why the play has been found flawed by Irish critics for its apparent lack of pertinence to reality; rather, my focus will be on Carr’s staging of a feminist trope: the association between women and monstrosity, which she explores in the context of the male quest for power. In her essay on Carr’s theatre, Cathy Leeney speaks of “aspects of the twenty-first century world, where nature and culture have collapsed into one another, where technology blurs the borders between the animal, the human and the machine” (2006, 517); this is certainly true of the play, but there is also more. Through the ill-formed body of the title-character, Ariel sets an oppositional framework between women’s perspective and dominant cultural norms. This structure is paradigmatic, and informs one of Carr’s most demanding works. We are given instruction that Fermoy views Ariel’s “shoulder growths” as a sign from God:
Fermoy Remember them wings she was born wud? Frances Wings? Whah wings? Fermoy Them wings on her shoulder blades. Frances Wha are ya talkin abouh? Whah wings? On her shoulder blades? Them growths on her shoulders, is tha what you’re talking abouh? Fermoy They were the start a wings. Frances They were balls a hardened bone and gristle, thah’s all, benign, tiny, we had em removed. (57)
The exchange is a direct hint at the dichotomy of holiness-materiality. Rosi Braidotti explores this historically sanctioned dichotomy from the initial connection of the monstrous with “the in between, the mixed, the ambivalent ... which means both horrible and wonderful, object of aberration and adoration” (1997, 62). Ariel’s murder becomes the eviction of the body of the monster; it gives Fermoy uncontested power, a power that is both holy and monstrous: touched by the hand of God, and having sacrificed the (woman) monster he can now fulfil his mission “to re- Contemporary Irish Women Playwrights 51 educahe a nation” (43). Later in the play, he is Minister for Education of Ireland. It is interesting to look at how the character of Fermoy was reviewed. Accused of not being plausible, Fermoy, for O’Toole, “is not remotely convincing as a contemporary Irish politician” (2003, 189). Although discourses on the monstrous really matter here, by overemphasising them we risk losing track of the deconstruction of realism (in form and content) which lies at the core of feminist theatre since the birth of a politically informed feminist performance in the early 1970s, and is part of a specific message conveyed in Ariel. I have specified that the deconstruction of the conventional family is one of Carr’s favourite themes. Here, thematic overlapping gives us a series of elements about Ariel’s family that demand as much attention as her sacrifice. The mother figure, Frances, is burdened by the loss of her first son and mourns him by being over-protective with Ariel’s young brother Stephen to such an extent that she still breast-feeds him aged ten. This Oedipal residue is counterbalanced by Elaine, Ariel’s sister, and her acquiescence to Fermoy. Incest is never evidently posed by the play, but it seems to be a strong sub-textual possibility. If we bear in mind the incestuous motif in On Raftery’s Hill, then Fermoy’s rage at Frances and Stephen may be justified by the fact that their relationship, unlike his with Elaine, per se represents an attack on his authority as patriarch. This also seems a reasonable reading for the cycle of murder in Ariel. Having found out about Fermoy’s bloody deed, Frances murders him, and at the close of the play Elaine avenges her father by stabbing her mother in the throat. She says:
Whah my father done to Ariel had the grandeur of God in ud. Pure sacrifice. Ferocious, aye. Buh pure. Whah you [Frances] done to him [Fermoy] was a puckered, vengeful, self-servin thing wud noh a whiff of the immortal in ud. (64)
Her words seem to confirm the possibility of incest between Fermoy and Elaine. What is more, by giving up her love for the “Mother” Elaine seems to accept her love for the father and submit to the generative compulsion of heterosexuality (Irigaray [1981] 1991, 44). This is epitomized by Elaine’s closing line after stabbing her mother, “After this no more” (75). Bloodied dreams of power have given Elaine and Fermoy the opportunity to escape from the bogged Midlands and ride the Celtic Tiger. The unsettling family portrait depicted in Ariel is, I would conclude, set in stark contrast with the cultural values which mask the economic drive towards capitalism and globalisation. In her contextualisation of 52 Chapter Three
Carr’s narratives of resistance, Vic Merriman reaches a similar conclusion when she admits that “[a]t a time of unprecedented affluence ... [Carr’s plays] elaborate a world of the poorly educated, coarse and unrefined. The focus is tight, the display of violence inhering in the people themselves, grotesque and unrelenting” (1999, 312). Fermoy and his subservient, de- humanised daughter have managed to enter “the actions of market- accommodating business and political élites” which according to Peadar Kirby have shaped Ireland of today’s reinventing of itself (Kirby, Gibbons and Cronin 2002, 35). Whether it is Curtains (Low in the Dark), Ded (On Raftery’s Hill), or the myth of Cuura Lake (Ariel), Carr’s storytellers are always at work “to keep a connection with audience and maintain a continuity of social practice while striving to find new ways to tell stories that threaten to remain untold” (Roche 2006, 2000). They become the embodied version of a whole community or set of communities who are never going to be worthy of adjustment within the Irish citizenship which the Celtic Tiger purports to represent. The personal/political dichotomy and its contingency on journeys into self, autobiography, and motherhood are dramatized in the plays by Anne Devlin. Marie Jones, another woman playwright from Northern Ireland, uses humour to attack the stereotype of women as objects of (male) desire. Gina Moxley and Marina Carr explore the possibilities offered by traditional Irish storytelling to shape new histories built in opposition to the economic and cultural context which they inhabit, and to bring to light Ireland’s hidden faces. Taken together, the plays and playwrights considered in this chapter develop several “sites of a complex intersection of individual and communal locations that resist reduction to the form of civil subjectivity which dominant narratives prioritize” (Lloyd 2005, 422). As Carr’s recent Woman and Scarecrow (2006) and Marble (2009) demonstrate, theatre by women can make a sapient use of its Irish roots in order to create new meanings for the Irish theatre. Contemporary Irish women playwrights contest, deconstruct, and replace a sedimented adherence to values of the nation. This work is still in process, and women’s performance offers a permanent site of resistance.
Notes
1 See the sections on Charabanc Theatre Company and Glasshouse Productions of this volume (Chapter 6). 2 Devlin [1985] 1990; subsequent references are in brackets. 3 See John Barber (Daily Telegraph) and Suzie MacKenzie (Time Out). 4 See Foley (2003) for further reference. Contemporary Irish Women Playwrights 53
5 Devlin [1994] 1999; subsequent references are in brackets. 6 Jones and Neil Martin [1995] 1999; subsequent references are in brackets. 7 See Theatre Record, 26 February-11 March 1997. 8 On reproductive heterosexuality, see Butler (1990); also, see the section on Glasshouse Productions in Chapter 6 of this volume. 9 On Jones’s use of humour, see the section on Charabanc Theatre Company (Chapter 6). 10 I am here referring to Llewellyn-Jones’s reading of the Banshee as a Kristevan abject (2003: 76-7). 11 Irving Wardle (on Danti-Dan), and Michael Billington (on On Raftery’s Hill) in Theatre Record . 12 Moxley [1995] 1996, 1-71; subsequent references are in brackets. 13 Carr 1999, 7-99; subsequent references are in brackets. 14 Carr 2000; subsequent references are in brackets. 15 This aspect is dealt with also in some reviews of the London premiere. See Theatre Record. 16 Carr 2002; subsequent references are in brackets.
PART II:
PERFORMING GENDERS
CHAPTER FOUR
QUEERING MASCULINITIES
Socialism for the future: Mark Ravenhill
A parallel can be drawn between early works by Ravenhill, namely Shopping and Fucking (1996) and Some Explicit Polaroids (1999), and two of his later achievements, Mother’s Clap Molly House (2001) and Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat (2008). A reading of themes and messages embedded in these plays will show how Ravenhill uses several points of entry to unfold his critique of postmodern capitalism and globalisation. Theoretically speaking, I attempt to demonstrate that “queer” seems to offer a strategic position from which to approach his writing productively. In doing so, I will follow points raised earlier by academics and critics in discussions about Ravenhill’s particular position within contemporary British theatre. Nicholas de Jongh sees him as “a man who sees life in queer terms, who sees queer solutions and ... subscribes to a queer morality, a queer way of thinking and being” (Monforte 2007a, 125). Caridad Svich and Sara Freeman note that Ravenhill’s message is hard to define either because he “spins his moral view slightly askew” (2003, 89- 90) or because he tends to approach these issues “from the side” (2000, 402). Ravenhill’s politics is by no means easier to understand. Discussing it from the point of view of a renewed form of anarchism, Christian Schmitt-Kilb in fact notes that he is “at odds with neither postmodern individualism nor older forms of social commitment” (2005, 198). Some clarifications on the use I am going to make of the term “queer” are required. My analysis will bear upon Sue-Ellen Case’s use of queer to indicate both “an activist, or social” environment and an “academic, theoretical” one, which she also summarises as “one can ‘buy’ queer and wear it” (1994, 39); the latter seems especially pertinent to Ravenhill’s concern for how commodity replaces socialist ideals in the 1990s. Judith Halberstam points out that queer refers to “nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time” (2005, 6). Her definition interests me because it relates to a series of contexts which inhabit the plays dealt with here. Ravenhill uses the theoretically queer and the politically socialist to create something 58 Chapter Four unique in many ways, something which will emerge as a “queer socialism.” Ravenhill’s provocativeness is stressed further by the role played by male homosexuality in his plays. Scholar and playwright Dan Rebellato was the first to point out that his stress on the death of structures—gender, masculinity, class, politics, sex and sexuality went far beyond a gay aesthetics. This is found in the following plays in the characters’ longing to establish new bonds through which to connect to others as bodies in time and space. It is primarily by acting within the spaces they inhabit that any ghettoising of gay politics is rejected in favour of a wider political message. Ravenhill’s attention to class as a category is a case in point: “In Britain today, how much you spend defines your identity. Having spending power makes you mainstream, not marginalized. It’s the poor people who are marginalized rather than gay men” (2007, 92-93). Two levels of experience overlap in Ravenhill’s theatre. There is the surface use of violence acted/performed on the body and articulated in terms of (homo)sexuality, drug-addiction, sexual politics and abusive relationship(s). A consumerist culture (sadly, our own) is thus mirrored, where pleasure is a truly rewarding and worthwhile experience only to the extent that it is pushed to extremes. At a deeper level, and at the expense of “those who fail to make the connection between the personal and the political” (Gardner 2007) there is an urge for action, to see if there is some form of affection left, if and how it can possibly be recovered in the “here and now” of social experience. Generally speaking, the body in Ravenhill’s plays is often displayed as a disposable item; a product of capitalist forces, the body emerges as a result of reiterated acts and practices, along with the effects of an external power which, as Michel Foucault shows, inscribes it with a specific power relation. Identity thus becomes artificial, “arbitrary and performative” (Wallace 2006a, 88). There are characters. There are actions; then, there is a series of movements, of situations where the characters come out as dramatic identities always in-progress as if they were a sum of their actions “in the present moment” (Freeman 2000, 99). Ravenhill’s début Shopping and Fucking1 still bursts with “anarchic energy” and intensity (Svich 2003, 82). Theatrical language includes verbal explicitness and the much too exploited and debated “in-yer-face” scenes of arse-licking, fellatio under the eyes of a CCTV, and anal penetration with a knife to re- enact in performance a history (Gary’s) of father-child abuse (83). The development of characters into dramatic identities does not follow a linear structure: Ravenhill makes clear that each scene can be viewed as a separate episode, a play of its own, like a “Polaroid” photograph. This method is pushed to rarely seen standards of theatrical experimentation in Queering Masculinities 59 the epic form of Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat. There is an underlying sense of dispossession and futility oppressing the characters in Shopping and Fucking, as well as in Ravenhill’s other most accomplished works. Mark, for instance, confesses: “I attach to others as a means of avoidance, of avoiding knowing the self. Which is actually very destructive” (33). In the paraphernalia of a downward spiral metaphorically uniting the individual experiences of a group of lost souls, Brian seems to hold a stronger moral vision, despite his own corruption as a would-be employer:
We haven’t reached perfection. But it’s the closest we’ve come to meaning. Civilisation is money, Money is civilisation. And civilisation—how did we get here? By war, by struggle, kill or be killed. And money?—it’s the same thing, you understand? The getting is cruel, is hard, but the having is civilisation. Then we are civilisation. (87)
Robbie is aware that individuals need to make up their own little stories in order to get by in the present (66). The meaning of his postmodern articulation of history shows, just like Brian’s speech, that identity politics has been substituted by fake-plastic ideals like the ecstasy Lulu and Robbie try to sell. In Some Explicit Polaroids, Victor pushes Nick to take an “E” because “Everyone is the same when you take this. Everybody loves everybody” (276). Moments like these impinge on how global capital offers the pretence to be free and in control of oneself. What allows this mechanism to reproduce is the concealed labour of “invisible others”, those subjects not allowed to be included in the cycle of affluent consumption (Hennessy 2000, 111)—underpaid workers in Third World countries whose existence depends on the drug business run by criminal activity in the West. In Shopping and Fucking, the deliberate choice made by Ravenhill to follow the thread of ready-made meals in individual portions acquires new meaning if viewed within the context of the difference between bodies that matter and bodies that do not. The play closes on Mark, Lulu, and Robbie as they share a meal. Svich views it as the fulfilment of a cyclical structure, a reiteration of the opening food scene (2003). However, there are frequent occasions when the characters try in vain to relate to one another and learn the meaning of interaction with others. It may then be inferred that Ravenhill aims at something more far-reaching in scope. First, Mark does not vomit his meal as he does in scene one. Together with Robbie and Lulu, he seems to embody paradoxically a possibility to break the logic of capitalist consumption. The three characters have gone through drug-dealing and addiction, sexual abuse, and the like, but their 60 Chapter Four proximity to one other as bodies longing to interact indicates that the need is felt to find new ways to communicate, even though this possibility seems as yet a long way ahead. The importance of establishing a form of interaction with others re- surfaces in Nick and Helen’s relationship in Some Explicit Polaroids,2 still one of Ravenhill’s most “underestimated” plays. As director Max Stafford- Clark says, Nick’s and Helen’s final kiss displays the chance to build “a more comfortable relationship” (Roberts and Clark 2007, 206, 216). I would add that the play primarily shows Ravenhill’s intent to move the characters of Shopping and Fucking one step forward. The play is the result out of a workshop experience based entirely on Ravenhill’s sessions with the leading company Out of Joint. He recalls that “We had a workshop based on no play. We began rehearsal still with no play” (Roberts and Clark 2007, 201). There are several narrative threads, the all-encompassing one being Nick’s release from prison after he has attempted the murder of a seeming millionaire. He tries to resume his relationship with Helen on the grounds of their shared past of political commitment back in the 1970s. Afraid of the collapse of all certainties, he wonders whether “nothing means anything” really anymore (282). Victor habitually collects polaroids of his own body. He catalogues bodily performances in archive form, with strong political implications—the fetishism of the naked body; sex trade, or, the body as consumable product. Tim is HIV-positive and finds hardly any relief in the fact that, as a western beneficiary of a structured health-care system, he can draw out the illness “for years and years” (268). Nick falls for Nadia, who prostitutes herself in a strip-club in Soho and is into an abusive love relationship. When viewed together, the two relationships reveal that Victor’s agreement with Nick on a love-story with no feeling at all is counteracted by Nadia’s attachment to “deep feelings for everybody” (Roberts and Clark 2007, 202). It is significant that this “urban fairy-story” as Ravenhill has defined it himself (Roberts and Clark 2007, 198) opens in a typically urban spot— that is, the airport where Nadia goes to collect Victor. A favourite site of postmodernity, the airport opens up a future of expectations and promises, at the same time as it leaves behind the site of a possible trauma; this may be the case for the “downloaded” Russian sex-slave, Victor. The airport is, above all, a place where time is stretched out like a continuous present, and it thus poses interesting questions for the performativity of identity. This issue is taken up by Nadia’s speech: “we all have our journeys that we’re travelling. Each of us has our own path and, of course, we can’t always see the path, sometimes it seems like there’s no sense in anything, Queering Masculinities 61 you know? But of course there is. Everything makes sense” (238). As the title of the play suggests, each social formation is the end result of the accumulation of little fragments, of individual shots of lived experience. As in Shopping and Fucking, there is a less evident structure in this play which is built on the characters’ desperate search for an isolated moment to gain control of their selves outside of the logic of expected behaviour demanded forcibly by the social and economic background. A case in point is Tim’s dissonant refusal to take his pills: “My hospital room. My illness. body. My death. My choice” (287). He is acting as a subject-agent, but his behaviour renders the very notion of agency problematic, and the same happens for other characters in a number of occasions. These occasions, I would argue, exemplify a form of agency experienced within the territory of queer subjectivity, as theorized by Halberstam. In particular, Tim, Victor, and Nadia may be queer subjects “in terms of the way they live (deliberately, accidentally, or of necessity) during the hours when others sleep and in the spaces ... that others have abandoned, and in the terms of the ways they might work in the domains that other people assign to privacy and family.” This view touches on Ravenhill’s socialist perspective. By focusing on queer subjects, he represents those individuals who inhabit a space “outside the organizations of time and space that have been established for the purpose of protecting the rich few from everyone else” (2005, 10). Tim, Victor, and Nadia are indeed living their own lives as social outcasts, class structures being stressed here by the two affluent figures, Helen and Jonathan. There is a consideration to make on the absence, or on the fear of absence, of love which pervades the overall play. Nick cannot understand why his relationship with Helen is not retrievable, and how Nadia can accept an abusive relationship. Similarly, both Victor and Tim are afraid to attach to each other because neither of them have ever felt really loved, nor have they known what love is (298). This is the origin of their loose defence mechanisms. At one point, Victor wonders: “There’s got to be more than this. What is there? This is ... animals. What makes us better than animals? Revolution never saved us. Money never saved us. No love. I want more than this” (299). This speech precedes the moment when Tim says he loves him only because he wants to have his last orgasm, as Victor masturbates him while he is dying. The closing scene of Nick’s and Helen’s kiss “offer[s] ... the surviving will to believe in alternatives.” Conversely, Victor and Nadia are left with “the sense that something is missing, only they are not at all able to name what it could be” (Schmitt-Kilb 2005, 203). In a recent interview, Ravenhill states that, in order to overcome their sense of dispossession and 62 Chapter Four loneliness, his characters “have to build their own structures” (Monforte 2007b, 123). This comment reveals the influence of socialist and Marxist theories, specifically Raymond Williams’s notion of “structures of feeling” which is a broad influence in his writing. Here, I am most concerned with Sally Munt’s reading of Williams’s concept as a series of manifestations of social meanings “in bodies and practices—lived” (2008, 16).3 Admittedly, Ravenhill started his playwriting career “to find more rage and sorrow” (2004, 311, my emphasis) and these two seem to become, for him, structures of feeling of capitalism and globalisation. It follows that moments such as the sharing of the meal which closes Shopping and Fucking are one attempt on the part of the characters to build their own structures of feeling, based on sharing and co-habiting space with others. The cathartic transformation set up by Tim’s death, which opens “a locus of liberation and understanding among the characters” (Svich 2003, 91) is another example, as is Victor’s realization that there must be more than “rage” and “sorrow,” or Nadia’s attachment to Victor and Nick and Helen’s kiss at the end of the play. Mother’s Clap Molly House4 is a “fantasia on historical themes which ... asks fresh questions about sexuality and the market place,” the result of a period of research at the Bodleian Library in 1998, a method quite unusual for Ravenhill.5 Gayness is used prominently here to hint at “the wider selfishness and hedonism of the society”; admittedly, this is Ravenhill’s gayest play, “so iconically gay, in a way, in that it’s about gay history, has got gay characters, a camp aesthetic, and had mostly a gay audience—that’s really a very gay play” (2007, 101). Ravenhill’s curious experiment thrust us into eighteenth-century London, where molly houses were the favourable venues of a gay subculture. The fluidity of identity is emphasized by Ravenhill’s production notes on the music played throughout: “productions should feel free to adjust where necessary to accommodate whatever balance of genders they prefer” (111). This fluidity is mirrored by a movement towards extremes of experience which emerges when we focus on the trajectory followed by characters in time— from reclusion to profit (Mrs Tull), and from subculture to affluent metropolitan culture (the Mollies). Mr Tull’s death leads Mrs Tull to a liberating future. The foundations of capitalist economy are laid out in her changing of her husband’s business from tally shop to the molly house of the title. Although she acts “out of economic necessity, and avarice” (Svich 2003, 93), she accomplishes a major and more rewarding movement from a world where, like all dutiful wives, she is “Prayin’ right to the day when their body dries up and Nature passes ‘em by and there in’t no hope left” (39), to one Queering Masculinities 63 where she re-invents herself as a subject-agent. Her agency depends on the profit she may make thanks to the “third sex.” Mrs Tull’s movement is in stark contrast to the one that sees gay people shifting from subculture to metro-culture. The actors playing the mollies are in fact doubled with a group of gay friends in today’s London; these are videoing “a sex-party- orgy-underwear sort of thing” (59) before they go out clubbing. God’s entry speech in Act One is clearly addressed to them:
Enterprise, shall make you human Getting, spending—spark divine This my gift to you poor human Pure celestial, coin divine. (5)
The doubling of characters is an expedient to re-write the past as a continuous present. From this point of view, Ravenhill’s intent climaxes in the closing scene: “The Mollies start to take their clothes off. The music turns into techno. The molly house becomes a rave club as the light fades to nothing” (110). I agree with Svich when she reads the dance as a powerful reiteration of Dionysian bodily pleasure, “the sheer celebration and power of the human” (2003, 95). I would add, however, that the scene makes manifest Ravenhill’s socialist stance in the indirect hint at the possibilities for bodies to interact within a single shared space. In his ‘Introduction’ to Ravenhill’s Plays 1 (2001), Rebellato points out that “everywhere in the work Ravenhill affirms our fundamentally social character, that we are only ourselves when we are with others, forming human, social bonds that are not driven by economic exchange.” This has been evident since Ravenhill’s earliest plays, in which “meanings [are] ... generated ... between bodies in space” (xviii, xix). My reading of Shopping and Fucking and Some Explicit Polaroids reaches similar conclusions. It seems that, in Mother’s Clap Molly House, the bonds Rebellato is referring to find an echo in the notion of “inter-embodiment.” With this notion, Sara Ahmed transforms the individuality inherent in inhabiting a body into a shared activity, whereby “the lived experience of embodiment is always already the social experience of dwelling with other bodies” (2000, 47). I see this as a continuous thread in Ravenhill’s theatre, one that is also strongly confirmed by his avowed fascination for “what happens between human beings in society” (Darley 2008). This progression towards the possibility of retrieving a shared sense of being in the proximity of others, a sharing which also involves the specificity of time and place, becomes a hallmark of Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, Ravenhill’s most daring attempt to date. First presented as the Ravenhill at Breakfast series at the 2007 Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, the play is made 64 Chapter Four up of 16 shorts. Ravenhill’s acute sense of humour is evidenced by the title, inspired by the developmental pattern of a video-game (Ravenhill 2008b). His intent is to create “a picture of the epic ... but through fragments—which seems to me to be the truer form for our times” (Cavendish 2007). I want to open my discussion of the play by presenting what is both an astute metaphor and a challenge launched to theatre critics, scholars, as well as to actors, directors, and theatre companies—that is, the absence of a finite structure on several levels of the play. Ravenhill has said in interview: “We have soundtrack to our lives on a constant shuffle on our iPods. We want the mega and we want the micro, the super-size-me and the sushi—all at the same time.” Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat exemplifies this metaphor and allows us “to ‘shuffle’ the plays into a different order and see what that offers you.” The inspiration for this huge enterprise is a Lyotardian picture of “the age we live in, an age in which we yearn for a grand narrative even as we suspect it is dead” (5). Following Ravenhill’s suggestions, I will focus on some of the little fragments of this epic play. I will try to show the extent to which Ravenhill’s earlier concerns are retrieved in his uncovering of the structures masked behind the ideals that have shaped Western social formations. In Women of Troy, a chorus of women speak about what it means to belong to and to preserve a “good people”:
— We tolerate, we accept, we celebrate – — We celebrate—exactly—we celebrate difference. — It’s all part of being a good people. — It’s what makes us the good people that we are. (10)
By “speaking with” women, Ravenhill here transgresses the gender boundaries and stereotypes which are released in the women’s discourse over the fetishisation of the “Other” as generator of trauma and fear. As each little fragment accumulates to create one, or better, a series of, bigger picture(s), two tropes, at least, seem to demand closer attention. The first of these is the Soldier. A “half-man, half-angel,” in Women of Troy he is the sole survivor of the bomb exploded by a terrorist disguised among the chorus of women. Left alone on stage, he draws his sword and appropriates the voices of all those preserving “the good people”: “Kill the bombers. Slaughter our enemies. In the name of the good people—begin” (16-7). In Crime and Punishment, he is seen begging for a love long gone: “Love me. Love me. Love me. Love me. Be my mum. Be my girl. Be ... just ... I don’t ... you can ... any ... shit ... be...” (92). Standing in front of a foreign woman, he realizes he can neither seduce her, nor can he control the power of language. He thus cuts out her tongue and re-establishes the Queering Masculinities 65 primacy of his (Western, male) self; but he does so only to acquiesce in the sense of loneliness and hatred with which the fragment closes: “The choice is mine. This is democracy. This is what we call democracy. Democracy—I hate you” (94). It is made very clear by Ravenhill, here and elsewhere, that ideals can be misinterpreted and lead to brutal acts of violence. A case in point is the Soldier in Love (But I Won’t do That),who asks Marion: “Allies. Bedfellows. Why are we doing all this unless we fuck?” (99); but she surrenders at the very close of the play, uttering a final “yeah” (106). Each one of the pieces considered so far builds on the certainty that language is severed and communication is broken, often mirrored by abuse on women and/or on women as “others.” This assumption informs the subsequent episodes. The Soldier is caught in a web of recurring figures—the broken- winged Angel is the one charged with a powerful metaphor—developed by associations with the “core values” of “democracy” and “freedom.” The second trope, the child, is introduced in Fear and Misery. It returns in other shorts, but it is its use in The Odyssey that certainly raises relevant points for my analysis. A chorus of Soldiers kicks a Dictator (i.e. Saddam Hussein) to death and humiliates him by urinating all over his body. They are by now weary of war and crave a return to their families. It is at this point that the child becomes a voice inciting the soldiers to keep on with their war in the name of the “right and good”: the safety of the good people. The child as a figure of quintessential innocence embodies the promise of futurity and comes to shape the whole notion of “politics.” This is what Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism,” whereby the whole idea of politics in the West, no matter its attempts towards social change “remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child” (2004, 2-3). I think this is what is at stake in Ravenhill’s flammable message. In Fear and Misery, the child shoots the Soldier with no head who haunts his dreams. We know he is still going to pass as innocent in the eyes of “the good people.” As Lyn Gardner notes in her review, one of Ravenhill’s greatest achievements in the overall epic is mocking the whole idea of dividing people into categories such as “them and us,” “terrorist-attack victims” and angels (2007). In The Birth of a Nation, the last short of the epic, a group of Western artists-facilitators is in front of a dumbstruck crowd in what is clearly a Middle-Eastern country. The artists have been healed of their respective traumas (from alcoholism to sexual abuse/incest), through various forms of engagement with the Arts and they are now going to help re-build a Nation riddled by war with “[t]he healing power of art” (198). A Blind 66 Chapter Four
Woman is taken from the audience. It is made clear that she has had her tongue cut out and has lost her family. What follows is a ludicrously bleakly ironical picture of the deceptive ideals behind the civilizing of a people. This, says Ravenhill, is how democracy is exported:
— Join me in an installation. — It’s beginning. You see—it’s beginning. The darkness is ending, the darkness is ending and light and civilisation and democracy and art are moving forward—once again they are moving forward, once again – The Blind Woman screams, throws pen and brush away. — That’s it, be brave. The Blind Woman screams. — It’s happening, it’s happening, it’s happening. The Blind Woman convulses, her body in pains. — Oh yes dance dance dance. The Blind Woman spasms, the Chorus applaud, lights fade to black. (199)
Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat casts Ravenhill as an astute observer of the ills of contemporary society, as well as an experienced playwright able to take the best tradition of British socialist theatre a big step forward. In my view, the play is most successful when he pins down the vested interests of a supposedly civilized West and deconstructs them by refusing to identify with its “core values.” He makes it possible in his theatre to “constitute a political history that reshapes social meaning, creating recognizable and intelligible alternatives to dominant signification” (Hemmings 2007, 564). This is evidenced by the fragmentation of both play and message, to the extent that “good” and “bad” become mere fictional constructs, the resulting effects of reiterated (dominant) performances, just as those of identity, terrorism and war, freedom and democracy. Ravenhill queers all these concepts by putting into practice a Brechtian idea of epic theatre, an epic not only suggested by the form he gives to his play, but mainly by the staging of subjects that are always emerging as the sum of their actions at the present moment (Brecht 1964). Ravenhill’s works show that, in the theatre, it is possible to find alternative ways to experience sociality. And again, Ahmed’s idea of sociality seems useful here. Accordingly, encounter may involve viewing “being” as a relational activity that requires the participation of others. This process, Ahmed points out, helps us to reach towards “the possibility of an ethics that is not only ‘beyond being,’ but which would also resist thematising others as ‘the other’” (2000, 143-4). This thematising of the “Other” is crucial in Ravenhill’s recent playwriting. Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat is preoccupied with the self-definition of “Westerners Queering Masculinities 67 even as we created a new ‘other,’ the Muslim,” just as he did in Product (2005). Sociality for him is best expressed by the use of the jigsaw puzzle embedded in the play as a metaphor for life in general: “It was as if different members of the audience were holding different pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and they needed to pull together if they were going to piece together a bigger narrative ... it was a pleasing metaphor for life, a metaphor that I’d found accidentally” (2008c). Through the breaking of the fourth wall, Ravenhill builds a splendid work of experimental theatre on the state of socialism today. His is, I would argue, a “queer socialism,” by which I mean one in which different points of entry are utilized for the articulation of a reading of the ideologies and values of the world we live in “here and now.” How we inhabit our social contexts is crucial for this socialism. The points of entry may shift from time to time, as we have seen, from sexuality (in Shopping and Fucking, Some Explicit Polaroids, and Mother’s Clap Molly House) to an i-pod (in Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat). Their aim, and Ravenhill’s accomplishment, is to foresee new communities where forms of being are possible other than those which regulate our present—those produced in the form of commodities or superficial judgements whose inner structures Ravenhill uncovers in a manner which never falls into easy stereotyping. Ravenhill forcibly tells us that we can choose what we want to believe in, what we want to engage with. We choose what to be accountable for, and affected by. The responsibility is all ours.
Queer Irish Plays
In his recent study on the theatre of the Celtic Tiger, Patrick Lonergan analyzes the founding structures of globalisation and argues that the process is also connected to people’s possibility of reaction, adding that “while globalisation may involve many different processes and definitions, all have in common the issue of agency” (2009, 20). Following on from Lonergan’s argument, this agency will be the starting point for my analysis of gay subjectivities. For the playwrights considered, Ireland’s opening to the “global” has undoubtedly helped to bring homosexuality centre stage. In Gerard Stembridge’s The Gay Detective (1996)6 Sergeant Pat investigates the suspect murder of a closeted member of the Parliament. The homophobia of Irish institutions—the Garda, the Irish Parliament—is juxtaposed with Pat’s sexual promiscuity. In performance, this aspect is enhanced by the fact that everything happens at the same time, with no change of setting. The duality hinted at in the play’s narrative threads is stressed through the doubling of characters. 68 Chapter Four
With the suspicious death of a rent-boy, Pat is offered the opportunity to investigate “a group of powerful closeted homosexuals” (Llewellyn- Jones 2002, 115-6), that is, politicians who engage in nightly perversions. The play is interesting for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it adheres to a developing trend in queer Irish drama in which individuals ultimately resort to “feeling.” This resorting to feeling, I want to argue, is also a perspective from which to look at the contested notion of a future. But The Gay Detective also poses the category of trauma—and in particular of a collective trauma like Aids—as inherent in Irish new dissident stories. Geraldine Moane writes that, as category, trauma is symptomatic of Irish history, “marked by the repeated occurrence of trauma, dispossession, loss and defeat, whether their causes are seen as colonisation, natural disaster, capitalist expansion or other factors” (2002, 113). In this section, I will address key issues such as homosexuality lived both as the trauma of Aids and of coming-back (home). Drawing from queer gender theories and trauma studies, I will try to show how the playwrights’ intent is to stage bodies that no longer bear the stigma of (heterosexist) oppression and colonization, as well as to shift audience attention from the national to the individual, even when “Irishness” is called into question. The visibility acquired by queer subjects on the Irish stage has gone hand in hand with the globalising process affecting the economy and society at large since the early 1990s. This poses some obvious problems still under evaluation by theatre scholars, namely the risk that a work (in this case, a play) be exploited to satisfy the requirements of the market, or more clearly, subject to commodification (Walsh 2008, 59). This point has been raised by studies on queer in Ireland, privileging the question of Irishness from a postcolonial theoretical perspective. In an Irish, as well as in other postcolonial contexts, queer makes of cultural identity something cogent, yet to be laid bare, something to be retained only prior to extensive, often traumatic negotiation. David Cregan has illuminatingly summed it up as the mandate of queer that there is and must be a paradigmatic uncertainty in that “no sides are taken as absolute in identity politics in order to make reductive assumptions transparent” (2010, 48). I posit the figure of the Hibernoqueer, adapted from a character in Loughlin Deegan’s play, as a radical queer subject who plays with the performativity of the name as linguistic sign (Butler 1993). Located in an imagined space of representation not confined within the boundaries of nation, this subject claims a non-coercive identity that does not however fully reject Ireland. He enlarges it by turning the notion of cultural identity into intelligible feelings for a transnational collectivity, and finally hints at a language beyond politics and identitarianism. Queering Masculinities 69
In his theatrical début, The Stomping Ground (1997)7 Deegan follows a group of college friends from Limerick gathered there to replay the craic they had enjoyed on the same weekend a year previously, interspersing it with a coming-out story as well as typically Irish motifs and concerns. Deegan astutely re-creates the language of youth and blurs theatrical boundaries and realist conventions through the centrality of coming-out. Taking inspiration from Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come (1964), Deegan focuses on queer-bashed victim Kev, a stage presence not inhabiting the present of the action.8 Yet, his presence on stage materializes the tension between visibility and invisibility implicit in the coming-out process.9 His traumatic coming-out is only partially successful. We are left to wonder about his life, especially as far as his relationship with Des is concerned. Des, in turn, is forced out of the group, and this is something he has to undergo in order to be really out of the closet one day. By telling partially successful coming-out stories, The Stomping Ground establishes the trauma of coming-out as a reparative experience, which however discloses no easy solution. It also hints at the association of coming out of the closet with leaving Ireland, or of how migration may lead towards entering another type of closet. These issues are taken forward in the next two plays examined here, Geraldine Aron’s The Stanley Parkers (1990)10 and Deegan’s The Queen and Peacock (2000). Aron’s is one of the first Irish plays on Aids. The serene life of a middle-aged gay couple, Stanley Parker and his Greek lover Dimitri “Dimwit” Papavasilopoulous is haunted by the spectre of Stanley’s proximate death. But this is just the bleakest outcome of a seemingly more consistent struggle against denial and shaming. Rhyming speech is used to convey meaning and feeling—to counteract the grief of impending loss. In order to render this strategy effective, Aron has the two characters interpellating the audience through direct address. As Stanley and Dimitri give an account of themselves and detail their life together—including Stanley’s betrayals—, they are also re-working the Irish tradition of story- telling to let people face, as Aron points out, “something different, something human” (Woodworth 1990) and to effect social change. Fear is thus transformed into humour, as shown by the campness of Dimitri’s jokes. In one such joke, he recounts a man’s bewildering relief when his doctor informs him he has Aids, whereas for a moment he feared it was age he was suffering from. Despite its troubling subject matter, Aron’s play has been revived several times in Ireland.11 It is however interesting to note the scarce mention of Aids in the reviews. The leading Irish Times is a case in point. For Paddy Woodworth, Stanley and Dimitri are just a couple “who have to 70 Chapter Four confront a terminal crisis in their life” (1990). Similarly, a short notice about the revival at the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork refers to a grief concerning “two men who have lived together for 17 years” (1995). Mary Leland is the only one who speaks frankly of “an unusual story of an established homosexual pairing stricken by AIDS,” (1991) whereas David Nowlan dismisses any direct hint at it by referring to an unnamed illness as one of the “after-effects” of Stanley’s “affairs”—that is, Stanley gets what he deserves (1990). To return to the play, Aron seems to prevent any such easy judgement on the issues it raises by following the couple all through their final moment together, when Stanley stares at Dimitri and thanks him. Dimitri then gets up from the bed and proceeds to close the play:
The music grows faster and Dimitri begins to turn on the spot, dancing faster and faster, his head thrown back, his arms high, his hands outstretched / Slow fade to Black-out. (18)
Aron wants to convince us that assumptions over Stanley’s illness barely matter. And, by using a defined identity (a name and a surname), she imposes the re-surfacing of stories which would otherwise remain untold. Here, the act of naming calls into question the lived experience of anyone’s death from Aids. Also, the reiteration of Stanley’s and Dimitri’s story through subsequent performances of the play allows audiences to engage time and again in the histories shared by a group of people whose identity is shaped by the invocation of the name “Stanley Parker.” As suggested by the title of the play, we can all be “Stanley Parkers.” The title of Deegans’ The Queen and Peacock12 alludes to a pub in Brixton where a group of Irish migrants have to come to terms with their different traumatic experiences related to homosexuality. The barman, Bob, divides his time between being at the bar and enjoying abusive sexual relationships with “people in trouble.” Paul had to refuse to inherit his father’s pub and left Donegal; he could never come out to his parents. Willie has just arrived in London; he is nineteen and out to his parents. Mark’s speech on gay Irish men in London is worth quoting, because it contests traditional assumptions on the exile of Irishmen in history:
The gay Irish. Hibernoqueer! A particular breed of immigrant ... Hibernoqueer is a different class of asylum seeker altogether / … / They’re in hiding Mavis, aren’t they? From their families and their friends and from the prying eye of our good friend Holy Catholic Ireland. (29)
As the play opens, we are given to assume the focus is on Mark/Gertrude Queering Masculinities 71 and his new “toy boy” (25), Willie. Mark, that is, Gertrude in drag clothes, whose trauma is possibly the most painful, has reshaped his past through the self-invention of a British identity and the performance enacted by his “loud street drag” (18) and camp behaviour, itself a reference to Micheál Mac Liammóir’s (re-)invented self. Mark was forced to leave Ireland when his father turned him out after the police spotted him prostituting for older men. In England, he has been saved by one of his many Irish customers, Ciarán, now Paul’s boyfriend. The Hibernoqueer, I would argue, is not merely an individual who queers Hibernia, as the name may quite obviously suggest. As a figure of resistance endowed with an agency in global Ireland, the Hibernoqueer queers the fantasmatic idea of a name and what it recalls, as shown by the metaphorical resonance of Stanley Parker’s and Gertrude’s constructed selves. As Ireland is caught between resistance to and avowal of globalisation, the Hibernoqueer forges a language of belonging when everywhere around him there is a language to which he does not belong, one charged with oppression and hysteria. In his discussion of some plays by Frank McGuinness, Brendan Behan, and Brian Friel, Todd Barry (2009) calls the queer wanderer an individual who queers national spaces and thus re-imagines Ireland itself. Similarly, the Hibernoqueer queers history and geography; but he takes up trauma as necessary condition for his movement out of and back into, the closet as well as Ireland. More than the differences between Irish gay men in London and gay Londoners addressed by Paul in the first part of the play, The Queen and Peacock posits interesting questions over where is home for people whose existence is centred around trauma. Ciarán was home for Paul, and a substitute parent for Mark/Gertrude. His death from Aids will facilitate Paul’s return to Ireland, but leaves Mark “homeless” and lonely, a peacock without his Queen. At one point, the characters have a brutal quarrel as a result of the surfacing of their personal histories of trauma. It emerges that Willie embodies the possibility of a future of hope and happiness. This is also emphasized by the naivety with which he approaches the issue of Aids, as when he remarks, “I didn’t think people died of that anymore” (51, my emphasis). The illness is never mentioned. However, the impression is given that a touch of naivety is not necessarily indicative of lack of consideration and responsibility, and this is demonstrated by Willie towards the very end of the play. I want now to draw from Anne Cvetkovich’s discussion on how trauma is used historically to indicate events affecting the nation as a whole, thereby sustaining the suppression of private trauma histories (2003, 16). She proposes a reconsideration of trauma as daily experience as opposed 72 Chapter Four to isolated event, in an attempt to bring to light the hidden histories of “what counts as trauma history and whose feelings matter in the nationalist public sphere” (2003, 33, 37). Cvetkovich’s observations pose illuminating questions over Deegan’s treatment of trauma, especially with respect to Willie’s words to Paul: “The war is over Paul. And the sooner yous in here realise it the better” (67). A cathartic healer (possibly, something he succeeds in by reason of his innocent naivety), Willie’s speech leads Paul to gather his strength and call his mother to tell her he is gay. Coming-out, for him, may then be paralleled to his return to a newly-found home. The play closes on Willie’s departure from the pub – a departure charged with metaphor – as Bob, Paul and Mark/Gertie are left to their own devices in the pub which is soon going to be demolished. Mark/Gertrude starts to tell the story of a new version of his self, disguised under the name of Fergal. The atmosphere is never relaxing in the play. And for Gertie, the future seems to disclose only loneliness: “She’s on her own now. It’s too late for... Much too late. This is her home now” (70). In his/her case, associations can be made between “trauma not only with departure and exile but with the difficulty of return” (Cvetkovich 2003, 125), what I have termed “the trauma of coming-back” at the beginning of this section. Furthermore, given Gertrude’s transnational movement (Ireland to England) and the complications due to his adolescence, coming-out is for him/her always painful, always traumatic, as well associated with a (forced) coming to terms with national identity. It is for this reason that he/she has to re-shape his/her new identity as an Irishman (Fergus) in a way that causes distress and pain to everyone else in the pub (Bob, Paul and the dismissed Willie). However, if there is a possibility for a hopeful future for him/her, too, this resides in his/her refusal of “easy solutions that take the form of nationalism, gay/lesbian separatism, or a single home.” In order to be successful, Mark/Gertie’s new self has to plunge into rather than reject trauma (Cvetkovich 2003, 131). And, by acting in drag, Mark/Gertrude builds a self-perpetuating site of resistance to an everyday experiencing of trauma, and at the same time leaves open the possibility that he is instead entering a new closet. Fintan Walsh writes about a (not text-based) “tradition” of queer performance in Ireland taking its distance from both mainstream and alternative theatre sectors. This tradition, he goes on, seems to work on two levels, favouring the expression of queer voices on one hand and dismantling rigid notions of both national identity and performance (2008, 57-8).13 From Walsh’s point of view, the plays considered may be less experimental, in that they remain attached to a loosely more “conventional” text-based form of theatre. However, I would suggest that they can lead to the same conclusions as the new tradition Queering Masculinities 73 outlined by Walsh, mainly through how they stand in a critical position as regards national imagery. They move tangentially beside national identity; but it is the issue of sexuality that is prominent, and closely linked to traumatic experiences that affect individuals per se. These plays disclose the possibility for the queer subject, as Walsh states, “to access its political jouissance through continually destabilizing the grounding powers associated with acceding to national fantasy, form and even futurity itself” (2008, 70). As Hibernoqueers, Stanley Parker and Mark/Gertrude share a destiny of liberation in the end—death, for the former, and the demolition of the pub for the latter. But in doing so, they resort to the self and to feeling. They enter a threshold no longer considered to be for them oppressive, or encapsulating, but rather full of promise, even though for Stanley this promise is embedded in the hope to be remembered every time his name is invoked. The Stanley Parkers and The Queen and Peacock are two markedly Irish plays. But in their presentation of lived experience and their hinting at feelings collectively shared, they exceed confinement within the nation and, more importantly, demand that we ask what subjectivity is at stake in discourses on Irishness.
Wilde stories: Britain and Ireland
Oscar Wilde’s cultural interventions, in Britain and Ireland, are manifold and stem from more or less overt references in the works of a number of twentieth-century playwrights to the overall influence of Wilde’s aesthetic on the shaping of dissident cultures (Dollimore 1991). However, they have often proved to be easily manipulable, perhaps mostly in terms of the depiction of (self-) celebratory representations of homosexuality. My analysis will move beyond readings of Wilde as “imaginative influence and as subject” in contemporary drama (Walshe 1999, 64) and focus, instead, on three “unorthodox” renderings of the person and of his works: Ravenhill’s Handbag (1998), Thomas Kilroy’s The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde (1997) and Neil Bartlett’s In Extremis (2000). Jonathan Dollimore has noted that Wilde lived “in terms of the discrepancy between his ‘public’ and ‘private’ selves, and took pleasure ... from having a sexual identity elsewhere at the same time as being socially ‘here’” (1991, 310).14 I will show how the three playwrights utilize fundamentally postmodern rewriting techniques and open Wilde’s palimpsest to discourses relevant for contemporary Western culture. The juxtaposition here/elsewhere outlined by Dollimore informs Ravenhill’s Handbag.15 Dramaturgically, the play anticipates the breaking 74 Chapter Four of linear structure and of realism which is a recurrent feature of his writing, as in the case of his “gay fantasia,” Mother Clap’s Molly House. Its alternation of scenes from Victorian and contemporary England reminds also of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, a playwright who has always influenced Ravenhill. What would have happened if Mrs Prism, in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) had left the baby in the handbag and the novel in the pram on purpose? “I just started from that image,” says Ravenhill, “and began to write the play spinning off that one picture” (Monforte 2007b, 98). The result is a bleakly ironical portrait of a nineteenth-century handbag disclosing a future where the child by now figures “the telos of the social other and [has] come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust” (Edelman 2004, 11). Handbag offers two versions of the same world “where parents and guardians were/are more concerned with their upwardly mobile social lives, and seeking their own personal gratification” (Svich 2003, 88). In a London at the close of the millennium, two couples, one gay, one lesbian, arrange for artificial insemination to take place. Mauretta and Tom, involved in the birth, are unaware that their partners, Suzanne and David, are cheating on them out of fear, it seems, of being inept parents: David’s pager beeps to announce the baby’s birth while a rent-boy, Phil, is giving him a blow-job; Suzanne cannot bear to keep away from her new assistant and lover, Lorraine, and employs her as the child’s nanny. In the mind of director Nick Philippou, “[t]he play became about means of parenting, the need to be looked after, and the need to turn the most inappropriate people into parents and the strange needs that the most inappropriate people have to become parents” (Svich 2003, 86-7, my emphasis). The Victorian child is the by-product of an internalized patriarchal and middle-class morality. Here, Constance is an interesting character; she is distressed for the confinement she has to undergo in order to become an “appropriate” mother:
Moncrieff You must stay in your room. Constance Confinement is unbearable. I am so lonely. Moncrieff That is your burden. (166)
While holding the baby, Constance (who is doubled with Suzanne in the present) says at one point: “Nothing. I feel nothing” (202). This reinforces the play’s insistence on the idea of identities “largely determined by society ... [by the] ... roles as fathers, mothers, husbands, or wives” (Müller-Muth 2002, 224). Ravenhill chooses to split the play into two different contexts, each one reflecting a particular culture and its own set of values. The message he clearly conveys is that, in this respect, the two Queering Masculinities 75 cultures barely differ at all. Again, this also brings us back to Edelman’s idea of reproductive futurism’s compulsion, whereby the promise, or the fantasy of the promise, of futurity embodied by the child structures our notion of politics, as well as the meaning of the “social” and of its subjects. Sarah-Jane Dickenson argues that the child in Handbag epitomises “the fear of the queer” and is tied to the recurring theme of patronage in Ravenhill’s plays (2006, 130). Her comment is revealing, but I would extend it to include a much more provocative critique over the fantasy of futurism which the child as ideal represents. For, as Edelman points out, the ideal citizen which the Child represents is sanctified as embodiment of the future “always at the cost of limiting the rights ‘real’ citizens are allowed.” It is the very survival of the social order that is at stake in the figure of the Child, and with it “national freedom more highly valued than the actuality of freedom itself, which might, after all, put at risk the Child to whom such a figure falls due” (2004, 11). A case in point is scene fourteen, in which Prism and Cardew arrange for the swapping of the cradle with the handbag. Lorraine and Phil have kidnapped the baby and set up their own family of sorts. But we also know Phil has “sold” his daughter to his pusher and child abuser. In a frenzied attempt to wake the child, Phil starts crushing cigarette butts all over its body and eyes:
Phil I did a bad thing. I ... Lorraine goes to bin-bag, picks it up. Cardew My own one. Lorraine cradles the bin-bag. Cardew cradles the baby. Phil howls. (226)
Few playwrights are able to use a truly disturbing scene to communicate a politically charged message, as Ravenhill does here; a message whose purpose is stressed by the fast-paced juxtaposition between (characters from the) past and present of the whole scene. Jack Worthing’s future is doomed from the start since he is being entrusted to Cardew, whom Ravenhill stages as a typical paedophile. The closure of the play brings us to a present, and a future of moral prejudice and corruptness. Here, the child “terroristically holds us all in check and determines that political discourse conforms to the logic of narrative wherein history unfolds as the future envisioned for a Child who must never grow up” (Edelman 2004, 21). Having come to this realisation, Phil displaces his internalized hatred, and howls (226). Lorraine and Phil are social outcasts, that is, subjects cast out of the social conceived of in reproductive terms. As such, they cannot partake of the inclusiveness of the family, the one category entitled to a future, and to the compulsion to 76 Chapter Four futurity which activates “the Child” as a protection against living the present; which is the way, in the end, the two couples (Mauretta and Susan; Tom and David) are broken. Kilroy’s The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde16 contravenes the “‘nationalizing’ of Wilde” (Walshe 2005: 38) that has dominated his representations in Irish culture throughout the twentieth-century. Éibhear Walshe uses this expression to address a series of works where Wilde is portrayed “as a disruptive figure of anti-colonial resistance ... the Irish rebel” at the expense of more consistent treatments of his sexuality (2005, 40-3). This is not the case with Kilroy’s play, in which the trauma of Wilde’s public disclosure of homosexuality and his relationship with Alfred Douglas overlap with the “secret” trauma suffered by Wilde’s wife, Constance, a victim of child abuse (66). Kilroy makes extensive use of extra-textual elements and agit-prop style. A group of Attendant Puppeteers appear every now and then wearing “white, faceless masks, bowler hats, Victorian jackets and pants, white gloves, clappers” (7). They highlight the constraints of Victorian virtues and morals. But they also foreground Wilde’s public laying bare and his subsequent imprisonment at the end of the play. It is made clear, throughout the play, that gender is a regulatory mechanism, made up of actions that can be performed as they can be altered in the course of their citation. For as Wilde himself says at one point, “[n]othing matters but the immediate, thrilling present moment. That is what is meant by salvation” (24, my emphasis). Assumptions over a true gender are dismantled by the performance of gender identity enacted within the confines of a white disk placed on stage, a “performance space” (11) connecting the events recorded in the play with its contemporary audience. The puppets play a crucial role in the “working through” of Constance’s abuse (her “secret fall,”) in that they bring her “face to face with her own masked non-existence” as a subject-agent, though her agency is deliberately made problematic. One of Kilroy’s achievements lies in his use of the stage “as a place to reflect upon masks—visible masks or invisible ones, masks perceptible as institutions or masks hidden behind normality” (Dubost 2007, 69-70). And this is true for the gender- as-social-construction theme outlined above as it is for Constance’s rendering. The puppets enter the stage and mime a stylized representation of the violence played on Constance’s body in a manner which reminds us of 1970s feminist agit-prop performances. In her study on hysteria, trauma, and melancholia in contemporary British theatre, Christina Wald writes that “trauma is that which cannot be narrated; as a sudden and chance Queering Masculinities 77 event, it breaks narrative patterns of making sense of one’s past and instead returns in forms that are distinct from narrative memory.” I think the puppets’ re-enactment of Constance’s trauma combines what Wald defines the “acting out” and “working through” of traumatic experience, whereby trauma emerges “as a repetition but for the first time ... paradoxically, the event which is repeated has never actually taken place for the subject. The subject repeats without being aware of repetition” (2007, 96, 98). It is interesting to note here that Constance’s apparent misrepresentation is the reason why the London production at the Barbican (2000) was, perhaps inadvertently, flawed for the critics. The Guardian described Constance as a stereotyped woman-victim defined only in terms of her relationships with the men of her life, namely, her father and, above all, Wilde: “[w]hat is being celebrated is not the woman, but the idea of constancy: the woman who stands by her man even when it turns out that he’s sodomising little boys and spending all her money.” I would argue, instead, that the opposite seems to be the case. According to Walshe, Constance is “strong, angry, no longer the passive, victimised wife but a woman who has informed herself as to Wilde’s real sexual nature and so not afraid to name it” (1999, 76). Here, Kilroy seems to draw from late eighteenth-century psychoanalytic treatments of child abuse which viewed the possibility that adult hysteria results from repressed memories of sexual child abuse. Such, at least, was what Freud postulated in his “seduction theory.” Recent studies on trauma theory have also exposed, however, sexual abuse as possible generator of adult homosexuality and/or lesbianism (Svich 2003), a question left, I would add deliberately, unanswered by the play. Furthermore, the fact that The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde does not go any further than naming Constance’s abuse may perhaps reflect the decrease in interest on the subject which followed the time when the events take place. For, as Wald records in her study, “the professional and public interest in the phenomenon declined in the first half of the twentieth century,” and this phenomenon was partly the effect of having abandoning the seduction theory (2007, 99). Both Constance and Wilde must, in the end, build their own “defense mechanisms” (Dubost 2007, 75); but in Constance’s case, this defense is made even harder by the lack of concern over her trauma which was felt in late eighteenth-century England. In Bartlett’s In Extremis,17 “very little” does not correspond to factual truth (9). Stage props are reduced to a minimum: two chairs facing each other, Wilde’s written request to the palmist, and a bowl of white lilies. Bartlett’s point of departure is a meeting between Wilde (W) and a palmist, Mrs Robinson (R) on the night before his trials took place. 78 Chapter Four
Through R’s point of view, W emerges as a man “infectious ... good at nerves ... a large man” (18-9), a “Pierrot who knows not how to cry” (48). The art of lying, or lying as art, is at the core of Bartlett’s (re-)telling of the event; he makes clear that “Wilde loved charlatans, if a charlatan is someone who makes lying not only a profession, but an art. His heroes and heroines are in this sense all liars; they make truth a performance” (8, my emphasis). Just like in his Who Was That Man? (1989), Bartlett uses the notion of “forging” an identity, of shaping a new self which acquires meaning only by virtue of its self-conscious construction as artifice, or fake, in this sense a quintessential liar. This is equally true for both characters, as shown by their attitudes over W’s trials, especially R who is pretending to foresee that nothing bad will happen. Despite little action in it, the play purports to insert Wilde in a broader context of performing a “factual” lie. Furthermore, it posits that, by reason of its very nature, a lie requires another lie in response—hence, R’s lies to W: “What I wanted to say was: I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. / ... / But what I said was—... I see a triumph. A very great triumph” (49-50). Some reviews in London seem to have failed to grasp Bartlett’s message; in particular, it was the idea that “Wilde’s undoing might have been his making, at least from posterity’s perspective” which caused much trouble, and was thus entirely dismissed (Taylor 2000). In spite of his friends’ advice to leave England, Wilde decides to remain where he is, even though he is well aware of the future awaiting him. It seems that, in a way, Wilde here “instantiates ... a death drive opposed to the ego and the world of desire ... the will-to-enjoyment perversely obedient to the super ego’s insatiable and masochistic demands” (Edelman 2004, 46). In his works, Bartlett is always concerned with the role of the homosexual, and of the homosexual artist, in society; in his re-workings of Wilde, he shows “the way in which the postmodernist view reading is inevitably self-reflexive and, therefore, self- revealing” (Cave 1997, 240, 242).18 Wilde’s depiction in In Extremis bears many characteristic traits of the figure of the synthomosexual, by whom Edelman intends someone who resists the compulsion towards futurism in favour of access to a form of repetitive enjoyment, thus repudiating the social. The synthomosexual is “neither martyr nor proponent of martyrdom for the sake of a cause.” What is more, in abandoning all causes, he also gives up “all social action, all responsibility for a better tomorrow or for the perfection of social forms.” The only act he performs is “the act of repudiating the social, of stepping, or trying to step ... beyond compulsory compassion, beyond the future and the snare of images keeping us always in its thrall” (2004, 101). Wilde’s acceptance of his conviction exemplifies the way he resists “in extremis, the lure of any redemptive humanization” Queering Masculinities 79
(Edelman 2004, 100, my emphasis) where humanization may refer to the fact that he rejects compassion and embraces the death drive, i.e. his own imprisonment and solitary confinement. Each of the three plays under examination here puts its emphasis on aspects tangent to Wilde’s persona (The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde, In Extremis) or appropriates his works to tell a different story altogether (Handbag). From divergent perspectives, and following radically separate routes, the texts make evident use of techniques of postmodern rewriting. Caught as this is between telling and re-telling, and techniques of parody, pastiche, adaptation, transvestism, and imitation,19 the purpose of such a process is, in this case, to interrogate the “conventional” Wildean Canon.
Notes
1 Ravenhill 2001, 1-91; subsequent references are in brackets. 2 Ravenhill 2001, 227-314; subsequent references are in brackets. 3 Williams associates feeling with ideology, defined as “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt.” Structures reflect “specific affective elements of consciousness and relationships.” A structure of feeling indicates “social experiences in solution, as distinct from other semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available” (1977, 132-4). 4 Ravenhill 2008a, 1-152; subsequent references are in brackets. 5 See Ravenhill’s ‘Introduction’ to Plays 2. 6 Stembridge 1996; subsequent references are in brackets. 7 Deegan 1997; subsequent references are in brackets. 8 In Philadelphia, Here I Come, Gar’s split self in performance (a “Private” and a “Public” version of himself) shows individual acts to be embedded in collective experience, and points to the interrelation between individual behaviour and social behaviour. 9 Of coming out, Butler has written that “the preposition ‘out’ always supports this double sense of invisibility (to put out) and visibility (to bring out), often exceeding even this simple tension in the confused entanglements generated by a host of other active associations” (1991, 4). 10 Aron [1990] 1995; subsequent references are in brackets. 11 The world premiere in Galway celebrated Druid Theatre Company’s fifteenth birthday at the Galway’s Arts Festival. Revivals include productions at the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork (1993 and 1995), at the Corks Arts Theatre (1991) and at the 2007 Cork Gay Pride; recently, at the Garage Theatre, Monaghan in March 2009. 12 Deegan [2000] 2010; subsequent references are in brackets. 13 In his essay, Walsh is writing of a performance by Shirley Temple Bar at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. 14 For criticism about Wilde’s influence on twentieth-century cultural representations, see also Bartlett (1989); Cave (1997); Walshe (1999), (2005), and (2009); Bristow 80 Chapter Four
(2009). 15 Ravenhill 2001, 141-226; subsequent references are in brackets. 16 Kilroy [1997] 2001; subsequent references are in brackets. 17 Bartlett 2000; subsequent references are in brackets. 18 Here, Richard Allen Cave is referring to Bartlett’s adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray at the Lyric Hammersmith in London (1994), but I would suggest that the same can be said for In Extremis. See also Bartlett’s introduction to his A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep (Part Three), in Wilcox (1990). 19 For a general overview on postmodern rewriting techniques, see De Zordo and Fantaccini (2002). CHAPTER FIVE
QUEERING FEMININITIES
In the archives of black lesbian feeling: Jackie Kay’s Chiaroscuro and Mojisola Adebayo’s Moj of the Antarctic
Cultural identity and lesbian sexuality are the two parameters for rewriting history from a black women’s perspective in Kay’s Chiaroscuro (1986) and Adebayo’s Moj of the Antarctic (2006). My reading relies on Anne Cvetkovich’s notion of “archive of feelings,” where each text functions as a treasury of emotions that are neglected by dominant (i.e. official) archival practices. This concept, I will argue, is crucial for both plays considered here. I will show how, in performance, these texts re- locate lesbian experience within the black diaspora in Britain. They establish continuity between past and present, as well as calling for new inhabitable futures which involve black identity and lesbian desire. Kay’s Chiaroscuro1 moves in two interrelated territories, exposing the problems of affirming a black (women’s) identity and a lesbian sexuality at the same time. Heidi Safia Mirza considers blackness “a state of ‘becoming’ (racialized),” and this process of becoming is a response to historical assumptions which viewed the black woman as “an object, not the subject of her story” (1997, 3, 6). Black women activists in 1980s Britain worked on historical research and promoted narratives of migration. They went beyond the problems of naming themselves in opposition to the dominant, male culture, and thus created a series of counter-narratives also in opposition to predominantly white feminism. As Mirza goes on to say, “[w]hat our struggles demonstrate is that you can have difference (polivocality) within a conscious construction of sameness (i.e. black feminism)” (1997, 21). The coming-out story in Chiaroscuro purports to achieve the pluralistic awareness of identity politics and difference referred to by Mirza. Kay blends several ingredients which are not evident in (Western) dualistic thinking. This issue is raised by Trinh T. Minh-Ha when she calls 82 Chapter Five for a construction of identity as id-entities, or “multiple presences” instead of “absolute presence” (1989, 90, 94)—that is, the norm underlying the process of identity formation in Western thought. Kay’s play opens with a group of black women who are on stage throughout the action. Of the four of them, Aisha (a lesbian) is the one who tries to have a hold on the situation. She does not, however, exercise authoritative control over the others; as I will show, she is more of a catalyst for the coming-out narrative and for the economy of the play as a whole. Her contribution is especially revealing for Yomi, who fails to accept lesbianism as part of black women’s identities. Beth (mixed-race) is dogged by the history of trauma inherent in her name; she was named after an ancestor taken to America as a slave, sexually abused and deprived of all her children. Beth’s relationship with Opal—who was teased as a schoolgirl for her skin colour—distresses Yomi, who is straight, divorced, and with a small daughter. In the course of the play, she is given an opportunity to disengage from the heterosexism that she has internalized in the same way as the values of colonialism she conveys through her use of language (Griffin 2003, 177-8). Aisha, Beth, and Opal reclaim a name for their identities as blacks and lesbians. Beth, for instance, does not think black lesbians need a name, and sees it as “something that is passed down, inherited and then redefined, showing that identity is open to reconstruction and change” (Goddard 2007, 109). The fact that this acquisition requires “the black solo” searching for a name “in the rain” (72) seems to refer to Minh-Ha’s idea of identity as multiple presences, as the cohabiting of diverse women’s perspectives. The changes of stage set take place during the performance with the help of a wooden chest: “[it] is an important symbol; it functions as the past and also as the chest of the human body. In order to breathe, these four women have to get things ‘off their chest.’ Everything that is important to them is contained in the chest.” The chest functions as a record of feelings, often characterised by trauma. It gives the potential to re-write history, a possibility considered by Kay herself when she indicates that “the four women had all met already ... the play would be an elaborate déjà vu” ([1986] 1987, 82). The notion of identity as citation is important in Chiaroscuro, for by reiterating instances of subject formation, official history is relegated to the background and replaced by an alternative history-in-the-making. So, for instance, when Beth and Opal are dancing together affectionately, Aisha cannot help contemplating them: “I envy her [Opal] / the way she’s making history” (78). Aisha, Beth, Opal and Yomi perform their own histories anew as if time were a continuous present (Griffin 2003, 183). The “here and now” of the present is the only thing Queering Femininities 83 that really matters to Beth in her relationship with Opal: “Do you see me heading for the door? / But I can’t promise any forever either. / I don’t believe in always. / Always is a lie like till death do us part” (67). Yomi’s monologue is a further indication of the importance of re-shaping the past:
I want to find it all now know our names know the others in history so many women have been lost at sea so many of our stories have been swept away. (79)
Her words point to an archive of feelings, in the sense of a series of memories, subjects, and stories which fall outside the boundaries of official, archived materials. According to Meenakshi Ponnuswami, Chiaroscuro is a play which builds on the assumption that “histories are necessarily incomplete and incorrect, that traditions are always invented, and that black subjectivity has always evolved in conflict with the master- narratives of history” (2000, 225). The chest interests me, then, because it opens up an altogether different type of archive, that contains histories of oppression along racial as well as sexual lines embedded in the four women’s stories, as well as in their names. These stories are the non- physical items of the archive, in that they are too “personal” and “ephemeral” to be recorded in contrast with Yomi’s photograph album which belongs to the material, we could say conventional, archive (Cvetkovich 2003, 230). Given my reading of the play as a “repository of feelings,” as Cvetkovich labels it, the avowed influence of Ntozake Shange’s genre of the choreopoem2 is another instance through which Kay opens up the immensurable archive of an emotional black experience. Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1975) is first recalled by the “stylised rather than fashionable” dress-code of the four women, even though some characteristic features are accorded each woman “to mark out their individuality and difference from each other” (Goddard 2007, 111). The references continue in the women’s arrangement in a circle, retained as a structure throughout, and from which each one of them speaks in turn, addressing the audience. Every woman is thus “in flux, reassessing her identity, travelling back into memory and forward into possibility ... The more these four characters perform this play the closer they get to who they are” (Kay [1986] 1987, 82). By relating to one another as a group with a shared history while also trying to affirm their own selves, Aisha, Beth, Opal and Yomi embody the belief that “[t]he world’s earliest archives or libraries were the memories of women ... Every woman partakes in the chain of guardianship and of 84 Chapter Five transmission” (Minh-Ha 1989, 121). The choreopoem draws from the tradition of black oral story-telling, whereby a story is handed down through generations of women who used to sit in a circle just like the four women here do. In Chiaroscuro, Kay uses the choreopoem in order to develop a circular narrative which confirms its black roots. By the end of the play, the problems caused by Beth’s and Opal’s coming-out to Yomi are resolved. The change that has taken place has evolved, I think, not in terms of a coming-out, but by means of a coming-to, as Sara Ahmed writes, “of arriving near other bodies, as a contact that makes a story and opens up other ways of facing the world” (2006, 105). In particular, it is Yomi who is given a chance to face the world in a different way. Kay’s play shows that a necessary step towards this broadening of vision is interrogating the archives of black feelings. 3 The issue of recording history occupies a prominent position in black theatres. Deirdre Osborne argues that black playwriting is perennially haunted by the spectres of “invisibility and archival neglect” (2008, 11). At the level of visibility in theatre sectors, the leading black playwright and director Yvonne Brewster points out that “a good vibe in the theatre bar or café, together with positive word of mouth has always been a more essential element in the success of black work” (2006, 394). In the next play, a female storyteller is the key figure whose value is asserted in opposition to the issues of oppression and neglect related to the history of the “others” of blackness. For Moj of the Antarctic,4 Adebayo carried out extensive research on black cultures and histories (142). She turns a “real-life odyssey into a theatrical odyssey” by altering its context (and content). Shange’s choreopoem and neglected black (lesbian) histories are major influences on her work (Osborne 2009, 9). Adebayo adapts the story of the nineteenth-century African-American slave, Ellen Craft, who cross- dressed as a white man to escape slavery together with her husband, disguised as a servant. Craft’s story is invested with an almost endless series of inter- and meta-textual references to American and British literature, from Herman Melville to William Shakespeare, Samuel Coleridge and the diaries and journals of Ernest Shackleton, to name but a few. In scene five (‘The Plan’), Moj picks up Melville’s Moby Dick from her father’s “lie-brary” (158) and starts fantasizing. The term “lie-brary” builds on the motif of how truth and falsehood influence the notion of history. The motif is stressed further by the fact that Adebayo places the whale hunting in the novel within the context of a lesbian traveller’s journey to Antarctica. Global warming and the consequences of ice- melting for the African continent form the sub-textual message conveyed Queering Femininities 85 by the “Ancient” who introduces the piece:
Once, We were Gondwana, Africa and Antarctica Antarctica and Africa One content Continent ... The future, Antarctica melts, Africa sinks. We all disappear. One million Two million Three million more! From ice to sea to land to shore! (151-2)
“The Ancient” is “a West-African female griot (storyteller, historian, singer, mystic), [who] enacts a ritual: she sings, circles the space in a shuffle, speaks in tongues and sprinkles libation” (151). Her words offer us a point of entry into Moj’s affective journey which bears similarities with entering an archive. A review in London’s Time Out notes that Adebayo “queers recorded history” (McGinn 2007). Her heroine is indeed the first black woman to set foot in Antarctica; she is thus the subject of another “(re-)making of history” from a lesbian perspective, something I have also shown for Kay’s Chiaroscuro. The first half of the play is set in Moj’s father/master’s home in America. When he finds out that Moj has been writing poems to May (a woman version of Craft’s husband), he goes into a fury. In scene four (‘The Punishment’), it is, however, May who is whipped blind on the grounds that, as Adebayo points out, “Moj has his blood and she’s brown and the slave May is darker-skinned than her” (Osborne 2008, 148). Moj’s journey in the second half is primarily a sentimental one. For Adebayo, the play is in fact “almost like a talking archive ... There were points at which I felt like I was in some kind of communion with the dead ... [with] people’s lives” (Osborne 2009, 10). In performance, an abundant use is made of alternative media, “photography, video, poetry, light, dance, movement, music, storytelling, and song” (149). It seems that we can only get fully into Adebayo’s play when we consider the entire writing process undergone by the Antarctic collective as a queering of standard archival practices. The Antarctic collective is a joint production consisting of, among 86 Chapter Five others, academic Lynette Goddard and queer artist Del La Grace Volcano; their creative process also poses interesting comparisons with the collaborative working methods used in women and/or mixed collectives of the 1970s. To begin with, there is the fact that a series of shots taken on location in Antarctica preceded the actual writing of the script (Osborne 2009, 10). In this case, the photographs become “a record of an emotional and physical process, but not ... a narrative of an event” (Cvetkovich 2003, 98), mainly because they purport to be included in the material archive placed on stage, i.e. Moj’s father’s library. Displayed throughout the performance, the photographs and videos insist on the emotional charge of the activity of the collective project. Moj’s narrative account places Western geography within the domain of a geography of black feelings and lesbian desire. She is given a chance to use her race and her sexuality to reveal that white history is a series of fictions, slowly adding up to form an official archive, just like her father’s. She chooses the pleasure of transvestism, or, in Adebayo’s words, “to divest of the cloth of victimhood and transvest to liberty” (167). It is interesting to note here that Adebayo describes Moj’s act as cross- dressing, rather than drag. Cross-dressing, she argues, places the stress on the performance inherent in black history, something done on a daily basis “out of necessity. Slavery necessitates performance ... whether it be for an escape strategy ... or just to pass, or to mock” (Osborne 2009, 12). So, for instance, it is an African transgender man, William Black,5 who Moj meets in a trans pub in Deptford that encourages her to wear the clothes of a sailor and embark on the ship whale hunting to the Antarctic. This takes us back to Minh-Ha’s notion of multiple presences which informs women’s identities in non-Western cultures. She approaches the relationship between speaker and listener in story-telling to re-think the “I” that speaks. No longer viewed as a stable identity, “‘I’ is ... not a unified subject, a fixed identity, or that solid mass covered with layers of superficialities one has gradually to peel off before one can see its true face. ‘I’ is, itself, infinite layers.” I would argue that, just like the storyteller in Minh-Ha’s theorisations, Moj’s “I” that speaks becomes a subject “compelled by the will to say/unsay, to resort to the entire gamut of personal pronouns to stay near this fleeing and static essence of Not-I” (1989, 94). A game, or play, ensues between reality and fiction, and between the layers that accumulate to give the play its final shape. It is Adebayo again who points out that “[t]here were a lot of different layers created by the artists who worked on it” (Osborne 2009, 11, my emphasis). Having reached her objective, Moj walks out into the snow using Captain Oates’s words, “I am just going outside and may be some time” Queering Femininities 87
(188). The Ancient returns to deliver her epilogue and takes us back into the present:
A little pin-prick of pollution Opens a hole in our protection. The earth’s lungs are stretched With the last gasps of a whale And both the rich and the poor move closer to the sea. (189)
By returning cyclically to the issue of global warming hinted at in the opening monologue, Moj of the Antarctic can be included in a new aesthetics of black British women’s theatre after the 1990s, in which radical identity politics is replaced by a focus on “the world we live in now” (Goddard 2008). In interview, Adebayo clarifies that “I chose a female lover for her because I’m acknowledging that there are many stories of female lovers in our history that I will never discover because they have never been written down and have never been acknowledged” (Osborne 2008, 144). Through the figure of the storyteller, Moj of the Antarctic engages emotionally in the black tradition it interrogates. The natural progression of time is replaced by a performance taking place in a present in which “there is no end in sight.” The Ancient has told of Moj’s journey, but her final speech about the Antarctic “leads actually to another end, another opening, another ‘residual deposit of duration.’” As a griot, she is the one who knows it all. Minh-Ha says that “[e]very griotte who dies is a whole library that burns down... A lifetime story. More than a lifetime” (1989, 149), a notion she takes from the black oral tradition. Moj of the Antarctic attempts to reconstruct these hidden libraries, and it does so by addressing the story of not just one, but many, endless lesbian lifetimes,
... free to write my life with ink in my pen, No more the invisible man. (175)
Lesbian futures and butch aesthetics: on Nina Rapi
Nina Rapi gained recognition in independent theatre sectors in the 1990s. Her earlier plays include Ithaca (1989), Dreamhouse (1991), and Dance of Guns (1992). In terms of situated perspective, she expresses changes which took place during the 1990s as regards the future of lesbian theatre. Elaine Aston summarizes these changes as a passage from claiming lesbian identity to interrogating the category itself, or queering it (2003a: 98). In Rapi’s theatre, this queering of identity is reinforced by her 88 Chapter Five migrant perspective as a Greek-born playwright based in Britain, what she calls the “neither-here-nor-there position of the permanent outsider.”6 Her plays and monologues interrogate sexual identity showing the influence of current debates within lesbian theory, and of the future of “lesbian” as a category in particular.7 I will draw from queer gender theories and look at Rapi’s two plays, Angelstate (1998) and Lovers (2001). I will then move on to see how she places the lesbian butch centre stage in her two monologues, Tricky (2001) and Josie’s Restrooms (2000). British lesbian drama in the 1990s changed considerably. During the previous decade, black lesbian playwrights had been struggling to assert a consistent body of works. For them, blackness was both a tool to deconstruct mainstream conventional forms of theatre and at the same time to question heteronormative versions of black women’s identity (Goddard 2007: 13). And indeed, as co-editor of the collection Acts of Passion (1998), Rapi adds that lesbian identity in the 1990s was still “a ‘nice’ white, Anglo-Saxon affair” (3). The recent success of some black playwrights, mostly women, hopefully will lead to fewer difficulties in accessing the stage for non-white lesbian playwrights. In a white, European context, Rapi claims that the shaping of a lesbian aesthetic may require aiming towards “the general even though starting out from an individual or specific point of view” (1993: 147).8 The texts considered here are not concerned with national identity, even though the character of Aris in Angelstate, as we shall see, somehow touches on the issue. It is nevertheless useful to begin with a consideration about the overall influence of Rapi’s cultural background on her sexual identity and on her writing. She finds herself writing from a doubly disengaged position, that of “non-woman” and “foreigner.” She goes on to say that this “comes from a desire to resist assimilation and assert difference. This certainly affects my work both thematically and structurally. Almost inevitably, my writing is characterized by operating on at least two levels, and mixing more than one style” (1993: 153). A playwright and occasional theatre scholar, Rapi sees her conjoined activities partially as the result of the difficulties lesbian drama still has to face in order to attract mainstream audiences.9 Her academic writing has helped to increase the number of British publications focused on lesbian theatre. Angelstate10 is set in “[a] non-naturalistic research centre in the shape of a panopticon & alluding to a mindscape” (1). Rapi’s use of a multi- layered structure for her writing is shown by the two sets of “prisoners” in the panopticon. One consists of a lesbian Anorexic, who is often huddled in “a foetus position” (2), a Bodybuilder, and a Bodyguard. Their personalities are shaken by the loss of a relative or lover which grieves Queering Femininities 89 them, but for which they are all, at least superficially, responsible. So, Anorexic has watched her mother drive herself towards death soon after her father did nothing at all to stop this. Bodybuilder is “dressed in exaggerated feminine clothes, looking almost like a drag-queen” (2), and has injected her sick father with a lethal dose of morphine. He was a policeman who “educated” her and turned her into what she is, that is, a woman physically shaped by discipline and, by association, (male) power. Bodyguard, a butch, has witnessed her ex-lover’s suicide after she had dumped her—she passes as a man, and finds pleasure only when she can exercise the power this gives her. The second group consists of Priest, a heterosexual Dominatrix, and a Mercenary. They have been more or less involved in the death of Aris, “[a]n archetypal figure of youthful beauty” (1) whose presence adds to the imagery in the play. Aris was the Priest’s nephew. He ran away from his abusive father and later fell in love with the Priest himself. Their relationship was complicated by the total absence of carnal love, a decision Priest had made because of the sexual promiscuity he enjoyed before taking his vows. Both Dominatrix and Priest fall in love with the boy; but it is she who has hired Mercenary to kill Aris brutally in order to release him from “a pain no-one else was capable of releasing him from” (33). We learn through Bodyguard that Bodybuilder and Anorexic are two sisters. They have internalized their private losses—Bodybuilder by pumping up her body, Anorexic by draining it. The death of Anorexic’s mother has left her inept, and childish. As a lesbian, Anorexic is defined by her disorder, a form of violence on her body which is the effect of self- disgust, as well as of internalized hatred and homophobia. Both Anorexic and Bodybuilder try to open up a space for catharsis which may both be available to them and to others. On a metaphorical level, Priest, just like Bodyguard, Anorexic, and Mercenary is assumed to have already been brainwashed by the subjective powers of the State and by stereotyped visions of good and bad, love and redemption, virtue and sin. Rapi makes sure we follow her in choosing a point of view from which to enter into her text: “Were their acts of violence acts of love and beauty or hatred? How can you determine guilt? Can guilt be physically erased? Is redemption possible when reality-twisting rules?” This directs us towards Guard, who enters the stage intermittently and administers pills and injections ordered by two unnamed off-stage voices, a Centre Director and a Technician. These three figures are the embodiment of the State, “watching them as they are watching each other and themselves, looking for answers.” The closure of the play is left to multiple interpretations, for as 90 Chapter Five
Director and Technician are discussing whether to inject the prisoners with a lethal dose of medicine, Aris makes his first material appearance and remains “silently watching them” through to the blackout (36). In this work, Rapi explores the mechanics of how “to give the ultimate gift to your lover” (36), as Dominatrix herself realizes in the end. An analysis of lesbian subjectivities introduced in Angelstate shows that the fragile body of Anorexic is an inverted version of the superficially more confident butchiness shown in the bodies of both Bodybuilder and Bodyguard. These, in turn, deconstruct homophobia, as Sally Munt has argued “by erecting lines of force, which are simultaneously constituted by shame and a refusal of shame” (2001, 105). So, Bodybuilder’s unconventionally feminine look is a response she activates against her father, who has trained her as a man; hence, the shame inherent in femaleness is called into question. Bodyguard’s attractiveness is her point of entry into overcoming the shame caused by lesbianism, and this occurs each time she passes as a man. By building a discourse around the butch as a figure, Rapi establishes a model in which, as Cvetkovich points out, “experiences of feeling ... are not castigated as feminine or expected to take forms associated with mental and emotional health, such as openness or expressiveness” (2003, 72). Lesbian experience and butch sexualities are the key features of the works I am now going to analyse. Tricky11 tells the story of Blue, a butch in her thirties who finds its hard to break permanently with her ex-lover, a theme also recurring in Lovers. Rapi calls on a lesbian audience and poses some questions on the notion of a lesbian gaze. The gaze has received great attention by lesbian feminist critics. Jill Dolan has theorized it in terms of the appropriation of a male subject position “by beginning to articulate the exchange of desire between women.” The lesbian gaze thus enacts a “new economy of desire,” and this economy specifically attempts to develop “lesbian spectatorial communities” invoking all categories of difference ([1989] 1993, 112-3). A rethinking of desiring object and subject is crucial in Rapi’s theatre. In Tricky, performer Joelle Taylor plays the victim at one moment, the seducer at another, as she explains why she has locked her ex in the bar’s toilet. She finally surrenders to her desire and rushes to unlock her, leaving the performance spot unattended. This relates to Ahmed’s invented figure of the “contingent lesbian,” which seems to be the kind of subjectivity that is at stake here. Ahmed adapts her figure from the Freudian contingent invert, the sexually-inverted being who, in his/her failure to reach the sexual object he/she is expected to reach, chooses same-sex desire (2006, 93); this, she goes on, creates a connection with the stereotype of the unattractive lesbian. What interests Queering Femininities 91 me here is that lesbianism, for Ahmed, opens up a space where women may “come together,” in the sense of establishing contact with others: “To begin to think of lesbianism as contingent is to suggest not only that we become lesbians but also that such becoming is not lonely; it is always directed towards others, however imagined” (2006, 102-3). Rapi tells a story which, through its simplicity of subject matter and delivery, has as its primary aim an imagined site for lesbian co-participation. This co- participation is stressed by the fact that a favourable venue for performing the monologue is a lesbian club, as indicated by Rapi’s production notes. In Josie’s Restrooms12 Josie has been invited by Dyke TV to deliver a “video diary” of herself for a series called “Sex: When Fantasy and Reality Clash” (258). Her father died when she was nine, and her mother followed him soon afterwards:
There she was wishing him home and there was I wishing him dead, so that she could love me for a change. Wicked, wasn’t I. He did die but I lost her with him. (260)
After having made a living as a rent-woman with men, Josie is now a toilet attendant. We see her developing her plan to turn her profession into a serious business. She has on her mind to start a lesbian club within the very toilets where she is working (hence, the “restrooms” of the title). The play’s strength lies in Josie’s refusal to make money through sex. In a subversion of intents, she in fact tries to make “sex for money” (264), thus subverting her former activity as a prostitute. By doing so, she shows that lesbian desire can be rethought as a constant search for an alternative form of being with others, in Ahmed’s words, “a space in which the lesbian body can extend itself, as a body that gets near other bodies, which tends towards others who are alike only insofar as they also deviate and pervert the lines of desire” (2006, 105, my emphasis). Josie does so when she re-invents herself through the trauma of losing her parents and of her troubled childhood. Having prepared a communal space where lesbians can activate their own desires, Rapi goes a step further in her queering of identity and in Lovers deals with the problems raised by an unconventional butch-butch couple. There are two versions of the play. I will look at both, the shorter version performed at the Gielgud Theatre in London (2001), where Patra’s and Justine’s relationship is foregrounded, and the longer one, which includes additional characters.13 Patra is a jazz musician in her thirties; she feels committed to a stable relationship, but she also wants to keep things “easy”: “Wanting safety means you’d take any odd shit out of fear. But commitment? Now that means you stay free but you’re also real and clear. 92 Chapter Five
See?” (c37). Justine is in her early twenties, and this affects her uncertainties over whether to follow her dreams or her heart. Justine is a butch, and that is not who Patra would normally fancy. There is a moment in the play when she is terribly worried “I’m serious. Can a butch fall for a butch?” (c14). Rapi presents an issue which is of resonance for current debates on lesbianism. Patra’s best friend, Sylvie, is a femme. She has always fancied her and is now distressed because it seems that femmes are “out of fashion” (c27); this particular aspect may be a deliberate reference to the rise of the “queer dyke” as a prominent figure of the lesbian scene in the 1990s (Case 2009). It is Sylvie, at the close of the longer version of the play, who pretends to be Patra’s new partner, so as to prevent her and Justine from getting back together. According to Sherrie A. Inness, the value of butch-butch discourse lies in its negation of “the binary oppositions female/male, self/other on which Western culture is based, and hence it is tremendously threatening” (1997: 199). Sylvie’s behaviour throughout the play shows that this “threat” causes some problems even for lesbians. Munt, for instance, contests that it is embedded in a logic in which desire and self-identification conflict with one another, calling into question the repudiated other inherent in the erotics of sameness generated by the desire of a butch for another butch (1998). Scenes three and four in the longer version (five and six in the short version) of Lovers are crucial for this articulation of a “butch aesthetics.” They also confirm Rapi’s attempt to play with sexuality as the primary requirement towards a more acceptable fluidity of sexual roles. Thematically, the play is structured around this fluidity. The impossibility for butch-butch couples to be accepted fully as part of a lesbian future shows, as Ahmed notes, that “drawing ‘a dividing line,’ can in its turn make other forms of sexual desire unlivable, even if that line does not follow the straight line [i.e. heterosexuality]” (2006: 99). These two scenes are a case in point. Here, the master/slave binary of an SM relationship is complicated by the swapping of roles between Patra and Justine. First, it is Justine’s turn to ask for her lover’s forgiveness, after she has eluded their commitment ceremony with her betrayal:
PATRA: Spits on the floor right in front of her, ceremoniously. PATRA: Lick this. JUSTINE: Looks puzzled, confused. This is turning into something she had not anticipated. PATRA: Lick it, you bitch. JUSTINE: Makes to stand and go over. PATRA: Crawl, you scum, crawl. JUSTINE : Hesitates. Queering Femininities 93
PATRA: Crawl! JUSTINE : Crawls and begins to lick the spit. (c54-5)
In scene four, Patra repeats the same pattern. She has to be forgiven for her excessive punishment on Justine. The alternative ending provided by the shorter version of the play insists on the fluidity of roles mentioned above, with the addition that Justine is focused on more closely. She approaches Patra but stops abruptly:
She keeps dead still, staring at the audience. Light diminishing until it only shows her face, expressing by turns release and terror, fear and hope. A faint smile is beginning to form on her face. It gets broader. The club music from scene one starts playing in the background. JUSTINE: Beautiful. (b16)
The differences between the two closures—a close-up on Sylvie and Patra as they get much closer and give the impression they are going to kiss (c65), and on Justine’s smile of hope—are arguably intended to foreground the butch-butch couple as an oppositional category for lesbian identity and desire (Inness 1997: 202). As a category, butch-butch takes its distance from unidirectional solutions, and at the same time contests the supposition that it necessarily involves the repudiation of others, as Munt argues. Patra’s and Justine’s intermittent shifts of role plays forward with the overall intention to explore the possibilities of role-playing and contribute to finding new liveable spaces for lesbians on and off the stage. As I write, Rapi continues to work in diverse fields, from theatre to short-story writing and performance.14 From a lesbian perspective, her lesbian characters look at the future and at how boundaries can be continually blurred or turned into erotically charged play. The contention that strategic essentialism is required in order not to fall into replicas of dominant (i.e. heterosexual) categories is replaced by exploring the possibilities offered by “queer” for the articulation of a lesbian experience.
Queenie on stage: the theatre of Valerie Mason-John
Adebayo and Kay adapt the influence of black traditional forms in order to shape a cultural and sexual identity from a lesbian perspective (Goddard 2007). In the plays dealt with here, Mason-John draws from the theatre tradition brought to success by Kay, but the wide range of influences which inform her performance pieces add up to the shaping of a “multi-faceted” persona, as she admits herself. Her theatre is symptomatically 94 Chapter Five queer, in that it never works only on one level of experience, but threads its way into several layers that make up identity. She writes plays which are outwardly interactive, as exemplified by her invitation, “I am a performer in everything I do, give me an event and I will perform for you” (Hensman 1998). Goddard observes that in her playwriting, lesbianism is featured as “a politically charged lifestyle choice” (2007, 116). This choice involves the self-creation of a stage persona via the performance name Queenie, retaining her birth name as a journalist and correspondent in Northern Ireland and other critical areas.15 Queenie has given her the possibility “to be the artist and not the journalist”16 and it is in this light that I am going to look at her two main successes. In Lesbian Talk: Making Black Waves (1993), Mason-John and Ann Khambatta survey the radical commitment of black lesbians since the first two conferences held in Britain, Zami I (London, 1985) and II (Birmingham, 1989). They take note of the separatism of the 1970s as “only part of the way we as black lesbians explore our identities.” The umbrella term black excluded lesbians, “[it] has been used by us to divide us. Identifying as Lesbians of Colour will not heal the rifts, but at least it might enable us all to be admitted into the same space together” (31, 35). For Mason-John, the creation of a scenario available to black lesbians has involved the questioning of cogent issues, such as sexual practices, a debate that is taken up in her first play. In the stunning Sin Dykes (1998),17 she explores intra- and extra-racial SM, subscribing to a notion of politics in which the categories of race, sexual preference, and class are dismantled. This is exemplified by the “shared cross-racial understanding” (Goddard 2007, 122) achieved by the characters BD, Trace, and which sets up uneven connections among the characters. Mason-John is very straightforward in making her point: lesbians are out, but is there space for SM in the black lesbian scene? And, how can we disjoin racial implications from sex experienced as a power relationship? She recalls that, up to the mid-1990s, “[n]ight clubs had been threatened with axes for having S and M nights, and black women who had white lovers were often ostracised” (2006, 398). In this, the play represents a “documentary historical piece” of lesbian culture. Mason-John is concerned with discussing what lesbians should or should not do, but it is clear that the conclusions she reaches are exemplified by her anarchic “F**k, we do what we want!” The centrality of lesbian desire is explored within the context of a “very promiscuous” culture, in the sense of “very poly amorous.”18 Sin Dykes offers “a range of subject positions that produce contradictory and not easily resolvable views” (Griffin 2003, 185); this is reinforced by the structure of the play, for the development Queering Femininities 95 through snapshots accumulating bit by bit makes each scene a close-up of lesbian life. The play is almost entirely set in a night bar where black and white lesbians harmonize and quarrel over the role of sexuality and race in their lives. Gill, the boss BD, and Trace are white lesbians. The dualism implicit in language is also a theme. On the one hand, the language of SM is uttered via the body, using techniques of physical theatre and mime; on the other, as in the case of Kat—an Afro-Caribbean femme who speaks in patois—language stresses the sense of belonging to a racial community. In other words, it confirms the “strategic essentialism” which characterises a black feminist aesthetics of drama (Goddard 2007). Kat is interesting because she seems to fall for Trudy up to the very end of the play and is indeed jealous of both Gill and Clio. Her jealousy is masked behind an alleged black relationship she aspires to create with Trudy and which she sees as a requirement for all black lesbians.19 Her speech is revealing:
One thing you’ve got to understand about some of these 1990’s white girls is that they say it’s alright to screw a man and call yourself a dyke. It’s the phase at the moment, packing a dildo down their Calvin Klein’s, and picking up cute looking gay men. It’s all the rage. They call it queer. (53)
Kat is in fact sceptical of cross-racial relationships and especially of queer dykes (like Trace), but she too secretly enjoys the company of white girls “between the sheets.” In this, she is somehow like BD, who pays Trudy to whip her so as to atone for her South African colonial background. Kat’s patois reinforces the idea of a politically committed black identity, at the same time as it affirms language over body in a play in which body language and bodily expressions of sexual desire substantiate each subject position. The published version of Sin Dykes is filled with Mason-John’s production notes on the importance of body language and mime in conveying her message. The overall effect is a work which is much about the troubles of getting (too) carried away while “acting out a fantasy” (68), as Trudy tells her ex-lover Gill when she asks her for the SM gear to “play” with Clio/Mason-John. Kat’s speech leads to considerations over the time- and place-specific nature of Sin Dykes. In interview, Mason-John clarifies that she would have to make several changes in the content of the play, were she to produce it today. When it was first performed at the Oval House (1998), the play was certainly “very British,” in that it detailed a reality in which SM clubs were springing up and carried “stuff which was underground” onto the stage. In particular, it is transgenderism which would have to be taken into account for the role it plays in underground (i.e. off-the- 96 Chapter Five mainstream) theatre sectors and performance venues of the present.20 I think this adaptability to changing contexts contributes to making Sin Dykes a key text of British theatre in the 1990s. Criticism of the play has tended to focus on the complications raised by SM practices within a black and white lesbian context prompted by the different narrative threads embedded in the play (Griffin 2003; Goddard 2007). As Trudy develops an interest in a reality she is totally unaware of and which scares, yet thrills her, Clio is the one who is always in charge, mostly when she performs the role of master/dominatrix while subverting black history of colonization. The SM scene with BD and Trace is in its own way a climax to the play:
CLIO Watch me. Turn, you son of a bitch. (BD is on all fours. She turns to face CLIO with head towards the floor.) Lick my boots. (TRACE prepares the boot, caressing it with her face. CLIO yanks her by the collar to bid her stop. BD seductively licks both boots. CLIO pulls BD’s head up and spits in her face. TRACE is jealous.) You’ve left a mark. (TRACE pushes BD out of the way and licks the boot.) Good girl. (82)
Although here Trudy begs Clio to stop because whatever way one performs it, it is just too uncomfortable to see power acted on like this, she realizes that Clio turns her on—“You ... press my buttons” (88). In the closing scene, she chooses to play SM with Clio, starts using the whip and acknowledges the pleasure she can enjoy from “carrying out sex as fantasy.” Both threads, SM and black-white relationships, are resolved in the end. This is indicated by Clio’s final “Stop!” (90) which closes the play; it is a sign of interruption according to the rules of SM encounters but, above all, a hint at moving beyond the labelling of identity in much more general terms. Of the final resolution proposed in Sin Dykes, Gabriele Griffin says that “[t]he question ... partly becomes how to deal with violence and with the desire for violence. And this is the question which remains unanswered within the play” (2003, 190). Mason-John undoubtedly refuses to provide answers to this question; but her strategy seems to be to contextualize lesbian desire within an escape through role-playing. This can also be evinced from the butch-femme aesthetics articulated in the play. According to Sue-Ellen Case, role-playing is a necessary step towards the establishment of butch-femme as a “strong” subject position for feminism (2009, 45), due to its inherent suggestions to disengage from ontological identities or any other form of conventional essentialism. The play on desire enacted by the black couple Trudy-Clio and sanctioned by the closing SM scene serves to highlight desire as “a serious space for erotic Queering Femininities 97 play and performance.” It follows that, when Trudy queers the connection between race and SM practices, she shows that “butch and femme are for lesbians erotic possibilities that can generate new lines of desire only when they are just that: possibilities rather than requirements” (Ahmed 2006, 99). This is true no matter what skin colour is involved, therefore Mason- John seems to defy the whole idea behind the looking for definite answers. Cvetkovich’s study seems applicable here, for she sees butch-femme sexuality as a matter of “giving and taking.” As she writes later on, it is the femme who seems to contest the stereotype of female passivity by exercising a form of agency “involved in the process of being desired” (2003, 59). In Sin Dykes, this is made clear for Trudy and her development from uncertainty to confidence as regards her relationship with Clio. The parallel between the body and the creation of texts is a useful feature of black theatres. Osborne analyses monodramas such as Adebayo’s Moj of the Antarctic and places the body “as a tool for articulating the text (visually and verbally).” It seems that Mason-John’s Brown Girl in the Ring also subscribes to a “body politic ... de-scribed and re-written, in their creative renderings, via these monodramas” (2008, 14). I would extend Osborne’s comment to read the monodrama from the point of view of the recovery of lost archives of black feelings, whereby the recording of histories of neglect and oppression shapes the overall performance. In the first section, this has been applied to Adebayo’s and Kay’s plays alike. Here, I begin with Mason-John’s mention of the jigsaw- puzzle as a major influence on Brown Girl in the Ring. Having no story to recount her diasporic childhood, she chose some photos of the Royal Family to be used for the workshop organised by former Split Britches’s co-founder Lois Weaver, then artistic director of Gay Sweatshop.21 The picture used for the performance is cut like a jigsaw puzzle to convey the feeling of the absence of Regina/Mason-John from having a family history. Just like the photo album displayed in Kay’s Chiaroscuro and Del La Grace Volcano’s photographs in Adebayo’s Moj of the Antarctic, photography is related to an emotional, rather than to a mental experience. “It is a piece that documents what happens to black people in history,” says Mason-John. “Because there’s humour in it, dark humour, I got away with it really”. Like Adebayo, she draws from fact in order to build a “historical satire” which queers the British history books (Osborne 2009, 9, 19). Brown Girl in the Ring (1998)22 is the story of a would-be black Queen—Mason-John’s other self, “Queenie,” is important here—whose figure is drawn from Sophia Charlotte, wife of George III, who has been proved to have had black blood. “It’s the first time she has had access to 98 Chapter Five tell her story so it’s as if she is in her Royal Court, or at the House of Lords or House of Commons” (289). Again, the overall text touches on a very specific context, as shown by the direct hints to the case of British Member of Parliament Ron Davies (1995) and the Broadwater Farm Riots (1980s).23 The only non-specific element that we have is provided by the music played throughout the monologue, namely Boney M’s hit-single. It is no coincidence that the song is interspersed in the writing. In the published solo version, which was performed at the Lyric Hammersmith, a preface by the playwright called “Remember” indicates how music, in the 1970s British clubbing scene, was the point of entry of black communities into the social and political debate.24 On the other hand, Mason-John underlines the non-specificity of her work and encourages future performers and directors to “play with the Queen’s speech and cultural references, while keeping the integrity of the script” (290). The value of this interchangeability is undisputed, given that it allows Mason-John to speak from a purely black perspective, reaching arguably for the transnational. Brown Girl in the Ring “travels across time, plays with time,” fluctuating between plausibility and madness. It attempts to open up a “new era of the Royal family,”25 but it does so by building a counter- discourse which is based on diaspora and re-assesses the role of performance in the intercultural scene. Humour is used throughout to convey the feeling of oppression and racism caused by historically sedimented fictions, as when, for instance, Regina moves in “stylized chimpanzee movement” (308). This form of mimicry is further developed in the scenes in which she turns into her child version and dialogues with her imaginary friend Lizard, or when she sweeps her petticoats up, repeating “Sweep it [blackness] under the carpet” (302). The changes in Young Regina/Queen/Lizard take place whenever a fact is recalled that is too traumatic to tell for reasons connected to racism and the Queen’s childhood. As Dimple Godiwala argues, “[t]he adult Regina’s frequent lapses into regressive childhood have no memory of self-validation but a litany of meanings of what blackness connotes to the young girl raised in white society” (2006, 262). Towards the end of the play, however, Regina performs a series of frenzied movements and becomes “both the child and adult, this image represents enslavement, institutionalization and the ridicule of black people” (315). But before then, she activates a double-bind of self- affirmation and negation:
I am the Queen, I am the Queen, I am the Queen. REGINA struggles with LIZARD and her Royal wave. I’m not black Lizard!!!!!! (310) Queering Femininities 99
By double-bind, I mean that the affirmation of Regina’s Royal heritage is counterposed with the rejection of blackness as something too traumatic to tell. In terms of the “I” that speaks (Minh-Ha 1989), this adds to the feelings effected by “the psychic impact of having to account for oneself in a context where one is likely not to be believed or where one’s assertions, indeed one’s identity and belonging, are in question” (Griffin 2008, 285). It is at this point that I would return to the role played by the body. For Minh-Ha, the delivery of women’s texts through the body, as is the case in the play under examination, shows that “we do not have bodies, we are our bodies, and we are our bodies, and we are ourselves while being the world .... We write—think and feel—(with) our entire bodies rather than only (with) our minds or hearts.” Claiming that women write corporeal texts requires viewing women’s stories, especially those that have been deemed not worthy of inclusion in recorded History because they deconstruct the assumption of “thought [as] the product of one specialized organ, the brain, and feeling, that of the heart” (Minh-Ha 1989, 39). Sometimes, as in the case of the African griotte, rhythm is used to produce the “full effect” of words (Minh-Ha 1989, 122); this happens both in Chiaroscuro and Moj of the Antarctic. In Brown Girl in the Ring, rhythm is conveyed throughout by the repetition of Boney M’s refrain, “There’s a brown girl in the ring / Tra la la la la,” as well as by the recurring expression “Sweep it under the carpet”, which Regina pronounces to hint at the unnameability of blackness. In discussing the role of the body in her theatre, Mason-John admits that she sees it as “critical for any actor,” one aspect which is impossible to write outside of the context of the production and reception of any one play that is being written or performed; hence, I would add, the importance of the archive. Body language is the subject of quite another story, in Brown Girl in the Ring as well as in black writing for the stage, since it specifically chooses, as Mason-John argues, a “black” articulation of movement.26 She then retrieves a blood line of black heritage, but the point she makes, namely that blackness is lived as trauma, leads to viewing her use of “the embodied act of performance to create a connection between storyteller and audience that constitute a public sphere around trauma” (Cvetkovich 2003, 109). In that, her Queen really succeeds in proving her point. As a performance name, Queenie is forcibly associated with Mason- John’s avowed identity as a lesbian, even though it is clear that Brown Girl in the Ring is not a lesbian play. In relation to this play, Godiwala argues that “[r]oyal status conflated with her role as lesbian queen, Queenie performs a piece which is bound up with her identity as a black lesbian in 100 Chapter Five
Britain” (2006, 260). A markedly queer construction of a persona is at stake here, erasing the divide between theatre and reality “or actor and character, obliterating any kind of essentialist ontology behind the play ... the actor overcomes any text, yet the actor herself is a fiction and her social self is one as well” (Case 2009, 44).27 It seems impossible then to try and dissociate Queenie from her real self, the “author, playwright, performer, professional anger management, and self-awareness trainer” that make up a self-consciously varied personality. Mason-John is optimistic about the future of black performance in Britain. Although she is aware that it is something as yet hidden in the underground of theatre systems, she insists that black people will always want to express themselves through theatre.28 After Brown Girl in the Ring, she performed two shows for children, The Adventures of Snow Black and Rose Red, and The Totz. A play about power and oppression, You Get Me, was given a rehearsed reading in 2006. Her last performance piece was The Perfect Road, which she defines a “seventeen-minute performance piece where I use traditional classical poetic forms but the theme is about sexual abuse” (Osborne 2009, 14). She is currently living in Canada, and has recently published a book on Indian women untouchables. She is not sure what role theatre will play in her future career. But the reputation she has gained in the academic and theatre sectors confirms that the British stage is longing to have its Queenie back.
Notes
1 Kay [1986] 1987; subsequent references are in brackets. 2 A poem choreographed to music, the choreopoem relies much on improvisation. 3 Criticism of the play has pointed out this broadening of vision in several ways. Dimple Godiwala, for instance, notes how the quilt contained in the chest may function as a metaphor of the play, “a patchwork of scenes where themes interweave to work towards a whole or wholeness of being of the four women to enable the formation of an integrated identity for the doubly ostracised black lesbian women” (2006, 253). Others have argued that, at the end of the play, Yomi shows to have learned her lesson, that is, “to modify her black-and-white vision to accommodate both mobile racial and sexual identities and to accept diversity, the grey that mixing engenders” (Griffin 2003, 179); see also Goddard (2007) for further reference. 4 Adebayo [2006] 2008; subsequent references are in brackets. 5 The character is inspired by the real William Brown, known as the first woman soldier to work for the Royal Navy. See Osborne (2008) for further reference. 6 Communication with the author. 7 I am grateful to Nina Rapi for suggesting a choice of her playtexts to consider for Queering Femininities 101
my analysis. 8 Nina Rapi is here drawing from Monique Wittig’s theories on lesbian subjectivity; see Rapi (1993) for further reference. 9 Communication with the author. 10 Rapi 1998; subsequent references are in brackets. A short extract of the play was performed at Betsey’s Salon in 2007. 11 Rapi [2001a] 2005; subsequent references are in brackets. 12 Rapi 2000; subsequent references are in brackets. 13 Rapi 2001 (b) and (c); subsequent references are in brackets. The versions are indexed as “b” for the shorter version and “c” for the longer. An extract of the play was published in Dummy Magazine (Summer 1999). 14 Communication with the author. 15 Mason-John was given the name Queenie by gay men in San Francisco; see also Hensman (1998). 16 Communication with the author. 17 Mason-John [1998] 1999, 41-90; subsequent reference are in brackets. 18 Communication with the author. 19 Trace (played by Paola Cavallin) had her name changed into Antonio for the Oval House production (January 1998). 20 Communication with the author. 21 See Griffin (2003); Goddard (2007); and Osborne (2009) for further reference. 22 Mason-John 1998 [2008]; subsequent references are in brackets. 23 See Valerie Mason-John’s ‘Foreword’ to the published version of Brown Girl in the Ring. 24 For a detailed socio-historical account of black cultures in Britain, see Gilroy ([1987] 2002). 25 Communication with the author. 26 Communication with the author. 27 Case makes this observation in her analysis of Split Britches’ performance Beauty and the Beast, but it certainly highlights a primary element of much lesbian drama. 28 Communication with the author.
CHAPTER SIX
TWO COMPANIES
Before I begin my analysis, I would like to explain what may at first seem an unjust exclusion, which is that the work of Gay Sweatshop is missing so far from the present study. Since their début with Jill Posener’s lesbian coming-out play, Any Woman Can (1976), the activity of the company was closely interconnected with their activism, their socialist background, and their markedly left-wing political agenda. Playwright and artistic director Philip Osment recollects that the origins of the company lay in “a theatre of the streets practised by activists who saw themselves as part of the counter-culture and therefore avowedly amateur” (1989, xiii). Gay Sweatshop entered the 1980s in two separate groups, the gay and lesbian members having different concerns and objectives. Among their achievements for gay and lesbian drama was the setting up of the Gay Times Festivals at the Drill Hall theatre (London). There, the company staged Andy Kirby’s touching play on Aids, Compromised Immunity (1982), Osment’s This Island’s Mine (1988), and Jackie Kay’s Twice Over (1988).1 Difficulties in funding due to the state of subsidized theatres in Thatcherite Britain and struggling financial conditions led the company to undergo other major changes. In 1990, Split-Britches’s co-founder Lois Weaver and James Neale-Kennerley were appointed artistic directors; Claire Dowie’s Drag Act (1993) was staged in this period.2 The company ceased activity in 1997. During the research phase of this study, the cutting-edge, fundamentally identitarian stance of Gay Sweatshop seemed to contradict the purposes of this study in many ways. My concern was especially for a theatre which takes its momentum from the assumption that to blur all definite categories and labels is a prerequisite for the future of playwriting and performance, in Britain and Ireland alike. And, this proved true even in those cases where identity claims played their part in the process as in the case of, say, white and black women theatres, or of the gay experience foregrounded by Neil Bartlett’s work and the gay sensibility peculiar to Kevin Elyot’s plays. Other companies whose contribution has been or is still valuable for the themes I discuss in this volume have also been omitted. Among them, the 104 Chapter Six lesbian company Siren, American-based Split Britches, and the leading Black playwriting company, Talawa in Britain; Red Kettle (Waterford) and Garry Hynes’s co-founded Druid (Galway) in Ireland, which have also opposed the privileged role of Dublin as urban and artistic centre. Max Stafford Clark’s Out of Joint is the most renowned company in terms of plays dealing with gender issues, although their work cannot certainly be said to be exclusively on gender. The voicing of oppressed minorities and the tackling of social problems of the time are the two consistent trends developed by the company since they started activity in 1993. Some of the major works they produced, such as Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good and Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking and Some Explicit Polaroids have been discussed already in this volume (Chapter two and Chapter four). The above mentioned companies have been the subject of several critical studies. My decision to focus on two all-women companies is coherent with the role of writing by women for the stage I have stressed throughout this work.
Charabanc Theatre Company
Because of its success the Charabanc Theatre Company has received a lot of attention in theatre studies—both on contemporary (Northern) Irish theatre and on women’s and feminist performance. Throughout their fifteen-year-career the company’s hallmark was the reviving of the local Belfast crack on stage at the level of language and subject matter of the plays. And it is generally agreed that the Marie Jones’s writing-in- residence years (1983-1990) were the most intense and creative period for the company. This section will look at the ways this all-women company performed innovative notions of Irishness which provided an alternative to the male-dominated theatre on both sides of Ireland’s religious and political divide. In particular, I will apply Colin Graham’s idea of how subalternity and gender may productively co-operate for a new reading of post-colonial Irishness. Scholars and critics in Britain, the USA, and Ireland have often attributed Charabanc’s feminist concerns and women’s performance of men’s roles to strategies shared by much feminist theatre. Not all members of the company, however, agreed to be labelled “feminist”: some did, others changed their position over the years. This clearly emerges from the interviews discussed by a series of essays edited by Imelda Foley, Lizbeth Goodman, Helen Lojek, and Carole Martin. My task here is not to assess the extent to which the production of the company may be termed feminist—this has already been done many times over. Rather, I will focus Two Companies 105 on how their work exemplifies the gendered position “in and outside the Nation.” This is the only position that Graham considers productive in order to endow with a voice the subaltern subject in globalised Ireland. The assumption made here is that Charabanc Theatre Company was indeed a feminist company. This is true at least to the extent that we accept the term “feminist” to refer to a company which would always rely on a women’s perspective and address women directly. Charabanc were a company that was made up of all women—with the occasional collaboration of some male practitioners—and that dramatized the conditions of women in Northern Ireland. They questioned the normative icons of mother/home- carer and silent supporter of male warfare either on the Loyalist/Unionist or the Nationalist/Republican side. It should however be pointed out that to look through the lens of gender as I will be doing here does not mean that this is what really drove this group of women to start writing and performing. As early as 1984, Charabanc début play, Lay Up Your Ends made it clear that class, rather than gender pushed them into articulating a voice of their own.3 Written by Martin Lynch in collaboration with the company, this play dealt with a women workers’ strike after their linen mill’s owners had planned cutting working hours and wages. My attempt here is to see how their commitment can also be read in terms of women’s re-shaping of the notion of “political” theatre along with (Irish) nationalism. Lojek makes a good point when she laments the lack of academic training oriented toward the kind of work that the company had been doing since its early years: “Training that values text over performance, training that values single authorship over collaborative work, training that imparts a restrictive notion of what constitutes appropriate forms and subjects for serious literature.” Her contribution on the company seems to me one of the most influential and relevant insofar as she highlights “multiplicity” and “lack of dogma” as Charabanc’s distinctive features (1999, 88, 94). This tension toward multiplicity, which we would nowadays call “intersectionality” (Crenshaw 1991)4 or even complexity, is translatable into representations of women which foreground more than one single issue and sometimes depict contradicting views on women considered subaltern in an Irish context. Charabanc Theatre Company seemed to take the second-wave feminist creed “the personal is political” and turn it into “you cannot aspire to justice within the home unless you first achieve justice everywhere around you.” This statement recalls Mary Brewer’s opinion that women’s location for resistance is contingent on the most cogent issues in any given historical context (1999, 164). In an interview, two Charabanc co-founders, Carole Moore and Eleanor Methven emphasise this fact: 106 Chapter Six
in our early work we felt ourselves to be feminist but we had to begin from a more general, political place: we couldn’t jump right in and examine women’s conflict with her sense of family or self, as first we needed to consider her sense of safety in a community and culture. We had to look at the effects of the political situation on women generally, rather than individually.
Therefore, a “cultural-political” orientation seemed more appropriate to a Northern Irish context, than the focus on individual experience stressed by women playwrights in the Republic of Ireland (Goodman and de Gay 1996, 280-82). In his essay ‘Subalternity and Gender: Problems of Post-Colonial Irishness,’ (2002) Graham draws from Antonio Gramsci’s and Gayatri C. Spivak’s earlier theorizations on the subaltern as a speaking subject. He reflects that if we follow Gramsci we acknowledge that the subaltern is complicit to power in the process of domination, for it attempts to replace the very power it subverts. On the other hand, Spivak adds that it is through and in the very act of speaking that the subaltern ceases to be such. For Spivak, the failure of the subaltern to speak up and resist is connected to the failure of nationalist movements in post-colonial areas. Still according to Graham, in an Irish context, David Lloyd and Carole Coulter argue, however, that Nationalism and subalternity are in themselves insurgent forces. Graham warns that Lloyd’s and Coulter’s viewpoint can be termed essentialist in that it purifies the subaltern as a political residue. Following this logic we could, for instance, fetishize women as silenced subjects and subalterns. Graham’s goal is to allow gender “to exist within, outside, and in opposition to the State and the nation.” In other words, subalternity and gender can co-exist in an Irish context only insofar as “gender and nation are both seen as potentially subversive and affiliative, existing variously in the subaltern matrix of empowerment, disempowerment, confrontation and hierarchisation” (2002, 145-6). As women performing women, the Charabanc players seem to answer Graham’s call for the subaltern Irish women to speak, as I will demonstrate through my analysis of three plays produced by the company before Jones left: Now You’re Talking (1983), Somewhere Over the Balcony (1986), and The Hamster Wheel (1990). In Charabanc plays, home is a favourite setting. Home is the crack-ish Belfast areas and their surrounding countryside. Home, therefore, is not just the physical space delimited by domestic walls, where women are expected to perform their roles of dutiful housewives and live up to their husbands, fathers and brothers’ allegiance to the cause of Nationalism or Unionism. Two Companies 107
Now You’re Talking5 is set in a reconciliation centre designed for Catholic and Protestant women to make peace. The play is about empowerment and freedom of speech, about being granted the possibility to speak as women and as representatives of a whole community of women. Veronica, Thelma, Jackie, Madeline and Collette are trying to end discrimination along religious lines under the supervision of American Carter, who prepares a series of entertaining activities to make them bond with each other, taking them to the beach to collect seashells, or organizing a traditional Maypole dancing, or gathering them to sing a song. Veronica (rebellious Catholic) and Thelma (rebellious Protestant) are the key characters in the play. They embody the struggle of Catholic women to make a living and the affluent life of Protestant women in Belfast. As representatives of communities at war with each other, they are nonetheless aware of being witness participants backgrounded by the real, male powers engaged in the armed conflict. In this they are both of the Nation and outside of it—and whereas they may see no immediate solution to the Troubles, they are against (male) violence and the use of weapons. Yet, they conduct their own wars within the homely space of the reconciliation centre. In one scene Veronica sings a rebellion hymn in a Protestant pub “A Nation Once Again, A Nation Once Again!” (19); in another Madeline tells Carter, “You see we all belong here...” (36); in yet another Collette adds, “this may be the only chance we will ever have in our lives to tell them what we feel as women, not just women, but a mixed group of Protestant and Catholic women” (40). While such scenes draw attention to a shared sense of belonging to the country, they also posit other issues concerning women’s exploitation that function as a commonality prior to, but not necessarily in opposition with as well as religious/national allegiance. Lojek noted that “The rejected male-dominated hierarchy is ... associated with issues of sexual domination and manipulation” (1999, 92). It seems that the setting and events of the plays are foregrounded as women-centred, whereas the male-dominated reality remains backstage. Somewhere Over the Balcony shows the effects of military violence on the everyday lives of three Catholic women and their families. It highlights women’s response to the Troubles using humour and mocking the male armed struggle. In a pioneer attempt for the mainly Protestant Charabanc Theatre Company, Jones draws extensively from Belfast black humour to compare the lives of three Catholics—Kate, Ceely, and Rose Marie—to the harshness of life in a state of long-lasting conflict. Standing on the balcony of a flat in the Divis Tower Area, Falls Road, they perform the Troubles and enjoy their Army camouflage surrounded by a confusion of 108 Chapter Six voices, noises and events. Tension builds up from the very beginning, when we are informed that the building is going to be demolished. The women repeatedly change dress, masquerading, now wearing gowns, now a gas mask (Kate), now police riot helmets and army shirts, as they question the dominant rule through their songs against the “jungle law” (200) of the area. Act one ends with a bomb blowing up Kate’s flat after they have been warned by the British Army to evacuate the place. In one of the tragicomic occurrences in the play, we also learn of Ceely’s pirate radio station and of a marriage going on in a church under siege. In act two, Kate does not have her flat any more, Ceely no longer has her radio and Rose, accused of having shot a British soldier seemingly for no reason, has been arrested. Ceely then starts to play her bingo game using an improvised radio—similar to those radio devices typically used at war times—whose noise/sounds are surrounded by the noises of ambulances, saracens, helicopters/choppers and explosions. As events occur at great speed, Ceely says:
Smell! Do you smell it? Do you feel it? The tension ... Yes, the Brits are gonna storm the chapel any minute. I know that feeling ... it’s like when somebody is waitin’ on one number for a big Saturday night scoop ... You know it’s gonna happen ... you can’t stop it ... you just haft to go with it. (221)
And before the women sing their last song, Kate repeats for the second time,
That’s what I love about this place. On a day like today you could be anywhere.
I want to stress the “anywhere” of Kate’s speech, for it points to two different positions occupied by women in the play. It refers to the some- where which gives the play its title, an undefined space beyond their own balcony from which they witness the injustices, while remaining safely within the domestic walls to claim, as women, the civil rights for their own nation; or it could refer to an imaginary space of their own, which for them is not utopian, but quite real, and in which they substitute their own voices for the ones of men engaged in their armed struggle and sectarian conflict. The last play considered here, The Hamster Wheel6 is about the way women of different generations deal with the roles of good housewives and respectful daughters. Again, what the play seems to stress is the refusal to choose between rejecting or accepting National values in order to embrace a wider notion of womanhood which combines the “subversive” Two Companies 109 with the “affiliative” positions of subalternity outlined by Graham. Kenny, a stereotyped husband and father of a girl, has just had a stroke and his wife Jeanette is learning how to cope with him on her own, without the help of their daughter Cathy who has just been awarded a scholarship in Germany. Other characters are Cathy’s aunt Patsy and her husband Norman. The health of Norman’s mother is slowly getting worse and his decision to keep her at home with them causes a rift in their marriage. This play seems to be about the moral stability of dutiful housewives as opposed to the lack of responsibility of the younger women. As Norman tells Cathy:
What the hell state are we going to be in if the next generation are so concerned with their own wants that any sense of duty or responsibility goes out the window ... / It’s because of these so-called stupid narrow- minded principles that we have still some humanity left in this country ....
Cathy answers:
And a lot of angry frustrated lonely people who have been taken advantage of—and he also blames her for her aspirations and for snobbing her family origins. (238)
The play shifts from tender, intimate moments when Jeanette feeds her husband (198), to others when Cathy explains why she does not want to take care of her father: “Well then he was more concerned with his stupid macho pride than he was ever about me, and now I am expected to be a nursemaid for him” (202). This comment hints at the exploitative nature of this marriage, revealed in act two. The cyclic structure of the play has Kenny who, after recovering, has another stroke and remains confined to his wheelchair. I am arguing here that, in The Hamster Wheel, Jones extends the “in and outside the Nation” position of women considered subaltern in Northern Ireland and places it within the context of the contrast between new and old generations of women. Towards the close of the play, Norman utters his “they owe you something” (258) to Jeanette. With this comment he seems to refer to the fact that she is still attached to her husband even now that he has had another stroke, thus showing her sense of responsibility. By contrast, both Cathy and Patsy, it may be inferred, embody undutiful daughters and wives, thus showing the lack of responsibility of those women who place themselves as if “against” the Nation. So, Jeanette is offered no alternatives in the end, though she is now assisted by Cathy back from Germany. The play ends with a production note reading: “same as beginning” (258)—which underscores 110 Chapter Six
Charabanc’s habitual depiction of women characters, always ready to handle difficulties which may spring not only from political instability, but more often from everyday life, itself a site of constant struggle against the male-dominated society in and out of the Troubles.
Glasshouse Productions
Irish theatre has recently been criticized for its tendency to overlook gender and sexuality in favour of national identity (Fricker and Singleton 2004, 565). Although some contemporary dramatists such as Marina Carr and Frank McGuinness have successfully worked against this tendency, it is no coincidence that drama remains a form that women find difficult to access or identify with. This section attempts a queer reading of Glasshouse’s commitment to feminist issues by looking at women as subjects on the Irish stage through Eve K. Sedgwick’s notion of periperformativity. In her Touching Feeling (2003), Sedgwick questions the “temporal terms” of performative (speech) acts defined by British philosopher of language J. L. Austin which are at the core of queer gender theory. She then calls for a reconsideration of “the spatial register” stating that although periperformative acts are not themselves performatives, “they are about performatives and, more properly, … they cluster around performatives.” The proximity of the periperformative to the performative is such that “periperformative neighborhoods have prestigious centres (the explicit performative utterance) but no very fixed circumferences; yet the prestige of the center extends unevenly ...” (2003, 68). The effect of periperformative (speech) acts is made explicit by their ability to “invoke (if not participate fully in) the force of more than one illocutionary act” (Sedgwick 2003, 78)—an act performed when saying something.7 Sedgwick then discusses the topos of marriage as slavery in Victorian literature. By focusing on the idea of marriage as an exemplary performance she analyzes the (performative) acts around it and compares them to the acts which have instituted and maintained slavery in the United States. Following this example of performativity, I will now look at the legal exploitation of women as sanctioned by the text of the Irish constitution of 1937. Written under the influence of the Catholic Church, it assigned roles to men and women specifically written to support the Nation. Marriage thus became a way of expressing devotion to the Nation, to religious observance, and to the male-oriented legacy of Irish Nationalism. These aspects have repeatedly been performed on the Irish stage, where the figuration8 of the Cathleen helped secure women’s dutiful role(s) as supporters of home and Nation. By the time Glasshouse Two Companies 111 emerged, the conditions of women had improved due to Ireland’s entrance in the EU.9 Debates carried out by feminists throughout Ireland had contested Article 41 of the constitution, primarily in that it claimed:
2° The State … guarantees to protect the Family in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State. 2. 1° In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. / 2° The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home …
It is however in the ‘preamble’ of the constitution that we find State and Catholic Church empowered as conjunct authorities:
In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred, / We, the people of Éire, / Humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ, Who sustained our fathers through centuries of trial, / Gratefully remembering their heroic and unremitting struggle to regain the rightful independence of our Nation ….10
Early in the twentieth century, the figure of the Cathleen had dominated as the embodiment of the yet-to-be-formed Irish Nation, as evidenced, for instance, by W. B. Yeats’ Cathleen written at the time of the Revival. As supporter of the male armed struggle for an Irish free state, the Cathleen secured women’s position within the home, and set up their relegation to the “backstage.” In her reading of the traditional Cathleen, Victoria White (1993) highlights the shaping of a national identity in the theatre where women are objects to be ignored yet deified (see Chapter 3). Marriage can be considered a founding institution of a hetero-normative State based on laws made by the fathers of the nation; this relational structure was traditionally supported in early modern Ireland by women through their (domestically) productive and reproductive role, embodied by the normative icons of “Cathleen” and “Mother Ireland.” In a way, marriage is nation, in that it performs as a nation through a legal illocution producing new citizens; it is however a periperformative in that it also produces a series of even and uneven collateral acts such as the objectification of women described by White. My reading is based on the assumption that periperformativity can work as a productive political strategy to dismantle any dominant discourse. To talk of periperformativity 112 Chapter Six here is to assume that marriage as a performative act produces a series of acts that allow an anti-essentialist understanding of its effects. By disengaging from the temporality of a performative (act), periperformativity reveals the extended effects of marriage generally concealed by dominant representations. The 1980s opened a new phase of Irish feminism, in which “feminist energies tended to focus on educational, cultural and creative projects” (Smyth 1993, 266)—this was the background for Glasshouse’s two-fold re-invention of Irish theatre from women’s perspective. A programme note reads:
Glasshouse Productions play a vital role in the promotion of Irish women’s writing for the stage. We are interested in new writing, and in fostering emerging writers, through advice, improvisational workshops and through production. In addition to new writing, we engage ourselves in valuable research and reclamation of Irish women dramatists, whose work is gradually disappearing from history. (Glasshouse Productions 1993, 1)
When Clare Dowling, Katy Hayes, Siân Quill and Caroline Williams set up the company, Belfast-based Charabanc Theatre Company had been touring Ireland for some time as the only all-women theatre company with a political agenda. The company had trouble finding a voice in the all- male establishment of theatre criticism. There are no Irish Women Playwrights! I was the first episode of two distinct performances which the company devoted to promoting new writers for the theatre and retrieving the lost tradition of women playwrights in Ireland. My idea in this section is to use periperformativity to explore how relationships that exceed normative heterosexuality function in the proximity of marriage, re-mapping the idea of nation and/or the ideology of nationalism. However, it is to be pointed out that, in a contemporary context such as Glasshouse Productions’, nationalism involves attitudes and behaviours sustained by dominant cultural norms. Contemporary notions of citizenship and national identity look beyond the confines of the term “Nation” as it was conceived of in early twentieth century. Sedgwick insists that, since the periperformative depends on spatiality, it may untie “that fateful reliance of explicit performativity on the exemplary, on the single example—which so often has meant … the exemplarity of the marriage act itself.” The plays here considered share this same concern in portraying the “periperformative struggle to displace and remap the theatrical space of marriage” (2003, 79-80) both in its figurative-political and in its literary meaning. The performance of lesbianism and lesbian relationships in terms of Two Companies 113 what is “tangent to, yet different from” marriage can be examined in two lesbian plays by Emma Donoghue. I Know My Own Heart (1993)11 came out of a workshop organized by Glasshouse and Donoghue who then started a co-operative playwriting-company which commissioned her second play three years later. The progress achieved by the depenalization of homosexuality in Ireland (1993) revealed problems related to lesbian (in)visibility, still well below that of gay men. This was partly due to the prevailing heterosexual orientation of the women’s groups where lesbians were active but also relatively closeted, despite the support given by women to the rights of gay men since the 1970s (Rose 1994). I Know My Own Heart, a lesbian play by an openly lesbian writer, invited the audience to identify with its protagonist, the aristocratic Anne Lister. The play deals with gender and class as themes where sexual and social awareness overlap, focusing on the real Lister (1791-1840) and her diaries. Donoghue seems to appropriate certain motifs of the romance novel to tell the (autobiographical) story of upper-class, would-be-heir of her uncle’s fortune Lister and her relationship with lower class Marianne. Caught between her attraction to Marianne and the rules her status demands, Anne writes in her diary: “Considering her low station in life, Miss Brown is quite wonderful,” while Marianne is seduced by “her manners ... softly gentlemanlike” (104-5). But Anne also addresses Marianne as an “impertinent little baggage” (109). This seems to pose the question of what matters most, sexuality or class. Is it the sexual deviance of lesbianism that prevents Anne from enjoying a relationship with Marianne, and vice-versa? Or is the play foregrounding their difference in status? The core of the performance is provided by Donoghue’s skilful play on gender and characterization, with both Anne and Marianne holding to traditional notions of masculinity and femininity only to subvert them. Anne is nicknamed “Gentleman Jack” by the townspeople, and her manners appear, as mentioned above, “gentlemanlike.” At times Anne becomes Marianne’s “wife” and Marianne becomes Anne’s “Mistress Lister” (119), at others Anne is characterised as a “female-Don Juan.” Soon after Marianne married a man in order to elevate her status to match Anne’s—thus becoming “one man’s wife, and one woman’s … beloved” (131)—Anne takes to bed her friend, Tib (a woman of “independent means”) and Marianne’s little sister, Nancy. Gender troubling is also evident from the way characters address each other; Marianne feels the need to call Anne by a masculine name, Freddy. Anne wants Nancy to call her “Master” (141). The reversal of gender conventions is best evident when Anne flirts with all the other women as a Don-Juan would do. By the end of the play, each of them is aware of 114 Chapter Six having become one of Anne’s “ladies” (149). The play anticipated the company’s concerns about the condition of women that was to become its distinctive feature, and also shared in the growing debate on sexualities evidenced by the upsurge of gay and lesbian activism. References to the Lister’s real diary written in code are important in the play. This intimate literary form available to women hints about feelings and experiences hidden and secretly shared by the characters,12 for lesbianism is always a “sweet intercourse [which] must be the best kept secret in the history of womankind” (117). Donoghue’s debut as a playwright carries the hallmark of much of her later work where she uncovers the lost histories of women in order to offer alternative contemporary narratives of the Nation. In this regard she seems to move towards Adrienne Rich’s notion of lesbian existence “as a reality, and as a source of knowledge and power available to women; or with the institution of heterosexuality itself as a beachhead of male dominance”. Implicit in Donoghue’s play is an attempt to deal with an experience which “suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence” (1980, 633, 648). Anne Lister’s story is developed to occupy a “tangent” location to the reproduction of normative heterosexuality. In 1996 Glasshouse Productions commissioned a new play from Donoghue. Ladies and Gentlemen13 is about British vaudeville star Annie Hindle (born 1847) and draws on “the music hall, vaudeville and variety act format to both entertain and foreground issues of performing gender ...” (McMullan 2000, 44). Gender roles are subverted, and sexuality is seen less as something assigned by a (heterosexual) norm than as a series of positions which may be freely occupied. In the play Donoghue experiments with temporal sequences. Set in 1891, the action shifts back to 1880 and forward to 1981, juxtaposing Annie’s two comebacks to the stage. The first one occurred after she had been deceived and beaten by her husband, the second after her lover, Irish “exiled” Ryanny, had died. Most of the play is set in the New York vaudeville theatre, but Annie (a male impersonator), Gilbert (a queer female impersonator), and Ella (Annie’s ex-lover, a stage dresser and then male impersonator) perform and deconstruct genders both on and off the stage. In one scene we see Annie cutting herself with a razor in an attempt to encourage the growth of a moustache. In her analysis of female cross-dressing, Marjorie Garber has spoken of the third “term” which she posits in contrast with binary gender oppositions. But, she continues, “the third term is not a term. Much less is it a sex .... The “third” is a mode of articulation, a way of describing a Two Companies 115 space of possibility. Three puts in question the idea of one: of identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge” (1992, 11). This is assimilated in Donoghue’s play by the theatricality of Anne’s cross-dressing, a way to perform and identify with “a space of possibility” which the vaudeville stage allows her. She explains what it means to her to wear men’s clothes:
RYANNY. Why do you pretend to be a man? ANNIE. I don’t pretend anything. I impersonate men, which is far more demanding than just being one. RYANNY. But do you like wearing men’s clothes? ANNIE. They’re only called that because men got a hold of them first. You bet your sweet life I like ‘em; they’ve got pockets for everything. (22)
The background message of the play is the liberating potential of theatre: a “world of one’s own” where everything can be performed, and thus can be. The stage offers an opportunity to perform, to give reality to what must not or cannot be real, as in the marriage scene at the end of Act I, when Annie gives Ryanny the ring her husband had given her, “then [they] assume the formal pose of a Victorian husband-and-wife photograph … RYANNY turns and tosses her bouquet over her shoulders into the audience” (65). Like Trudy Hayes’s Out of My Head (1991), this play addresses the often violent nature of traditional husband-wife relationships. In this regard a further application of Rich’s theories and her notion of “male sex-right to women” would indicate that the domestic violence performed in Hayes’s play is justified as a collateral act of marriage; “male sex-right to women” sustains women’s exploitation at home by “defending sexual slavery within the family on the basis of “family privacy and cultural uniqueness” on the other” (1980, 645). When Ryanny asks Annie about her black eye, she replies:
ANNIE. No no, it was me who kept misunderstanding. I’d look in the mirror and see two great black eyes and ask myself, “Annie, did your distinguished thespian husband raise his fist to you last night? Why no, he couldn’t have, he’s the people’s darling. I must have walked into a wall.” Come think of it. I must have walked into two walls, every Saturday night. (40-1)
Ladies and Gentlemen is interspersed with songs. The use of songs, employed to emphasize a given message with political intent, is a recurrent strategy in feminist drama. The play draws, above all, from the tradition of female-male impersonators in the vaudeville, where songs were also used to express serious themes. For some things there are no songs, as for Annie’s relationship with Ryanny: “Where am I to get the words? There 116 Chapter Six aren’t any songs about things like this” (49). But at the very end of the play, when Annie makes up her mind to go back to the stage, she sings A Real Man: in Donoghue’s plays, women always manage to find their own voice. In less than ten years, Glasshouse Productions managed to explore feminist issues, putting on stage the oppression of women from women’s perspective, and experimenting with possibilities of gender in performance. This undertaking necessarily questioned the traditional masculinist concept of the Nation. McMullan and Williams have pointed out that although some male playwrights have dismantled masculinity and national allegiance “their critical canonization has left little space for those whose imaginative world, stories or audiences fall outside the boundaries of what has become recognized as the national tradition of Irish theatre” (2002, 1237). The women of Glasshouse have contributed to re-writing this tradition in two ways, by focusing on the new and by recovering what had been lost, forgotten or deliberately left out.
Notes
1 For a history of Gay Sweatshop and four plays produced by the company, see Osment (1989). 2 Drag Act was part of Threesome, a performance staged at the Drill Hall including also Phyllis Nagy’s Entering Queens and David Greenspan’s Jack. 3 I wish to thank Brenda Winter for her useful suggestion. 4 In Kimberlé W. Crenshaw’s formulation, the theory of intersectionality sees social inequality as the effect of interacting socially and culturally constructed differences. See Crenshaw (1991) for further reference. 5 With the exception of The Hamster Wheel, all quotations from playtexts by Charabanc Theatre Company are taken from Harris (2006). 6 Jones [1990] 1994; subsequent references are in brackets. 7 Sedgwick is questioning British philosopher J.L. Austin’s theorization on speech acts as a form of action, which focused on an analysis of how saying something is actually to perform an action. 8 I refer here to Donna Haraway’s use of the term “figuration” as a political trope that can be embodied, or rather as a “theory of representation that critiques the literal realism of science, scientistic thinking, and ‘secular Christian Platonism,’ and offers an alternative in self-conscious troping, or embodied, performative images” (1996, 37). See Haraway (1996); Braidotti (1994); and Curti (1998) for further reference. 9 Amendments to the constitution achieved through referendum in the period 1937- 2004 included the recognition of specified religions (1972 Fifth Amendment, signed into law in 1973), which remove the special position occupied by the Catholic Church. Two Companies 117
10 The Irish Constitution (1937),
PART III:
CASE STUDIES
CHAPTER SEVEN
NEIL BARTLETT
One of the critical standpoints for the present section is that a discussion on Bartlett’s work cannot be separated from his statements over his positioning as a contemporary gay artist and his relation to gay history and art in general.1 My analysis will be informed by readings of how the affect shame is productive in terms of the shaping of identity and sexual dissidence. The question of appropriation plays an important role for an understanding of Bartlett, no matter the position in his varied career (Williams 1989). I will thus address how this impinges on his meta- theatrical vision. Bartlett combines the sacred and the profane, the artistically “high” and the conventionally “low,” seriousness and camp, butch and drag styles in his attempt to demystify, “the division that dogs every corner of the British creative establishment” (Bartlett 2007a, 40)— that between mainstream theatre and experimental performance. In her study on the politics of affect, Eve K. Sedgwick indicates that shame has the power to destabilize the communicative act at the same time as it effects “powerfully productive and powerfully social metamorphic possibilities” (2003, 65). With the sole exception of Pornography: A Spectacle (1984/5), the works under exam here are written and/or directed by Bartlett and in which he has performed either as part of his collective project Gloria (active 1988-1998) or as a solo performer. I will investigate a series of instances in Bartlett’s texts, both for the stage and for television, in which his going into shame is, as he admits, a healing strategy, and above all a productive and political statement (Halperin and Traub 2009, 349). Following the discreet success enjoyed by Dressing Up (1983), Bartlett went on to direct Pornography: A Spectacle. Produced in co-operation with Ivan Cartwright, Duncan Roy, and Bartlett’s long-time collaborator, Robin Whitmore as the then 1982 Theatre Company, the show poses some interesting questions over the practices of gay drag. In its attempt to shape a language of gay culture, Pornography presented a series of intra- and extra-textual elements re-read in parodic form, “seen to be altered or viewed obliquely,” as Bartlett points out (Robert Wallace 1985, 34). This look askance, oblique on things is of resonance here. Few doubts remain 122 Chapter Seven over the fact that Bartlett’s greatest merit is to have brought to light the queer culture which was part of the British historical background long before the term “queer” came to prominence in the 1990s; which is also to say, long before it became a fashionable term in worldly academic circles and the publishing industry.2 The politically subversive implications of drag constitute a privileged site of queer theory’s resistance to heteronormative practices, as Judith Butler’s ground breaking Gender Trouble (1990) first laid claim to. With its altercation of parodic and citational practices, drag lays bare the facticity of gender. For Bartlett, however, the question is not that of being someone, but of doing, and/or of performing someone by wearing drag: “I’m not a certain type of person or a member of a category of persons; I’m engaged in a particular and willful activity ... what matters is my power of decision and not what I decide ... I’m not dressing up as a woman, but dressing up as a gay man” (Robert Wallace 1985, 31). What Bartlett sees as a problem with language has slowly come to be institutionalized, we could say “normativized,” through academic discourses on gender performativity. We will see later that he uses drag to retrieve his own affective relationship with the British “queer” sub-culture, especially in his semi-autobiographical musical piece, Night After Night (1993). Bartlett’s monologues collect his views on love and courage, and are characterised by their site-specificness, in that they are emotionally and immediately “close to their audiences in time and place” (2005, 5-6). The debates around the implementation of Clause 28 (1988), the Aids epidemic, and their effects on the building of a form of political resistance to the conservatism of Thatcherite Britain are the subject of Pedagogue (1988), Where is Love? (1987), That’s What Friends Are For (1988), That’s How Strong My Love Is (1989) and A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep.3 Co-produced with independent filmmaker Stuart Marshall, Pedagogue4 features Bartlett in the guise of a teacher about to be interviewed by an unnamed voice-off. The point is to analyse “in comic style the possible implications of Clause 28.” Bartlett’s outfit is voraciously proud and provocatively effective: a pair of jeans with one button undone—the camera often switches to a close-up on this particular—; a jeans jackets and a fringe leather jacket above; leather belt and boots, his naked body emerging every now and then from under the jacket; a safety pin reading “CARE.” Bartlett-teacher first goes over his tastes, and denies having ever slept with one of his students, along with any possible reference to his homosexuality. This he over-stresses when he interrupts the interviewer to add: “No, I’m not [a homosexual]. I just wanted to get that quite clear onto Neil Bartlett 123 the tape.” The tone changes as he starts rummaging through the contents of his bag, and reveals copies of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library and Henry James’s The Bodley Head, a rather flamboyant “change of clothes,” a copy of a fitness magazine, leather gloves, a cock ring and other SM gear which he disguises as his “jewellery,” and a bottle of popper as “perfume.” The hilarious second half has a series of students, male and female, stating that they have all turned to lesbians and gays after having attended Bartlett’s classes. It is by now a given that the worse effects of the law preventing local authorities to publicize or openly promote discussions on homosexuality led to the belief that is was alright to discriminate in matters sexual.5 And indeed, anti-homophobic theories and debates have started from the very premise that homosexuality is related to contagion. In Pedagogue, this climaxes in the mocking tone of the end credits, showing evidence that none of the organisations involved in the project received local or state government funding, with an indication of the sexual orientation of the people involved added on. Bartlett’s single-authored direct response to “the new law” in That’s How Strong My Love Is6 is a combination of five different scenes involving different characters. A TV placed nearby a sofa shows nightly images of Soho, and introduces Bartlett’s analysis of the unmeasurable effects of public censorship on the personal sphere.7 As he tells the Dutch man, “you’re not supposed to be allowed to talk about it to children, and ... if they don’t hear about it when they’re kids then they won’t grow up gay ... there won’t be any here in England, you see, that’s the idea.” With a clear focus on shame and homophobia, the piece is characterised by long repeated “bleeps” to cover explicit sexual content (56, 58); but Bartlett, out and proud, turns shame into a political statement, self-affirmation, and a statement on love. Gestures of affection are counteracted with the overall feeling of being in times of pain, possibly relieved by the affirmation of a circle of affect, itself a partial account of Bartlett himself. So, for instance, the closing scene shows him caressing and kissing his boyfriend’s head under the gentle sound of a piano. That’s How Strong My Love Is is an early observation over the relational implications of gay shame in terms of a form of counter-public discourse which is explored further in the next two monologues. Sedgwick analyses shame as a double movement, first involving individuality, then a form of interactive sociality. This outward sociality is responsible for the emergence of a sense of self whose identity is thoroughly relational (2003, 37), which is what is at stake in Bartlett’s use of the solo performance and of theatricality to build affective forms of overtly political responses. For Butler, the giving of an account of oneself 124 Chapter Seven involved, for instance, in the monologue is a fundamentally social experience (2004). This is shown by Bartlett’s explorations of the lives of gay men in contemporary England enriched by autobiographical elements. In particular, Bartlett re-assesses the authority of the “I” that speaks in terms of shared experience, of a communality of feelings reverberating around the potentials of shame. He embodies, through dress code, gestures, and behaviours this politically productive affect and demonstrates that identity and subjectivity cannot be contained merely by language (Clare Wallace 2006a, 11). A case in point is Where is Love?8 which is delivered in the form of a dedication and/or declaration of love to all the gay people “abused” and “humiliated.” Here, Bartlett’s intent is self-affirming, just like his voice which remains self-controlled throughout (9). He appears “shirtless, wearing boots, 501s, a black leather jacket and black lather gloves; sideburns, a moustache, greased hair, a can of beer and the inevitable Malboro” (9), and goes on with a list of “dedicated to-s,” eventually summoning up a whole community of people he is devoted to interact with:
... and I would like to say, boys: this is one is for you; boys ... I would like to give you...all of me. ... Take All Of Me. (12-3)
A form of political response developed through the public display of affects is also a recurring feature of That’s What Friends Are For.9 The piece opened in an abandoned Victorian house corridor—a likely metaphor for the neglect affecting the gay community at the time of Aids. The walls of the corridor are ornate with “pornographic images of snogging, haloed skinheads” designed by Whitmore. Here, Bartlett answers his father’s doubts and preoccupations over his choosing a lifestyle so starkly in contrast with all that a man would want to live for, which is also what men supposedly are for. His father’s concerns are manifold, from the fear of growing old, of feeling scared and lonely, to the seeming much more preoccupying absence of somebody to cook for his son, take him to the hospital, drive him places, a wife and maybe children to keep him company (49-50). An isolated group of “friends, acquaintances, lovers and pieces of current trade” are revealed as Bartlett delivers the monologue face to the camera. This shadowy representation of men emerging from the dark corners of the corridor is a well-structured metaphor of the death evoked by the ghostly reality of the Aids crisis on the background. The fear of a lonely death is indeed interrogated at the very close of the monologue: Neil Bartlett 125
And my Father said, but who’s going to come to your funeral? ...and I said ...well I said ...Father, ...That’s What Friends Are For. (51-2)
That’s What Friends Are For was in fact revived by Bartlett repeatedly at funerals throughout the 1980s, those congregations, as he says, of “young men with cropped hair holding onto each other for dear life” (47). The accent placed on friends replacing family unions is Bartlett’s response to (not solely his own) father’s concerns, as well as an attack to those opposed to the idea of “the social” in homosexual love. This invitation is further stressed when he starts kissing more or less passionately all his friends, as the quotation from Simeon Solomon reads “that company beloved of me above all the rest.” The two monologues poses interesting questions over Bartlett’s favourite themes. On one hand, he deals with his own relationship with his father—a primary source of Night After Night—; on the other, he foregrounds the role played by the body, and how it can communicate by means of non-verbal expressions typical of his work. So, the boyfriend and friends he caresses and kisses in That’s How Strong My Love Is and That’s What Friends Are For are significant additions to the story-lines, in that they count as presences that are felt and with whom we are asked to possibly feel together. These bodies bear the signs of shame and are characterised by it; they bear the stigma attached to this affect as a defining category of gay experience. The idea of owning one’s body is crucial both in Bartlett’s original works and in his adaptations. In the case of The Seven Sacraments of Nicolas Poussin (1998)10 or A Vision, it is the ways in which the body, at least for gay men of his generation, is “experienced as policed, shamed, medicalised, repressed, oppressed, alienated,” at the same time as it is also “experienced and celebrated as the site of the route to liberation,”11 which is how it is displayed via the body wearing drag or dressed in butch in the monologues. To introduce the next work we need to make a few brief considerations about the postmodern aesthetics informing Bartlett’s uses of time and history. As a playwright, he always starts with the feeling that the present is “too close” to be dealt with. Drawing from the past, according to him, is still a way to deal with anecdotes, “but they begin to have a resonance, they begin to have a pattern which means that you can use them to articulate things in your own life” (Kinsman 1985, 9). This form of anecdotal history of the self and of theatre, of subjugating autobiographical 126 Chapter Seven experience to theatricality and performance, is condensed in the characters versions of Night After Night.12 To refer to them as versions, that is, as representations always underlaid by their self-conscious construction as artificial selves, seems quite appropriate not just because their identity and that of the actors playing them coincide, but for how they are conceived as “types, anecdotes or quotations as much as they are people” (4). This choice confirms Bartlett’s adoption of a theatre whose main intent is to explode any encapsulating category, such as for instance those between character and performer. A similar subversion of theatrical norms is involved in the developmental process of the play, which was first performed as a solo monologue together with Bartlett’s long-time co- operator Nicolas Bloomfield, and subsequently turned into a huge-cast production for the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh and the Royal Court (August and November, 1993). In Night After Night, time is dilated to the extremes. The action takes place from 6.40 to 7.30 pm on a Spring night in 1958, that is, the year Bartlett was born. A proper definition of the work is that of a “gay dance theatre piece” (Kiernander 1994, 230). It is also the final episode of Gloria Theatre Company’s trilogy following their rewriting of Balzac’s short- story, the highly acclaimed Sarrasine (1990).13 Bartlett plays his own father, Trevor Bartlett, on the evening when he heard the news he was going to become a father. Trevor buys two tickets for the hottest show in town (originally, West Side Story) to celebrate the occasion. But, while he is waiting in the foyer for his lover to come, he realises he is up to his neck in the paraphernalia of “the homosexuals who kept the stage running during the boy-meets-girl era” (Irving Wardle, Independent on Sunday). At the end of act one, Trevor even becomes physically part of the show; or better, for the part of the show which calls extensively upon the musical in order to reaffirm its respectability as a theatre form, a point Bartlett is keen to stress (Edgar 1999). From here on, the play develops a deeply enjoyable feast where the people who share a double love—of theatre, and of men (Hodson 1993a, 84)—provide through songs the background narrative to the father-son relationship. The actual Trevor Bartlett playing himself is one of the additional presences on the sofa in That’s How Strong My Love Is. Here, their encounter is based on the idea of Neil playing both by virtue of their physical resemblance; it has a quasi-supernatural, dream-like flavour, and provides the meaning of “the dream that ev’ry other dad and mother dream” (55). In performance, this scene is realized by having François Testory playing Neil. Bartlett’s changing between the role of father and son interests me for the double grip affecting the overall play which it points to. In interview, he has viewed this point in terms of a two- Neil Bartlett 127 fold move, of giving life to his own father and murdering him at one and the same time, in the sense that “I’m taking his place, literally, my body occupies the space of his body, my voice is his voice” (Hodson 1993b, 59). Night After Night is Bartlett’s most daring venture as regards its architecture, production, and cast. The performances of Paul Shaw (the barman) and Reginald Bundy (the Cloakroom queen) were particularly appreciated by the London papers. Through postmodern rewriting techniques, part autobiography, part documentary, Bartlett enriches the notion of time in his history pieces. His claim that there comes a time for every gay man when “everything becomes a form of biography” (Kinsman 1985, 10) can be then used, I think, to read the form of theatre evoked in his works as the construction of an archive of personal stories “by which the fleeting emotion of shame has instituted far more durable, structural changes in one’s relational and interpretive strategies toward both self and others” (Sedgwick 2003, 62). This, I would add, is self-evidently valid for Bartlett’s readings of gay artists from the past, such as those carried out in A Vision and The Seven Sacraments. It also hints at the connection of gay experience with the shaping of a language which is, as Brian Roberts notices, “literal as well as a metaphor of performed identity” (2000, 184). In the show within the show, Neil embraces and dances with his father, thus giving way to the “real” one, i.e. his own life:
my father is going to have a son, and it will happen, the curtain will rise night after night and so hold my hand and I’ll take you there, hold my hand in the dark, hold it, day after day, year after year, night after night after night. (57)
By amalgamating past, present and future, Night after Night insists on the possibility that regimes of truth be contested, that as Reginal Bundy says, Art and Life are best when rehearsed (34). It is a work decidedly and uncompromisingly “about theatre” (Bartlett 2005, 61) which flattens the divisions between theatre and meta-theatre. It insists on a truth—the all- encompassing presence of gay people (as actors, theatre staff workers and so on) which accompanied straight people’s entertainment every single night—which, though not hidden from view, is taken centre stage as if it were unravelled for the very first time, and which confronts its contemporary audiences with strong affection. By having his self “contemplating his father’s orientations just as his father is confronted by his” (Sabine Durrant, Indipendent on Sunday), Bartlett acknowledges a truth of his own, that is, in 1990s London, having to claim the right to the love that still dares not speak its name. 128 Chapter Seven
A Vision14 makes of shame the common territory for comparing the life (and fall) of pre-Raphaelite artist Solomon, “a gay visionary whose open homosexuality was both the breaking and the making of him” (Kirk 1987, 74) and gay life in London, years into the Aids epidemic. In the company- devised version of the piece I am going to examine here (part three), the “Vauxhall Tavern-style drag” (Tim Robinson, City Limits) of the dialogues and the presence of the three drag queens Bette Bourne, Cartwright, and Regina Fong are ways for Bartlett to manoeuvre his ability to speak about and for the present by drawing from a queer past. In particular, the queens elude the confines of performance via their staging of their own real stories. They accompany Neil in his imaginary journey into Solomon’s life and highly evocative poem; but, as he has confirmed, “[e]veryone in the audience knew that the stories they told in the show are all true, ... they weren’t acting, so much as acting out their true, personal selves” (Monforte 2007c, 49). This brings me to consider once more the importance occupied by the body in Bartlett’s works. I would agree with Richard Cave and his invitation to read them not as plays, but performance texts, in that the actors—such as the queen in this case—shift intermittently “between the roles they are playing, the stage personae they have each cultivated during their careers, and sudden glimpses of their private selves” (1997, 240). Here, this occasion is also offered by Bartlett’s choice of an alter-ego, a character that is “written, constructed, edited, performed.”15 Furthermore, on a metaphorical lever, it bears upon the conception of myth as “a system of truths”16 related, in A Vision, to the public shaming of the homosexual. For the published version of Night After Night, which was also first performed as a solo show, Bartlett expands the conventional working methods of text-based theatre. The published script is in fact “not entirely the property of the author” (4), not the result of a writing process, but of a series of interviews carried out with cast, theatre workers and even his own parents. A Vision was originally transcripted during performances.17 Bartlett enters the stage as “a semi-naked man, posed like an artist’s model, partially draped in a length of dull red silk” bearing the visible signs of “powdered white flesh and dull red hair” (87), a convincing metaphor, I would say, of the diseased body confirmed by the moment when he checks his body “for signs of HIV infection” (95). The colours used for the production play a fundamental role, and contribute to determine the message of the overall piece; they also hint at their own association with the affects love and shame which fuel this compelling work. The queens have red hair and pre-Raphaelite scarlet velvet robes, “They have gold shoes, and heavy make-up” (91). In That’s How Strong My Love Is, the sofa placed centre screen is bright red, too. In a way, these Neil Bartlett 129 elements lead to consider how later revivals of A Vision, and I am thinking especially of the 1991 production at the Drill Hall, could resonate with the whole representations of Aids and its metaphors, condensed in the red ribbon which would later come to signify it.18 This would make it a really interesting, though debatable revival; and by this I mean that the site- and time-specific quality of the piece perhaps elude any possible reiteration of this emotionally charged theatrical experience. In A Vision, Bartlett recounts the problems of being an out gay in 1980s London: a woman passes by with her car and asks, “excuse me are you gay because if you are you are going to die of AIDS you wanker”; the walls on his own way home bear writings such as “GAY, Got Aids Yet?”, “AIDS ... it says Arse Injected Death Sentence and underneath that is written Queer Today, Gone Tomorrow and underneath that is written One Man’s Meat is another Man’s Poison”; a neighbour whispers “you fucking queer” under his breath. Homophobic speech and public disclosures of hate are interspersed with recollections of Solomon’s later life, namely his turning from “a good Jew” to a bad Jew with a “filthy and matted” beard as he chose to be proud in Victorian England. For, as Bette announces,
[a]t ten past seven on the evening of February the 11th 1873, Mr Simeon Solomon was in a public toilet in Christopher Place, WC1 ... Just off Oxford Street round the back of Selfridges. He was with one Mr George Roberts, aged 60. (100)
Metaphorically, the laying bare of Neil and Simeon, their public shaming, is taken up by Bartlett’s performance, playing with the effects shame has on the “narcissistic circuit” enacted by the flooding of the subject in light on stage (Sedgwick 2003, 38). There is a recurrent, clever use of shadow and light whenever his own naked body is revealed, either in its entirety— though only in glimpses—or by the bodily gestures he performs with the red robe. There is also a significant change of tone and perspective as regards the uses of shame in Bartlett’s other pieces dealing with Aids. Here, the closing moments of the piece have him alone at home in the middle of the night: “It was two o’clock in the morning, but I decided to fix myself dinner, because I think that when you live on your own, you have to take really good care of yourself” (98). In monologues such as That’s What Friends Are For, by contrast, the stereotype of the lonely gay men, doomed to a life with no future, is undone by the affirmation of the love of friends, lovers, and acquaintances. Furthermore, the repetition of words and sentence structures in Bartlett’s long monologue on Aids in A Vision places the stress on fear and despair, as if to say that times have slowly 130 Chapter Seven grown harder than they used to be. This change in tone certainly strengthens the connection with the figure of the doomed homosexual, i.e. Solomon. It is a connection acted out materially at the very end of the play, with the letter/gay-sex-ad-response Bartlett receives from the Victorian artist, and which turns out to be totally blank. At one point, Ivan tells of how Solomon “never, never, never, never, never, never, not once in 32 years, from 1873 to 1905, he never apologised for what he’d done” (105). Bartlett takes up Solomon’s message, hinted at by the blank page, and in his final speech enacts, mirror-like, the artist’s self-affirmative, proud declaration:
And then I looked up, and it was morning, and I couldn’t see the stars any more, and I was walking home on my own at four o’clock in the morning, and I said, I said out loud I’m going to keep on doing this. (112)
A touching work on the potential of theatre, A Vision uses shame as performance, reinforcing it “as more than just its result or a way of warding it off, though, importantly, it is those things. Shame is the affect that mantles the threshold between introversion and extroversion, between absorption and theatricality, between performativity and—performativity” (Sedgwick 2003, 38). This sets a parallel between the identity of the performer, or actor, and the uses of shame for strategical theatrical and political purposes. The underlying thread of The Seven Sacraments19 is how shame is constructed culturally and how it can generate a collective response in the time-span of a performance. The evaluations are made on the basis of an intimately public experience such as the ceremony of the sacraments of the Anglican Church. Also, Bartlett’s and Whitmore’s shared experience of having been present at a death is a major influence in the work (Woods 1998). Informed by techniques of deconstruction, Bartlett gives a lecture on Poussin’s series of paintings20 with the attempt to see if they are still of resonance to a contemporary audience. He expands on the oft-quoted Book of Common Prayer teaching that they be “not ... enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly or lightly” (111). The overall tone has something of the sacred, and resembles Monsieur Paul Freat de Chantelou’s private collection of Poussin’s paintings in Paris.21 The production opened “in the bowels of the London Hospital in Whitechapel” (95), and is arguably Bartlett’s most site-specific effort to date. During the performance, chalk drawings sketched by Whitmore served to give representation to what could not be articulated through voice, and accompanied the projection of the paintings on Bartlett’s own body, dressed in a surgical gown, and on the screen behind him. He revives the ceremonies while lecturing about Neil Bartlett 131 the paintings; which means he adapts them—thus also examining his Catholic background—and sees what residue the sacraments have left him. Shame is involved in both sides of this two-fold reading process, as shown by the slide(s) I am discussing here. ‘Penance’ glimpses, at least in part, at the shameful body of “woman.” It is a quirky look at the divergence in representations between Mary Magdalen and the unnamed Bride. The Magdalen has her hair untied, her shoulder exposed and a name, whereas as Bartlett notices, “the other doesn’t.” The symbolic difference, we learn, is in the shade left by the wedding ring, “the characteristic callous just below the first joint of the third finger thus enabling us to distinguish between the accepted, and the unacceptable” (120-1) as religion has them. The painting depicts the moment when the Magdalen bows and kisses Jesus feet, which is the particular Bartlett re-articulates from the standpoint of the present, charging it with sexual connotations:
... oh, I’m sorry—but I hadn’t let myself go all evening, and I ... I went right up to him, and I took hold of his foot in my right hand and I ... He opens a can of beer. She had no bloody shame—she did it right there in front of all those men. She bent over—and I’ve done that—she took ‘is foot in ’er ‘and—and I’ve done that—she opened ‘er mouth, and she...
Pardon me. No, really. (118-9)
“There are moments,” says Bartlett, “when you have an absolutely concrete sense of negotiating with the audience around the issue of shame, when you know you are about to do a shameful action.” Movements of shame, here and elsewhere in the work, are stigmatised on and acted through body language. The greatly irreverent tone of the sequence above is, for Bartlett, a means to show the cultural productions of this affect. He plays with the fact that, as he has said in interview, when we watch a performer “we share their crime; we share their shame”; this sharing of shame becomes even more powerful because of the silent context of the actual performance. Such scenes, he goes on to say, reverse the relations between the shamer and the shamed, so that the audience becomes responsible for the actors’ shameful act (Halperin and Traub 2009, 344-5). More to the point, the fact of “enacting” a moment in one’s own terms is, in this case, exploited to convey the full extent of and possibilities of expression for the “performance of a sexuality organized around shame” (Sedgwick 2003, 54).22 In “Marriage,” Bartlett casts the wedding ring as symbolization of the 132 Chapter Seven resistance to the social which heteronormativity attaches to homosexual love, a gesture materialised when “(He takes off and holds up his wedding ring)” (111). I am interested in the notion of marriage as an emblematic performative act, that is, as the sampling of the power to do something with words. In particular, I would consider the figure of the “compulsory witness”, by which Adam Frank and Sedgwick refer to each isolated member of any congregation gathered at ceremonies. The compulsory aspect is effected by the juxtaposition of the solemnity and silence of the moment with the materiality of the attendants as physical presences (1995, ‘Introduction’). The notion of what is and can be representable and/or represented is thus interrogated, and this is something Bartlett does at the very end of the piece. As the production at the Whitechapel hospital in London drew to a close, Bartlett left the lecture-hall and moved to an adjacent room where the audience, as would-be attenders of the lecture, could find him sitting beside a bed, “head bowed, holding the hand of the person lying in it— except that there is no person there.” The audience was interpellated to share publicly the memory of the mourning of someone hinted at by the “hollow in the pillow” (128). Again, a double movement can be outlined here. On one level, the scene calls for the shared experience of mourning, and of overcoming the shame of seeing it as a relational experience. At the same time, it stresses on the issue of non-representability. Bartlett expresses this by shaping, via body language, what he calls “a consideration of, indeed a dissection of, the inert body, the unresponsive body—the body for which there is no passage of time”; a case in point was his performing of the doctor’s role. The scene subverts theatrical conventions, in that it uses experimentation to question the issue of living the moment of something. He views the sacraments as “a re-enactment of the archetypal version of this moment, and ... in all the other times that this has happened” (Woods 1998, 121) and builds his vision on the theatricality of shame as always gathered from the theatricality of the sacrament; such is his provocative message in this compelling show. Performed at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in London on World Aids’ Day, 2007 Helpless23 returns to issues of Aids and its impact on the lives of gay men of today. The “I” that speak is Bartlett himself, a forty-nine- year-old gay man with “a confession to make” as declared in the opening line. The idea is to discuss safe sex, and in particular the implications posed by the use of the condom. With earnest clarity and cutting-edge humour, Bartlett gets straight to the core of the problem:
... it’s just a bloody fact, a bloody fact, Neil Bartlett 133
that we’re all helpless, when Push. Comes. To Shove. (1)
He is prouder than ever, and totally and purely confident while saying the reality is that “nobody can CHANGE what they WANT” (2). In a turning upside down of issues of homophobia, Bartlett carries forth a powerful interrogation and celebration of gay men’s “habits”, not only between the sheets. The result is a consistent evaluation of the potential offered by solo performance “for dramatizing and integrating shame, in the sense of rendering this potentially paralysing affect narratively, emotionally, and performatively productive” (Sedgwick 2003, 44), such as for instance, when he exhibits a condom, or when he summons a series of detailed possible sexual encounters. The short monologue is indeed characterised by explicit sexual content. And, before Bartlett puts the condom back in his pocket, he makes sure it has been understood “for use later in the evening” (3). The funny punchlines on gay sex and the condom are contrasted with a much more serious heart-felt recollection of the Aids spread:
twenty five years later, standing here, and having a good old varda round a tavern in Vauxhall, Still with Love— As ever— Love, in all its guises.
As Bartlett leaves the audience wondering about what has indeed changed, the stress he places, once again, on love shows evidence of his on-going concern in coming to terms with the Aids crisis. What has, instead, changed is the site-specificness he has always used in his monologues. The focus is certainly all-encompassing, and may well adapt to several different contexts.24 Such, at least, seems to be indicated by the use of the first-person pronoun with which he wishes his good-night to everyone:
I Just
Can’t
Stop. (3)
The variety of Bartlett’s career as writer, playwright, director, performer, and translator cannot be fully explored here. As artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith (1994-2004), he has tried to promote an art “always seeking to extend and challenge and deepen its relationship with the audience both formally and—most importantly—socially” (Bartlett 134 Chapter Seven
2007a, 44), just like he has done with his original, experimental works for “theatre” and television. The literary references informing his works, as well as his allusions to the past and influence of his private life are endless and artfully enmeshed in his writing; but they are never self-referential, and make for rewarding emotional and intimate experiences. With an astute and crafted attitude which, for this very reason, is never exclusively “his own,” Bartlett conveys the wide range of political messages which can be expressed by “plunging” into shame (Halperin and Traub 2009). He makes performance the best way to talk about ourselves.
Notes
1 See Cave (1997); Roberts (2000); Deeney (2006) for further reference. 2 See also my communication with the author. 3 From here onwards, A Vision. 4 Pedagogue is under property of LUX, London. Available on-line at
19 Bartlett 2005, 95-128; subsequent references are in brackets. 20 The Seven Sacraments were originally a double series of paintings, which Poussin terminated in 1648. 21 It is known that de Chantelou’s allowed only one of his guests to watch only one work of the collection at a time, but for whatever long as it suited him/her. 22 See also Halperin and Traub (2009, 349). 23 Bartlett 2007b; subsequent references are in brackets. 24 Communication with the author.
CHAPTER EIGHT
CLAIRE DOWIE
Dowie with her sparkly unconventional persona made her first appearance on the British alternative scene in the 1980s, following her disillusionment with the increasing appeal TV was having on stand-up comedy (Stephenson and Langridge 1997, 157-8). The term “theatre” is one she usually tends to dismiss as an expression of “dullness.”1 The present section will first investigate a series of feminist articulations of the gendered body and the notion of a “true” womanhood as they emerge from Dowie’s successful monologues, Why is John Lennon Wearing a Skirt? (1990)2, and Leaking from Every Orifice (1994). Drawing from queer gender theories and post-structuralist anarchist thought, as well as from the connections between them, it will then move on to analyse Dowie’s later works. My attempt is to read her incessant deconstruction of the organizing principles which regulate sex and sexuality in her later works as an expression of an anarchic political stance. John Lennon3 is structured on the protagonist’s rejection of being female, and is mainly drawn from Dowie’s own childhood (Stephenson and Langridge 1997). For Dowie, it all began with dress codes:
This is me. Dressing how I want to dress and thinking what I want to think. And I did it and it was fun. I still had friends, I was still popular, still went out, went dancing, and if there was a boy I danced with a boy, and if there was I girl I danced with a girl. If there was nobody I danced with myself... (44)
Through her dress-code—here as much as in her subsequent works— Dowie combines “the potentially androgynous with the highly gendered, [and] in turn conditions behaviours that are also highly gendered,” as Gabriele Griffin writes (2004, 157-8). In H to He (2004), this aspect reaches a paradox when the protagonist, slowly turning from woman into a man, finds herself in a supermarket and realizes even vegetables are assigned a gender. In John Lennon, Dowie makes her point with the help of several costume changes, from school uniform to T-shirt, jeans, and a 138 Chapter Eight leather jacket, re-staging her unconventional, quasi-personal story until adult life. The potential androgyny named by Griffin is particularly revealing if we look at how reviewers of Dowie’s piece insisted on this aspect. For the paper What’s On, the monologue is all about the fact that “we are not born boys and girls, but that we become them,” a message Dowie delivers as “a very androgynous actress” (Patrick Marmion); similarly, for the Times, she is both a “hero” and a “heroine” on stage (John Thaxter). Although it is not all there is to know, and to learn, from Dowie’s theatre, the figure of the androgyne is, I will argue, one way by which she calls for a renewed version of anarchism built on ethical bonds. But there is a clarification to make, for my use of “androgyny” does not indicate an in-between-stage in opposition to conventionally masculine or feminine positions. As will be clear later on in this study, Dowie uses androgyny as a destabilizing subjectivity imbued with specific practices for the shaping of alternative communities. Or, as Susan Stanford Friedman has it, from her queer theoretical viewpoint, androgyny is a subjectivity with “exuberant pleasure in parodic mixing and juxtaposition of gender and sexual differences as acts of transgression” (1998, 77). Written years after John Lennon, which in a way it continues by referring to it repeatedly in the text and in performance, Leaking from Every4 claims its right to affirm that “Motherhood’s crap.” Reviewing it for The Guardian, Claire Armitstead wrote extensively about Dowie’s troubling look on stage, mentioning both her “[c]rop-haired and stick- skinny” attire, and her presentation of and as “a boy-woman in blue jeans with a beer bottle in one hand and a baby sling strapped to her stomach.” More than in its subject matter, the challenging originality of the monologue lies in Dowie’s deeply irreverent tone, as when we see her asking for a home birthing so as to be able to smoke throughout the delivery of her child. It is made clear that motherhood is a disgusting, repudiating experience, “all of it, the crap, the responsibility, the pressure, the feeling of being trapped, unable to move” (156). The bleakest irony of this is that it is exposed as threatening for women, in that it reduces them and their bodies to “pure surface, exteriority without depth, a moveable theatre of the self” (Braidotti 1994, 51, emphasis mine). Here, feminist academic Rosi Braidotti is turning upside down the figure of the “body without organs (BwO)” as theorized by French poststructuralists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. I see connections between Deleuze’s and Guattari’s BwO and what critics, as regards both monologues, read as androgynous eruptions. In A Thousand Plateaus (1987), the BwO indicates “not at all a notion or a concept, but a practice, a set of practices.” This seems to share some Claire Dowie 139 questions with the notion of gender performativity that characterises Dowie’s stand-up comedies. For, just as gender is the effect of reiterated performances, the BwO is a ground on which “everything is played out” (149-51, my emphasis). I am not assuming any straightforward correspondence between the BwO and Dowie’s androgynous performances. However, it is Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that the BwO refuses the notion of organism which, in my view, poses interesting questions for a reading of some of the works considered in this study. By organism, the two philosophers mean “the organic organization of organs.” The Bwo refuses every structure (we could say, every hierarchy, or ontology) which “imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchical organizations, organized transcendences” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 158-9). From the reviews considered previously, the labelling of androgyny is, arguably, a sort of fleshing out of whom cannot be assigned a “true” gender. For Dowie, in fact, it functions as a self-conscious performance whose project must involve contesting regimes of “truth” around gender assignment and intelligibility. It follows that, in my own interpretation, her use of the androgyne attempts to reject conventional autobiography in favour of an anarchism of gender. One element which underlies any instance of giving an account of oneself is, according to Judith Butler, that different versions “of” the account have their effect on its own credibility. “Indeed, it may be that to have an origin means precisely to have several possible versions of the origin ... Any one of those are possible narratives, but of no single one can I say with certainty that it is true.” This contests the very idea of a “coherent autobiographer” (2005, 37-8); as something which is, for Dowie, essential, it is exemplified in her works by the constant movement between “neither biography nor autobiography”5 that structure them. John Lennon plays with this idea by calling attention to John Lennon’s song, “Woman is the Nigger of the World” and addressing all women. Leaking from Every Orifice expands on the fear of the pregnant body as a sign of women’s desire for and men’s fear of anarchy,6 and hints at feminist debates on the abjectness of a woman’s body. A lesbian enters a club; a gay man mistakes her for a man and approaches her. Revived for the thirtieth anniversary of the Drill Hall, Death and Dancing (1992)7 is the story of lesbian Max (Dowie) and gay Max (performed by Mark Pinkosh). In the privacy of their “queer” love, the two “spindly, crew-cut, dancing androgynes” (Simon Reade, City Limits) go out in straight places and get mistaken for a gay couple. The scene where they swap their dresses typifies their troubling of gender:
She Okay. All right. You are not a transvestite. You’re not a transvestite 140 Chapter Eight
because you don’t like transvestites, because transvestites dress like women, and you don’t like women you like men, so you say you’re gay. But you like me and I’m not a man, you say I’m a woman but you wanted to fuck me when we were dressed the same, so what does that make you? (93)
In her stand-up play, Dowie shows that the social construction of gender is “at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation” (Butler 1990, 140, my emphasis). This issue is reinforced in the opening of Part Two, when Dowie and Pinkosh perform as a couple of women friends. Dressed in drag, the two Maxs uncover the mechanisms by which “reality is both reproduced and contested” (Butler 2004, 218). In the course of this reproduction, however, the divergences between them arise. He/Max chooses to conform to moral and political norms of the 1980s and becomes a successful businessman, whereas She/Max ends up at Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, which is also where he tracks her down ten years later, at the very end of the play. The closure is light hearted, yet still hilarious:
She There’s no such thing as normal. He You’re right, it’s anything but. It’s He/She Not natural. (119)
By performing genders and troubling them in Death and Dancing, Dowie seems to insist on “the possibility [or, possibilities] of a failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction” (Butler 1990, 141). But, I would add, we could read this as one instance of a politics of antirepresentation, itself fundamental of contemporary readings of anarchism. Jamie Heckert understands anarchism as “an ongoing tendency in human history, which is always specific to socio-historical contexts” (2005, 62).8 He draws from the notion of tactical political philosophy common to both post-structuralism and anarchism, in which “there is no centre of power, that it is irreducible to any particular source (e.g. capitalism or patriarchy).” It follows that power and the social structures sustaining it are the cemented effects of a series of “decentralised relationships” permeating all domain of life in the global, post-capitalist West (2005, 65). Commenting on the chances of setting up a new form of anarchism ahead of the queer movement, Heckert insists on antirepresentation as a first principle for moving beyond identity politics, itself a concept which a queer culture like that promoted by Dowie refuses replacing it Claire Dowie 141 with the convergence of varying differences. In Leaking from Every Orifice, for instance, Dowie playing a lesbian who has had a baby with a gay man, debases explicitly the terms of identity categories, as well as the claims of State-recognition for dissident sexualities:
we were at the front of queer, ahead of our time or what? ... Mind you, don’t ask me what queer means because I’m damned if I know. I think it means that lesbians can now have sex with gay men, and vice versa. Funny I always called that straight myself. But there you go, have to move with the times. (138)
Feminism since the 1980s, sexual awareness and identity are key themes of the following works. All Over Lovely (1996)9 is perhaps Dowie’s most avowedly political text. Two unnamed cousins, A (performed by Dowie) and B (Peta Lily), deal with their different women’s perspectives. Their childhood together has initially served the purposes of creating a self-awareness on gender power relations. For A, this acquisition is rendered more problematic because of her parents’ neglect of her as a tomboy.10 A is openly lesbian, whereas B tends to dismiss the relationship they have had as a proof of her political commitment in the 1980s. This has its effects on, as well as being an effect of, her views on feminism. And, if A/(Dowie) does not really think that “feminism’s been fought and won” (76) her anti-labelling convictions conceal her own disillusionment for what it is thought to have achieved:
A Yes I’m just a housewife and mother, feminism has given me that much. B So feminism put the “just” in housewife. A Either that or become “just” another man. (80)
In addition to the claims on antirepresentation, the play insists on the need to start up a revolution through which to rethink the organisation of social relationships in opposition to those sanctioned by hierarchical organisation, such as State apparatuses:
A Well, I like a good revolution, who’s in charge? B We all are. A What does that mean? B Means we all agree to go along with the consensus. A Doesn’t sound like much of a revolution to me. (91)
Here, I would draw from Heckert’s consideration of sexuality as a state- form (a concept he takes from Deleuze and Guattari), that is, a series of “micro and macro level operations” mutually dependent with the State, 142 Chapter Eight whose ultimate goal is that of “maintaining the appearance of centralised power.” Rejection of identity politics is required precisely because, Heckert goes on, “assertion that sometimes identity politics is the only possible option, comes from efforts to be included within the State or to be represented” (2005, 74-5). Like the anti-identitarian/post-structuralist politics informing Heckert’s views, in All Over Lovely Dowie sees antirepresentation as the primary requirement for an alternative society based on true equality. The characters of J.J. and Terese take this antirepresentationist stance some steps further in Designs for Living (2001)11, the story of a circle of close friends, Louise (straight), Terese (lesbian dyke), and her butch friend, J.J.. The latter is a very interesting character, and Clarke Hayes’s performance for the opening production at London’s Drill Hall communicated “the awkwardness of feeling neither male nor female, straight nor gay, but something indefinable between the two” (Madeline North, Time Out). “Something else. Something other, not male, not female, but something both. Female body, male essence—something. Salt and pepper in one pot” (71), J.J. resumes the considerations on androgyny carried out above. At a “pot-pourri” (e.g. mixed) party, Louise spots J.J. and mistakes her for a gay man who is just too scared to try his first sex with a woman; and, we see them making love “partially clothed” on stage (64). Terese’s jealousy is thus stirred, since she fancies Louise from the start:
Louise I still regard myself as straight. Terese Going out with J.J.? Louise J.J.’s my boyfriend. Terese J.J.’s a woman! Louise Maybe to you. But to me and J.J., J.J.’s my boyfriend. Terese (moving away) Well then, both of you are tapped because as far as I’m concerned you are both lesbians, having a lesbian relationships. (76)
It seems that Dowie’s main concern here is to insist on the problems posed by Louise, who is not exempt from bracketing views on gender. She confirms that “even the best-intentioned rely on pigeon-holing labels rather than reality” (Berkowitz 2001); a case in point is what she wants from J.J.: “be it! [a man] I expect you to sit like a man, walk like a man, talk like a man, act like a man, make love like a man, be a man” (80). J.J.’s and, we may argue, Dowie’s favourite territory is, instead, “[a] dark alley. With no names, no labels and no genders” (84). Heckert traces the history of discourses on sexuality in Western culture, and notes that “[h]eterosexuality developed as a new state-form, Claire Dowie 143 one in which a variety of practices were compressed into a single psychiatric category. Homosexuality and bisexuality have been constructed as variations on a theme.” As a powerful means to control manifestations of dissidence at all levels, sexual orientation can be viewed as “a set of state-forms in that a wide variety of practices (including sexual, romantic and gendered) are defined and judged in terms of their capacity to be categorised within, or association with, one of three boxes” (2005, 75). What happens whenever the three boxes explode is the subject of Dowie’s last monologue to date, H to He (I’m turning into a Man), inspired by Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. As suggested by the title, Dowie performs a middle-aged woman who wakes up one morning and realizes that she is turning into a man. The action develops around the protagonist’s coming to terms “with the discrepancy between how she feels inside and the outward public persona of an ageing body.” Dowie slowly removes all typically feminine garments on stage, showing the troubles caused by the sudden growth of a huge hand, a huge foot, and a “different” nose. She feels her world is now impoverished and this creates humour throughout her passage “from female through an a-gender to male” (D’Monté 2006, 217). There is one moment in the play from which she/he starts panicking about what her lover and her cleaner may think of her abrupt change. Or, we could also think of the scene in the supermarket I have mentioned at the beginning of this section. Both scenes, I think, are examples of a characteristic feature of Dowie’s theatre, that is, as Griffin (2004) argues, the assumption that gender is basically a social experience.12 The performing of a gendered identity, or the shaping of a new gender identity as that taking place in H to He, seem to require readings of gender as “a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint.” Butler uses this remark to indicate that the construction of any one gender always involves more than just one subject. “One is always ‘doing’ with or for another, even if the other is only imaginary.” When translated to Dowie’s stand-up theatre, such a view would clearly affect the authority of the solo performer, who is in turn replaced by “a sociality that has no single author (and that radically contests the notion of authorship itself)” (2004, 1, my emphasis). Dowie does not create one self; she creates several. She is not a performer; she is many. The chronological order of the texts I have chosen leads to think of Sodom (2006)13 as a point of arrival for Dowie’s articulation of the queer anarchism object of my analysis. The first part of the play is a rewriting of the story of the biblical city for a contemporary audience. Abraham’s nephew, Lot, arrives in Sodom and finds out that its people are going 144 Chapter Eight around crazy to have sex with the Angels. Under Abraham’s and Lot’s reign, however, “Hierarchy”, as Lot’s wife says, is all there is to live with. Part Two is the transposition of Part One to contemporary England, where the life of a middle-class husband and wife is ruined by the arrival of a neighbouring commune of sexually promiscuous individuals. Here, the community “all family, all tribe” (96-8) which Lot’s wife aspires to in part one is represented by Echo, a bisexual (see the “sodomite” Doom, in part one), and the modern hippies of his family of sorts. It is a community which becomes even more threatening once Toolly (a parody of Lot) ends up having sex with him. Dowie’s materialist perspective, which often plays an important role in her works, is dispelled by having Echo’s wife, Lydia, as a stereotyped middle-class woman. Her fate is doomed, and if Lot’s wife has been turned into a pillar of salt, Lydia closes the play frozen, and silenced by Polter (Abraham) and Toolly as they “push her down” (121). There is one moment in the play when Echo refuses to be labelled an anarchist. But I think there are several points which prove that, instead, this seems the direction towards which Dowie wants to move. After all, the way sexuality is developed as state-form (Heckert 2005) is of particular resonance here. For, she depicts a group of people (Echo’s commune) who refuse to be controlled just for their sexuality. Dowie herself has said in interview that “I don’t think you can talk about humans without talking about gender, or sexuality, or clothes even. Because I am obsessed with humans, I am interested in sexual politics—I’m not interested in sex really—and I think this is how we are all controlled” (Donald 1992, my emphasis). So, it also seems that there is a strong and, I would add, deliberate, thread in the works under examination here which adds up to build a queer anarchism, or, as Heckert explains, “an anarchism which places relationships and ethics at the centre of its definition ... [one which] promotes respect for diversity and acknowledges lifeʊpolitical, personal and biologicalʊas an ongoing process” (2005, 79-80). Dowie is undoubtedly one of the most uncompromising artists dealt with in this volume. Since the very beginning of her career she has reinvented herself with her stand-up theatre, exploring new territories for the speaking “self” of conventional (autobiographical) solo performance, and with the overall effect of undoing the confines of truth and fiction. In her works, she starts from the assumption that, unlike in theatrical mainstream circles, “[t]he actor is talking directly to and interacting with the audience, responding directly to them in a way that doesn’t happen in a normal production. And that means if something goes wrong, you make something of it rather than try to cover it up” (Lathan 2004). In Death and Claire Dowie 145
Dancing, She/Max tells He/Max that politics is all about “[e]verybody telling you how to live your life and what to do” (79). We have seen how Dowie objects to this notion of politics; she uses theatre, or whatever she thinks of it, to create a space where sexuality and gender are questions “more of a relational process than [of] a simple identity category” (Brown 2007, 2685), and in doing so exposes the real nature of dissidence.
Notes
1 Communication with the author. 2 From here onwards, John Lennon. 3 Dowie 1996, pp. 33-66; subsequent references are in brackets. 4 Dowie 1996, pp. 133-56; subsequent references are in brackets. 5 I wish to thank Colin Watkeys for discussing Dowie’s work with me. 6 See Elizabeth Grosz’s observations, quoted in Heckert (2005). 7 Dowie 1996, pp. 67-121; subsequent references are in brackets. 8 Just like I am doing here, Heckert’s criticism is informed by post-structuralist thought, anarchism and queer and feminist critical approaches. 9 Dowie 1998, pp. 62-104; subsequent references are in brackets. 10 Childhood trauma is a recurring theme of some of Dowie’s most accomplished works. See Adult Child/Dead Child, Easy Access (For the Boys), and also, albeit partially, John Lennon. 11 Dowie 2001, pp. 37-85; subsequent references are in brackets. 12 Griffin is referring to Dowie’s treatment of gender in John Lennon, but I think the same can be said to include all her career as performer. 13 Dowie 2001, pp. 88-121; subsequent references are in brackets. The show was presented with Nigel Charnock, a founding member of the physical theatre company DV8.
CHAPTER NINE
KEVIN ELYOT
A former actor, a successful playwright, screenwriter, and adaptor of Agatha Christie’s novels for television and the stage, Elyot is arguably one of the most original voices of contemporary British theatre in the past three decades. Questions of gay sensibility in contrast to an identification with, and commercialisation of, the labels “gay” and/or “queer,” and issues such as the obstacles of life and mortality are hallmarks of his theatre. The present section will look at his four plays and his recent TV- drama, Clapham Junction (2007) using a provocative approach such as that developed by Lee Edelman’s book, No Future (2004). There, the author builds a discourse centred on gay sexuality’s rejection of the notion of politics, so as to negate humanity’s impulse towards “reproductive futurism.” Edelman’s model does not account fully or solely for the intricate emotional patterns featured in Elyot’s works; but my analysis attempts to show that it nevertheless poses useful questions over his unconventional depiction of gay life, and of the idea of a “future.” There is a speech by William from Elyot’s début play, Coming Clean (1982),1 where he anticipates the unrestrained campness which is partially typical of his plays. Talking about sex with his friend Tony, a writer who has an open relationship, William admits: “Well, you know what it’s like. Once you’ve had a taste, you keep wanting more. Like Chinese food” (14). Welcomed as the author of “the first mature play about homosexuality” (John Elsom, Mail on Sunday), Elyot refuses to raise the finger against anyone, and instead of critiquing promiscuity, he chooses to cast a look on a lifestyle which heteronormativity sees as morally unacceptable. The question is all about rules: “if we discard one set of rules, then by what rules do we live? I’m not commenting on whether it’s good or bad, just showing how it might pan out.”2 Tony is convinced, presumably induced by Greg’s decision to open up the couple, that “[t]he prospect of a new body’s always exciting ... it is a transitory excitement, and it doesn’t change my feelings for Greg” (9); but he turns out to be the one who fails to adapt to an open relationship, especially when everything happens under his nose: Greg falls in love with their cleaner and trainee actor 148 Chapter Nine
Robert. This breaks up their relationship, and the play closes on Tony, trying to cope with the language of a German man he has just picked up in a gay club. Does making oneself intelligible really matter so long as sex is the issue? The answer is clearly no! It is unsurprising that Coming Clean, a play exposing gay sexuality quite freely, was sometimes misunderstood in its intentions. Elyot has been accused of presenting a “clichéd” and “old-fashioned” view on homosexual relationships (Benedict Nightingale, New Statesman and Suzie MacKenzie, Time Out), mainly because he appeared to confirm a stereotyped version of gay life—at one point, Tony feels he is being treated as a housewife (39)—and behaviour—promiscuous sex. Critiques of this kind have been directed against Elyot’s later works. I would now introduce the figure of the synthomosexual (and of synthomosexuality), which, from his own psychoanalytic perspective, Edelman invents as an embodiment of the opposition to the idea of a future always emerging as totalizing fantasy, and which is reproduced in the social, the everyday.3 The synthomosexual is defined by his/her access to jouissance (literally, enjoyment). This jouissance, however, is by nature made of positive and negative elements, for it exceeds the limits of pleasure which a subject can bear, and which are regulated by the Freudian pleasure principle. A pure jouissance—such as sexuality devoid of reproductive aims—the Lacanian synthome is “the mode of jouissance constitutive of the subject, which defines it no longer as subject of desire, but rather as subject of the drive.”4 Here, the drive Edelman is referring to is the death drive, as representation of the movement towards death which characterises all sexed living beings.5 In synthomosexuality, says Edelman,
the structuring fantasy undergirding and sustaining the subject’s desire, and with it the subject’s reality, confronts its beyond in the pulsions of the drive whose insistent circulation undoes it, derealizing the collective logic of fantasy by means of which subjects mean, and giving access, instead, to the jouissance, particularized and irreducible, that registers the unmasterable contingency at the core of every subject as such. (2004, 73)
In Coming Clean, a series of elements related to sexual promiscuity can be read as insistence on the jouissance referred to by Edelman—William’s association of sex with food, Tony’s of excitement with the body of strangers. By insisting on a repetitive pleasure, Elyot’s characters clearly stand opposed to the “social” conceived of in reproductive terms. Which, in itself, is a possible explanation for the accusations made by some critics and the parallel they sought to maintain between hetero- and homosexual sex. Kevin Elyot 149
Elyot’s award-winning My Night With Reg (1994)6 purports to subvert dramatic norms by matching “the boulevard comedy feature of French windows in the shape of a conservatory” plus something “you don’t get in boulevard comedies ... men snogging amidst the rubber plants.”7 The action is set entirely in Guy’s flat. In scene 1, he has invited a group of friends, new and old, for his flatwarming. Aids looms on the background as a “deadly lottery,” an “ever-present threat.”8 Viewed by many as a quintessential “anti-hero” (Wyllie 2009, 104), Guy is the one to whom almost every one in the play returns to for counselling and support. The flamboyantly camp Daniel and the very attractive ex-rugby player and actor, John, whom Guy has lost touch with, are his friends from school. The latter is the object of his unrequited love, and one of the play’s strengths is in its holding audience interest and curiosity on whether he eventually might confess it one day. Reg is Daniel’s partner; but, it turns out, that “a nuit chez Reg has been offered to just about every one else in the play” (John Gross, Sunday Telegraph).9 In scene two, Reg has just died of Aids and John tells Guy he has been his long-lasting lover. In spite of the fact that he never appears on stage, Reg is meant to be “very much as flesh and blood,” something which contravenes the temptation to read him as omni-present personification of the epidemic.10 This plays a fundamental role in the play. Some reviewers dismissed the play because of the frankness and occasional humour with which it treated sexual promiscuity in times of Aids. The bleakest irony of the play comes when an acquaintance rape on a holiday in Lanzarote reveals fatal for Guy, who by scene 3 has died. That is Guy’s last and only sex he has had in a very long time. There is one moment here in which Daniel’s humour is devastatingly beautiful and moving: “Oh Juanita [John], what are we to do? Guy of all people! Jesus fucking Christ! Give us a fag” (153). It is moments like these which show Elyot’s keen ear for dialogue, and that the gay sensibility informing his writing is far more subtle than we may at first infer. It seems that the way John embraces sexual promiscuity and Guy cookery is their own way to deal with what haunts them most—Reg’s death (John), and unrequited love (Guy) (Jeremy Kingston, The Times). We could view the two activities as a form of enjoyment which “annihilates the fetishistic jouissance that works to consolidate identity by allowing reality to coagulate around its ritual reproduction” (Edelman 2004, 30). In my view, little does it matter if this jouissance is disclosed in having sex or in preparing a meal, for it is what defines John and Guy as subjects that matters. Synthomosexuality, for Edelman, comes to signify by virtue of its position “against futurity, against its propagation, insofar as it 150 Chapter Nine would designate an impasse in the passage to the future and ... would pass beyond, pass through, the saving fantasy futurity denotes” (2004, 33). I think Guy stands in this impasse, in that he tries to retrieve a specific moment in the past which he would rather live now—hence, the whole idea behind the party. After a school performance of Euripides’ Bacchae—significantly, a play on the pleasures of the dancing body as manifestation of pure enjoyment—, Guy had taken the jockstrap worn by John. The jockstrap is contained in a case full of Guy’s memories of him that John discovers in scene three. Now, there are clear differences between John and Guy, and these differences extend to their possible acting as synthomosexuals. If on one hand both of them confirm synthomosexuality’s aversion to the future, they activate this aversion in radically different ways, and with radically different effects on the economy of the play. Guy “is never able to produce the meal he has worked so hard to prepare,” and he thus functions, as Louise Doughty (Mail on Sunday) writes, as “an icily appropriate metaphor” for his life of near total sexual-abstinence in comparison with his friends. John, instead, attaches to promiscuity and, we may add, reclaims the right to it notwithstanding the oppressive menace of Aids. He seems to inhabit
the place of meaninglessness associated with the synthome; to figure an ungenerate, and unregenerating, sexuality whose singular insistence on jouissance, rejecting every constraint imposed by sentimental futurism, exposes aesthetic culture ... as always already a ‘culture of death’ intent on abjecting the force of a death drive that shatters the tomb we call life. (Edelman 2004, 47-8)
To associate sexuality with the Lacanian synthome, that is, what gives solidity to the subject, offers, I would add, an understanding of what is at first a provocation on Elyot’s part. For we see John desperate about Reg’s death; but we also see him kissing Benny on the mouth, after Reg’s funeral, and having sex with Eric after Guy’s death. Here, it is interesting to look at some reviews to the two London productions of the play. Irving Wardle (Independent on Sunday), for instance, seems just to refer to Elyot’s rendition of gay sexuality when he speaks of My Night with Reg and its display of “an emotional candour and volatility that belongs to a world of outsiders who are making up the rules as they go along” (my emphasis).11 And indeed, if there is any provocation by Elyot, this is clearly in how he focuses on sexual promiscuity, and how this may lead to view John as insanely uncaring. We know that Eric, too, has had sex with Reg, though he lied to him about his real name. As risky and Kevin Elyot 151 slippery as speaking of resistance to the future and embracing the death drive in a play dealing with Aids may seem, John’s apparent carelessness as regards his sexual behaviour is, instead, his way to insist on “the only act that counts as one: the act of resisting enslavement to the future in the name of having a life” (Edelman 2004, 30). In a way, then, John Peter (Sunday Times) was the only critic who succeeded in getting Elyot’s striking ability, namely to write “about gay life without disapproval, defensiveness, or a sense of crusading zeal ... The Elyot character does not justify his life: he just lives it” (my emphasis).12 And he lives it by repetitively seeking access to the source of his enjoyment. Scene three takes place a year and a half after Guy’s flatwarming. John, to whom Guy has left his flat, is having a relationship with Eric. It is here that John recounts his only and last visit to Guy’s deathbed:
The last time I saw him—lying on his side, shrivelled up like a little old man—he made me lean right down to put my ear against his mouth and he said, ‘I love you. I always have,’ and I’d never realised before. I must be stupid ... all I could think was that I wish it’d been Reg. (155, my emphasis)
These few words, “I always have,” are an example of how it is “the little things that mean a lot” (Roger Foss, What’s On)13 for Elyot’s characters. Clustered around the singularity of a moment, they hint at the playwright’s breaking of temporal sequence and stress the inevitability of death which looms in his plays. Here, one last consideration is required as regards comparisons between the play and the film version of My Night with Reg (1996). But before that, I would like to go back to the moment when Daniel visits John and Eric. Having found out that, in life, his beloved partner had shared many other men’s beds, Daniel now feels compelled to asks John whether he was one. In a fairly disturbing scene, John lies to his old, desperate friend. He somehow refuses to surrender to the compassion compulsion, and to help Daniel elaborate the trauma of Reg’s death. In Edelman’s study, the refusal of the compassion compulsion is one of the traits characterizing the synthomosexual. I would point out that it is not only John, but the overall play which refuses compassion, even though it needs John, and indeed uses him, to make its point. This contravenes Jack Tinker’s opinion about a “healthy compassion” conveyed by Elyot’s work (Daily Mail). What makes it one of the finest plays ever written for the British stage is its inherent refusal to “touch,” as Edelman writes, “on what touches the heart by seeming to put us in touch with something other than ourselves while leaving us open, in the process, to being read as an easy touch” (2004, 67). After all, My Night with Reg is so compelling because it 152 Chapter Nine presents Aids not “as a sinister menace or a chess figure in some game of moral-sexual politics, but simply as a fact of life and a fact of death” (Peter, Sunday Times). As the play draws to a close, Eric is staring at Guy’s run-down garden. Bird singing accompanies his moving words to John through to blackout: “The garden’s a mess an all. You’ve got to have them done. Guy’d be furious otherwise” (157). In the film version, a camera close-up then moves to a boy dancing to the notes of David Bowie’s Starman, the song which Guy, Daniel, and John used to sing at college, and which they do together again in scene one. In his comment to the play, Paul T. Davis argues that “Eric’s naked body holds the past and indicates the future, contains both life and death, as all our bodies do” (2007, 117). If we accept this view, the film’s last shot would over- emphasise the fantasy represented by the boy’s association with the future. I think the opposite is at stake here; for, through the boy, the film closes on the jouissance which is crucial to the play’s message. Furthermore, it does so by using a song which anti-gay campaigners of the time would have metaphorically associated to a “plagued” people, and which, in Elyot’s portrayal, seems to emerge as the enjoyment of a bodily dance, itself a reminder of The Bacchae mentioned in the play. I have already mentioned that a singled-out moment in time is a feature of Elyot’s playwriting, and it is in fact one that obsesses him whenever he writes (Devine 2006; Aragay and Zozaya 2007). This influences Horace, possibly another anti-hero,14 in The Day I Stood Still (1998).15 In scene one, Horace is visited by his old friend Judy and her new French boyfriend. In scene two, Judy’s son, Jimi (now sixteen, four in scene one) goes to Horace’s for advice over a boy whom he has fallen in love with, and to meet his father’s old friend. Back at secondary school, Horace was in love with Jimi’s dead father, Jerry. Jerry, however, was irreparably heterosexual, and the occasional “bit of mutual” sex he had tried with boys was only a convenient childhood experience (235). For Horace, time stopped on the day when he, Jerry and Judy were together in his house (in which he still lives), a day “of disappointment, frustration, rejection and pain, relieved by a tiny gesture of affection” (Nightingale, The Times): Jerry left his gold chain to Horace as a sign of their friendship, and kissed it with his own lips (240). The fact that all this is staged as a flashback in scene three, with a movement back in time of thirty years, suggests that Horace inhabits what Edelman calls “the temporality of desire” (86). For, as Horace says to Jimi at one point :
My life crystallized in the memory of a moment. It was like we were outside time ... A moment is not a minute or a second. It’s a mystery. A moment is part of the mystery of life. (210-1) Kevin Elyot 153
Jerry’s chain gets lost in Horace’s fight with a “council-house tearaway” (Michael Coveney, Daily Mail). This, it is later revealed, is Terence, the rent boy Horace calls at the beginning of the play, and with whom, significantly, he is unable to have sex with. The chain reappears from under a floorboard in the present:
HORACE reaches into the hole and takes out a gold chain. He holds it up and looks at it, amazed. JIMI eventually notices this. He crawls to HORACE and also looks at the chain. Dad’s? HORACE nods. JIMI delicately touches the chain. Dad... Pause. Then HORACE kneels behind JIMI and fastens the chain around his neck. He retrieves his Mars bar and resumes eating it. JIMI gets up and looks in a mirror. It touches the chain. He goes over to HORACE and stands above him. Beat. JIMI very tentatively places a hand on HORACE’s head, then gently strokes his hair. Beat. HORACE very gently lets his head rest against JIMI’s thigh. The lights fade. (220)
It is an extremely effective scene mainly because, in performance, Jerry and Jimy are the only two roles played by the same actor (164). Just like the Mars bars Jerry used to eat, and which Horace has continued to eat ever since that day in the 1970s, the digging up of the chain means—for Horace, as much as for Elyot—that “time stands still” (Aleks Sierz, Tribune). Elyot’s use of the partiality of a moment to encapsulate a whole lifetime has been dealt with extensively in the reviews to the show. So, if Nightingale (The Times) writes that Horace’s moment justifies, as well wasting his life, Georgina Brown (Mail on Sunday) sees a parallel between his life and his own flat, “a shrine to that moment when nothing and everything happened” (my emphasis). They are acute observations, if only because they catch the pervading indefinableness of Horace in terms of how he approaches time and life. The Sunday Telegraph describes him as “nervous, fussy, prematurely middle-aged ... cocooned himself pretty thoroughly against life.” Though no doubt interesting, this comment somehow fails to grasp the pulsations behind Horace’s apparent refusal of life. More than a refusal, Horace’s non-mobility attempts, I would note, to undo “the consistency of a social reality that relies on Imaginary identifications” and demanding, instead, the right to live in the here and now of his highly evocative moment with Jimi, one which is also sexually charged. Horace materializes an unrelenting will that the future, his own as well as Jimi’s, “stop here” (Edelman 2004, 25, 31), where “here” is related to the enjoyment Horace gets access to via the chain. Jimi is his father’s 154 Chapter Nine spitting image. It follows that the play leaves open the possibility of encountering, in Horace’s sexual drive, the manifestation of a perversion, i.e. his love for Jimi as his father’s image. We will see that this aspect recurs in the plays I am now going to consider, and especially in the characters of Don (Forty Winks) and, albeit differently, of Frank (Mouth to Mouth). The use of time in The Day I Stood Still exemplifies Elyot’s emblematic sense of “the fragility of life and that death is but a doorknob away” (Marmion 2004). Like Horace, Frank, in Mouth to Mouth (2001),16 has got the feeling of not having “really got anywhere. Not for want of trying” (285). Also like Horace, he is the living demonstration of how a moment can “haunt” someone’s present (Paul Taylor, Independent). In the London papers, Frank was seen as a “doleful, youth-molesting writer, a shambles of droopy, tentative mildness with a capacity for integration” (Evening Standard), an “angst-ridden” man hiding a “nasty truth” (Independent on Sunday). The nasty truth is that he has fallen in love with his best friend’s fourteen-year-old son, Philip. The play opens on Laura and Frank. She never utters a word, whereas he has a bandaged eye and is trying to confess his own secret. Not only did Frank deliberately save Philip from drowning one day so as to give him a kiss of life (hence, the “mouth to mouth” of the title), but also he has exploited, since then, Philip’s uncertainty about his own sexuality. They have had sex together, we are led to believe, more than once. Elyot cleverly ruffles with both Laura’s and Frank’s jealousy for an older girl whom Philip has met on holiday in Spain, as well as with the nature of their affection towards him. Scene three (‘The Sitting Room’) is, in this way, a climax to the whole piece. During the celebration of Philip’s fifteenth birthday, he and Laura tango together, and it is a dance whose sensuality exceeds a mother-son relationship. After kissing him “passionately” and touching him all over his body, Frank basically forces Philip to show him his tattooed thigh in the pantry. He demands an explanation:
PHILLIP. I’m at that sort of age. I’d shag a rat given half the chance. FRANK. Thanks a lot. PHILLIP. It’s over, forgotten, okay? FRANK. Life’s not like that. PHILLIP. We’ve got to go. (294)
The play is denied any linearity in terms of narrative development and structure. Through intermittent shifts between the present and a year and a half previously, it mingles its fragments into a portrait of familial destruction. Kevin Elyot 155
So, Laura is married to Dennis; she carries on with her marriage as if with a burden; he, in turn, is having an affair with a nineteen-year-old girl. His brother, Roger, is married to Cornelia, but turns out to be Laura’s long- time lover and Philip’s actual father. By the end of the play (scene one), Cornelia has had a miscarriage and, most strikingly, Philip has died in an accident with Roger’s motorbike on the very day of his birthday celebration. Laura has a stroke, and this is why she has a stutter. The closing scene of Mouth to Mouth is thus a continuation of the first. Dramaturgically, all of Elyot’s plays more or less avail of this expedient. I would infer that, in this case, it also places Frank and his doctor, Gompertz, as two variations of synthomosexuality which, I think, both of them represent. We know from their dinner together (scene two, ‘The Restaurant’), that Frank suffers from an Aids-related illness, and that his treatment is no longer working. Compassion seems to play a crucial role in Mouth to Mouth, and especially in how it raises comparisons between the two characters. Gompertz is very interesting, and he is surely not as peripheral as it may appear. At the dinner, his role is played as a selfish, preposterously funny individual who is constantly checking on his pager and answering his mobile phone. A cocaine inhaler which he uses profusely, he loves spotting gays in the restaurant and making black humoured punchlines over his partner’s sudden death. There is another black irony here, for the death occurred in a car accident, and not from an Aids-related illness, as we are bound to expect. Meanwhile, Frank is vainly trying to create the right moment and confess his secret. By standing in opposition to feelings of compassion, identification, and love of one’s neighbour as oneself, I think Gompertz here behaves as a synthomosexual. Furthermore, through the negative force of his irony and cynicism, he “calls forth compassion to negate it and thereby marks compassion ... with the negativity of the ... drive ...” (Edelman 2004, 89). Frank’s behaviour towards Laura disclosed something similar. The dinner scene with Gompertz shows Frank’s own call for compassion, but the closing scene of the play moves towards the opposite direction. Here, Frank makes self-evident the “flavour of narcissism” which Gross (Sunday Telegraph) attributes him. For, if he initially surrenders to compassion— he avoids telling Laura a truth which would devastate her even more—he then turns this well-meaning gesture upside down. During the dinner, he tells Gompertz:
What happened—was just awful—unimaginably tragic. It’s haunted me for a year. And the point is—I think it’d make quite a good play. (298)
And later on, in the closing speech to Laura: 156 Chapter Nine
I’ll write. LAURA. Yes. Your pplay— FRANK. No. To you, I mean. (305)
His is, then, a form of “narcissistic satisfaction” with its own “self- destructive effects” (Edelman 2004, 50)17, for we are left wondering whether the story of this series of lies and betrayals will ever be told in its entirety, and used by Frank to overcome the creative crisis we find him in at the play’s opening. In a “functional and impersonal” (7) hotel room, Diana in Forty Winks (2004),18 tells her school friend Don she will never forget the back row of the cinema where they first kissed. What Diana does not know is that her fourteen-year daughter has come to ask him about her uncle’s sudden death. Charlie, Hermia’s gay uncle, has had a heart attack because, we are led to infer, he has caught Don kissing her. With Forty Winks, Elyot makes a change of direction, in that he widens his subject matter away from purely gay life and sexuality. But the themes he deals with are his own favourite, namely, the passing of time, mortality, and unrequited love.19 A case in point is Diana’s speech to Don:
... It’s now that matters, isn’t it? Now. This moment. She looks into his eyes and strokes his hair. And even this is already a memory. (31)
Susannah Clapp (Observer) notes that Elyot seems to play with Don’s possible homosexuality, and this is very plausible throughout the first part of the play. In particular, it is his relationship with Charlie which is worth looking at. Love is about to become the subject of Charlie’s play. As Elyot claims, “the love that eludes him he creates in his imagination.”20 There is, however, a key moment when Charlie tries to enjoy his own moment with Don while his partner, sitting nearby, is having a rest:
... (Quietly.) You’ve still got the same eyes. DON. Well, I suppose I would have, wouldn’t I? CHARLIE. The same mouth. Another glance at DANNY. (Almost a whisper.) Kiss me. Kiss me like you kissed her. They look at each other for a moment. HOWARD (off). Charlie! Beat. CHARLIE walks out with a tray full of things. DON breathes a sigh of relief and looks out at the garden. (25)
Charlie’s disturbing behaviour thus bears similarities with some of the Kevin Elyot 157 characters considered so far. By contrast, I would argue that Don appropriates sexuality as the synthome of synthomosexuality and, as heterosexual, comes to embody a sexual drive/sexuality that is no less “child-aversive, future-negating” (Edelman 2004, 113) than synthomosexuality itself. For, when it is clear that Diana is not going to choose him any more, he twists his own love for her into a sexual drive for Hermia. The issue of sexual child abuse is left open by the closure. Sixteen years have passed from scene 1, and Don meets Hermia’s daughter:
Beat. DON smiles at her. DON Hello, Celia. As he offers her his hand, the lights fade. End. (52)
On the whole, Forty Winks touches on a wide set of themes and is at best successful whenever it takes pleasure, as I think it does with Don, in eluding the audience bit by bit. I want to conclude this section with what is surely a significant moment in Elyot’s career and a deeply controversial TV-drama. Clapham Junction brings to audience’s attention the contradiction between the legal recognition of same-sex couples and the increasing rate in homophobia registered in Britain over the past few years. James Rampton’s use of “a cat’s cradle of interconnected stories over 36 hours on a broiling summer’s day in London” is an astute introduction to a most provoking work (2007). In My Night with Reg—both in its play and film version –, the gentle, intermittent sound of pouring rain connects the three different time zones, and hints at the grim references to the Aids background. Here, “[t]he shiny surface seems bright and cheerful,” says Elyot. This determinedly cheerful veil is in stark contrast with the message conveyed, and with the depiction of a culture still considered, by many, “alien and anarchic” (Rampton 2007). Indeed, in an interview with Hannah Pool, Elyot laments the fact that gay life, and especially a realistic, in-depth representation of gay sexuality can barely be seen on the British television (Pool 2007). A mapping of the story-line is required, if only to show Elyot’s artful construction of a multi-faceted, yet homogeneous picture. Opening close- up: as brand-new civil partners Will and Gavin kiss, a seemingly happy crowd shower them with white rose-petals. In the middle of the chit- chattering of the post-celebration party, Will follows a young waiter, Alfie. They have sex and a line of coke in the pantry and, in the euphoria of his jouissance, Will leaves him his own ring. Late at night, Alfie is queerbashed and murdered in a London park.21 Julian is a closeted gay, and the only witness to this assault from behind the toilet cabin in which 158 Chapter Nine he has just been screwed. In the toilets, Julian undoes his trousers in front of Robin, a gay screenwriter who is on his way to a dinner party at his friend Roger’s. Roger is married, but longs for some gay sex. The dinner scenes are beautifully written and outstandingly performed, and they make up the backdrop of “ostensible tolerance” (Cooke 2007) and occasional homophobia from what Elyot calls the “surprising quarters” (Dowell 2007), that is, the British middle-class. It turns out that Julian, too, and his homophobic, middle-class wife are two of the guests. Terry is an attractive, closeted gay man who enjoys beating, kicking, and pissing down on men he picks up in gay clubs. He finds Alfie covered in blood behind a bush. At first unsure about what to do, he steals his ring and leaves him to die on his own. While cottaging in Hampstead Heath, Terry is beaten. At the hospital, Gavin (who is a doctor) is about to medicate him when he suddenly recognizes Terry’s/Will’s ring. Meanwhile, in different areas of London: Theo, a fourteen-year-old guy (whose parents are also guests at Roger and Matilda’s dinner party) is meeting Tim, a convicted paedophile with an “untameable sex drive” (Billen 2007). Theo has been spying on him and masturbating from his bedroom window. A black guy, Danny, is the object of repeated offences by a local, homophobic youth gang. The ending close-up is on his broken violin lying on the floor of a London underpass. There seems to be a deliberate use of the ring, and of its trajectory, not only to stress the characters’ interconnectedness, but as an emblem of “the radical dissolution of the contract, in every sense social and Symbolic, on which the future as putative assurance against the jouissance of the Real depends” (Edelman 2004, 16). By virtue of its association with the social structure of marriage, the ring sanctions and sanctimonies Will and Gavin’s investment as subjects of “the social” and inscribing them, in the very moment of their union, to the fantasy of a future “unattainable because always still to come” (Edelman 2004, 83). The juxtaposition between “marriage” and homophobia is crucial in the work. And indeed, Elyot has pointed out he finds interesting “that gay couples are rushing up the aisle aping heterosexual marriage as if it’s some kind of liberation,”22 for this liberation has produced a series of uneven effects, which he sees mainly due to issues of visibility. As a very specific object, one over- charged with metaphor, the ring somehow reverses desire by making it “desire for no object but only, instead, for its own prolongation, for the future itself as libidinal object procured by its constant lack” (Edelman 2004, 86). For, Will and Gavin are now presumably entitled to a future, to the same fantasy of the future which structures the heteronormative conceptions of social and political life. Kevin Elyot 159
Clapham Junction has generated heated responses from critics and the gay community. Kathryn Flett, for instance, criticises its display of “wobbly bits and its lingering close-ups of sweaty naked male flesh” and its “misogynist ... clichéd, old-fashioned” morality. In her view, Elyot wants to tell us that being gay is “a relentlessly fraught, thoroughly fun- less, loveless and soulless sort of business, and that all gay men are fundamentally defined by their sexuality.” Terry, Flett points out, is the most spoiled of all characters, for she sees him defined merely by his “loving—yet obviously sinisterly so—grandmother” (2007). A possible “victim of society’s attitude” (Billen 2007), Terry interests me here. By refusing the compassion compulsion—he steals Alfie’s ring, instead of possibly saving him –, he “shatters the lure of the future and, for refusing the call to compassion, finally merits none himself” (Edelman 2004, 109); which is why the camera close up on his wiggling body, all blood and bruises as he lies in the hospital bed in front of a (justly so) bewildered Gavin is an extremely poignant moment. Elyot here is playing with the whole idea of compassion. For, before we even ask ourselves whether Terry is worthy of compassion, his creator makes clear that he seeks none at all. A parallel emerges between Terry and Julian. Julian refuses compassion, too, in the cottaging scene. He is married, but he enjoys occasional sex with men—that is, he is a subject of desire instead of subject of the drive—, Julian chooses to remain attached to “an infinite future of failed pursuit through which desire ... refuses its satisfaction or enjoyment, prolonging itself by negating the satisfaction at which it aims and only through that negation engaging the enjoyment it refuses to know” (Edelman 2004, 91). In her unfavourable review to the film, Rachel Cooke develops a heart-felt critique saying that “[n]o one ... lives only for sex ... Most of us have moved on. It’s just weird that it’s taking even gay writers such an age to realise it” (2007). But, even if we accepted, at least in part, this view, for the overall pessimistic tone pervading Clapham Junction, we would nevertheless still feel bound to ask, what of the increasing rate in homophobic assaults Elyot is speaking of? Let us now move on, then, to discuss Alfie’s murder and the beating of Danny, which is suggested by the closing freeze frame on the broken violin. After Alfie’s body is taken to the hospital viewing room, a touching scene displays his corpse covered with a white linen, unrecognisable— perhaps even “monstrous,” as the abject body—for his mother and sister to recognise him. At first glance, this scene materializes the threat which takes the form of Alfie’s “death.” But there is another, more subtle and yet no less tangible threat which Elyot exposes here, that is, that posed by 160 Chapter Nine
Alfie’s life as a homosexual, as embodiment of the fear of a culture alien and anarchic, to use the playwright’s words (Edelman 2004, 116). The closing fade-out on Danny’s broken violin, torn to pieces, renews, over and over, “the Imaginary fantasy of a totalizing form” (Edelman 2004, 89), which for homophobic minds is associated to the life-shattering force inherent in homosexuality. If there is any threat posed by the film, this is certainly not to be found in old-fashioned morality, but in that posed by depicting sexuality as synthome, that is, as Edelman writes, “as always synthomosexuality: sexuality as the force that threatens to leave futurity foutu” (2004, 149), a threat whose threatening potential comes from the fact that it threatens to undo the social which shapes politics, bodies, and minds. Repudiating easy solutions or light-hearted messages, and giving, instead, an account that is way too “far from life-affirming or a lesson in compassion for bigots” (Bevan 2007), the reasons why Clapham Junction is very disturbing are the same which make it a pure work of art. From his favoured position “out on a limb, out in the cold”23 instead of from within labels such as gay, queer, or “in-yer-face,” Elyot creates a theatre amiably honest, deeply moving, and thoroughly compelling.
Notes
1 Elyot 2004a, pp. 1-72; subsequent references are in brackets. 2 Communication with the author. 3 For Lacan, the unconscious is structured like language. The synthome is what holds together the borromean knot, that is, the three orders which constitute the subject: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. 4 Edelman argues that the death drive is the only way for the subject to transgress, to move beyond the pleasure principle, that is, the regulator of pleasure in heterosexual reproduction. Whereas desire, in psychoanalysis, always emerges as lack, or as a result of a lack suffered by the subject, the drive emerges as an effect of a surplus (2004, 10). The drive is, by definition, perverse—hence, Edelman association of the drive with homosexuality. 5 This jouissance is present in the Lacanian Symbolic, but the Symbolic develops against it by constant negation. 6 Elyot 2004a, pp. 73-158 subsequent references are in brackets. 7 Communication with the author. 8 See Doughty (Mail on Sunday) and Wardle (Independent on Sunday). 9 From the reviews to the first London production (26 March-08 April 1994). 10 Communication with the author; see also Wyllie (2009) for comparison between Reg and Guy. 11 Irving Wardle’s review is to the second London production at the Criterion theatre. Kevin Elyot 161
12 From the production at the Royal Court. 13 The quotation refers to a review of The Day I Stood Still. 14 See Nicholas de Jongh (Evening Standard) and Kate Stratton (Time Out). 15 Elyot 2004a, pp. 159-248; subsequent references are in brackets. 16 Elyot 2004a, pp. 249-305; subsequent references are in brackets. 17 Edelman is here drawing from Freud’s theories on primary and secondary narcissisms. 18 Elyot 2004b; subsequent references are in brackets. 19 It is important to note that no deliberate change underlies the play, as Elyot has confirmed in my communication with him. 20 Communication with the author. 21 Elyot’s film seems to be inspired from young waiter Charles Dobrowski’s murder in Clapham Common (2005); however, the film does not, in any way, attempt to tell Dobrowski’s story. 22 Communication with the author. 23 Communication with the author.
CHAPTER TEN
SARAH KANE
Kane’s work has reassessed theatre language and distorted its parameters, as well as the meaning of the search of love as an absolute in the 1990s. In this section, I will use Jacques Lacan’s notion of the objet petit a and draw some connections with Kane’s treatment of love in her later plays Cleansed (1998), Crave (1998), and 4.48 Psychosis (1999). The objet petit a remained a slippery concept throughout Lacan’s career, one which he tended to reformulate over and over.1 With perhaps some risks of over-simplification, it can be summarised as what causes desire, yet always remains inaccessible. The scenario(s) of love presented by Kane lead us to find solace in the crude visions she conveys, (in) the feasible—though sometimes barred— signs of a redemptive, heart-warming optimism. Her 1995 début play, Blasted, was crucially a “sign-o’-the-times,” a state-of-(not only one)- nation play, as director James Macdonald stressed in his response to the unfavourable reviews in the London papers (Saunders 2002, 9). Phaedra’s Love (1997) explored the crisis in public consent over the British Royal Family and sought to evaluate the human potential for and towards honesty (Saunders 2009, 69-70), albeit in a decidedly barbarous way. Intimate and epic at one and the same time,2 both plays attempted to show that the threshold dividing the personal and the political is but a “paper- thin wall ... a wall that can be torn down at any time, without warning,” as Kane admitted (Stephenson and Langridge 1997, 131). Cleansed3 is a twenty-step test on love contextualised along gender and sexual politics. The play makes the point that love is a matter of pain and loss of integrity for the self; Cleansed was indeed inspired by Roland Barthes’ association of being in love with being in Dachau.4 Also, there still is the control over the triad mind-body-language which permits one to express one’s needs and desires, something which becomes less and less so in Kane’s subsequent works. I would like to begin my analysis with the scene where Carl and Rod swap their rings, a gesture Rod is reluctant to do in spite of Carl’s pleas. Graham Saunders believes that the ring has a dual imagery “not only as a romantic and affirming symbol of love, but 164 Chapter Ten also as a demonstration of how love is savagely tested in Tinker’s institution” (2002, 97). This is certainly true, but there is something more which escapes representation and is hinted at later on in the play via the performing, mutilated body of Carl. In order to bring this something into view, I now want to focus on Rod’s speech:
Rod (Takes the ring and Carl’s hand.) Listen. I’m saying this once. (He puts the ring on Carl’s finger.) I love you now. I’m with you now. I’ll do my best, moment to moment, not to betray you. Now. That’s it. No more. Don’t make me lie to you. (111)
In my view, the overall scene is not underlied by what has been termed a “type of mock ritual” which, in imitating heterosexuality, denies both Carl and Rod as gay men (Busby and Farrier 2007, 149). Lacan first makes a distinction between the subject as he understands it (the Freudian “unconscious”) and the “thinking” subject of philosophy. The Lacanian subject is produced between one signifier and another, and occupies an undecidable space (or lack) within the chain of signification through which meaning—including meaning for individuals—is produced. This conceptualisation of lack and its inexpressibility is crucial for thinking in Lacanian terms. In the passage above, Rod seems to inhabit the symbolic dimension of love, which Sean Homer sees in “being ‘a couple’ ... a relationship with another subject who is lacking.” Carl, by contrast, is driven towards the objet petit a, “something intangible, something extra” which the two lovers cannot discern, and to which Carl aspires as demonstration of his own and Rod’s love (2005, 88). The objet petit a is the inexpressible something escaping signification, yet generating a surplus. It will become clear later on that it is always a surplus of jouissance which moves the subject in the symbolic, i.e. the order of language. The objet petit a, or, “object-cause of desire,” gives consistency to the subject as desiring subject (Homer 2005, 73). As “a moral experimenter” (Saunders 2009, 29), Tinker repeatedly tortures Carl and Rod. And, “every time the two boy lovers have another limb chopped off, they keep going, convinced that they overcome if they love enough” (Hattenstone 2000; Wallace 2006b, 222). Under torture with a pole pushed right up from his anus (scene four), Carl begs Tinker to choose Rod instead of himself. Betrayal is thus contemplated, and with it the assumption that Rod’s may Sarah Kane 165 indeed be a purer love than Carl’s. The objet petit a here offers an explanation for his extreme defence of Carl when Tinker asks him who is to die: “Rod Me. Not Carl. Me” (142). Throughout the action, Tinker, “part Prospero, part Nazi commandant” (Ravenhill 2006) is testing this objet petit a. Lacan identifies four different discourses—Master, University, Hysteric, Analyst—each one corresponding to four different positions of the objet petit a. Interesting comparisons arise from Kane’s referring to the institution as “a university” (107) and Lacan’s second discourse, according to which domination is there for those to whom knowledge is transmitted. As a representation of this authority, Tinker seeks to grasp, to control, and to normalize the inexpressible jouissance which moves the people in the institution—itself an attempt that, for Lacan, is doomed to failure: there will always be a little something of themselves they will not give away. The use of violence as a metaphor to talk about love finds echo in the violence Tinker has internalized. He wants to grasp the roots of desire, and to see how far people can go, what they are prepared to do for love, and because of this he tortures all his “patients” one by one. As Kane herself said, “If there is still love after that, then love is the most powerful thing” (Saunders 2002, 92).5 For Tinker, this is also proved by his not knowing how to behave with the unnamed Woman in the boot; he starts a crude voyeur, then he makes love to her, cries like a child would with his mother, and finally rejects her because of who she is not (Grace). In the opening scene, Graham desires death, so Tinker eye-injects him with a lethal dose of heroine. In scene ten, Grace is beaten and raped by off-stage Voices in front of her brother’s spirit. The Voices call into question a power even greater than Tinker’s own, and which mirror the four-room unspecific composition of the institution. They also remind one of Lacan’s articulation of the University discourse as fundamentally a power discourse, aimed to substitute the authority of the Father. After a love dance for Rod, Carl’s feet are taken away by rats; his surface tools for articulating and expressing love (hands, tongue, feet) have all by now been brutally removed. By the end of the play, Grace and Carl have been subjected to organs transplant; she has stitched-on genitals, whereas he has been implanted with Grace’s anatomy: “Grace now looks and sounds exactly like Graham. She is wearing his clothes. / Carl wears Robin’s clothes, that is, Grace’s (wo me n ’s) c lo the s” (149). On Carl’s dismemberment, Kane commented that “It’s not about the actual chop, it’s about the person no longer being able to express love with his hands, and what does that mean? ... what does that mean?” (Saunders 2009, 77)—hence, he is given unrecognisable signs (i.e. a woman’s body) to articulate his gay love. At the same time, however, he calls into question the issue of how to express 166 Chapter Ten love when communication is either broken or lost forever, and this will be the source informing both Crave and 4.48 Psychosis. The closing scene interests me for the movement desire makes as regards Grace’s new body:
Grace/Graham Body perfect. ... Here now. Safe on the other side and here.
Graham.
(A long silence.)
Always be here. Thank you, Doctor. ... They stare at the sky, Carl crying. It stops raining. The sun comes out. Grace/Graham smiles. (149-51)
Grace’s (which is also Graham’s) smile follows her remark on “the other side,” one which nevertheless remains rooted in the “here” and now of the present mainly by virtue of the body of her new Other. I feel that this “other side” indicates a pleasure well beyond the representable, and I would agree with Dan Rebellato when he reads Grace’s change as crossing the boundaries between the human and the post-human (2008). I would add, however, that it also seems to refer to a place beyond the symbolic, where Grace experiences an undefinable enjoyment, an “unspeakable ecstasy ... a surplus jouissance” (Homer 2005, 105-6); which is how Lacan reads the asymmetry of men and women in terms of jouissance and the objet petit a. Masculinity and femininity in Lacan are distinguished along having and being the phallus. In particular, “Woman” has to undergo a form of masquerade (being the phallus) because “it is for that which she is not that she wishes to be desired as well as loved” (Homer 2005, 99). This surplus jouissance follows her confusing the object-cause of desire for Graham with his loss (his suicide); she thus desires to become him and asks the “Doctor”/Tinker to help her in this: “Treat me as a patient” (114). Grace’s fantasy—to become One with whom she loves—is thus fulfilled in this metaphorical wholeness of being. After all, this is also what she answers to Robin when he asks her what she would change of her “original” self: Sarah Kane 167
My body. So it looked like it feels. Graham outside like Graham inside. (126)
I would not, then, view Grace’s change as a remark on a world “still defined by men, with women compromised in the process” (Wandor 2001, 234) nor, as Christina Wald notices, as the fulfilment of her “resurrection of Graham through melancholic incorporation” (2007, 200).6 In the context of a desire for something that is always lacking, her transformation is perhaps a way to approximate towards the impossibility of a Lacanian real, the inexpressible, the always already occluded from our reach as (desiring) subjects. In addition, this dimension is hinted at, and I would say very effectively, by the final positing of sound and lightning to replace verbal and bodily language:
The sun gets brighter and brighter, the squeaking of the rats louder and louder, until the light is blinding and the sound deafening.
Blackout. (151)
With Crave, Kane reaches deep down into the “brutally naked environment” which in Ravenhill’s view characterises her writing (2005). The brutalities depicted in Cleansed and Blasted had its source in violent outbursts recorded globally (Hattenstone 2000). In this respect, the next two plays shift towards a much more intimate perspective, and a breaking up of the logics of meaning, representation, and interpretation. In terms of style, Crave7 incorporates elements of the “contemporary confessional monologue” (D’Monté 2006, 223). Love is lacking. The lack and search of love is expressed through the illusory dimensions evoked by “four nameless voices, different characters or warring factions of one person’s consciousness” sharing the same unattainable desire (Hattenstone 2000). Such uncharacteristic choice of stage voices (A, B, C, and M), not fixed- down deliberately, tempts us to read them as defined merely in relation to their desire(s). A is a paedophile. His line “love by its very nature desires a future” (156) anticipates the dimly positive note on which the play closes, even though Crave is widely regarded as Kane’s bleakest work written, as she admitted, at a time of “ceasing to have faith in love” (Saunders 2009, 80). A is also the author of a breathtakingly touching monologue on love, and this demands a reassessment of his sexual drive/perversion:
somehow somehow somehow communicate some of the/overwhelming undying empowering unconditional all-encompassing heart-enriching 168 Chapter Ten
mind-expanding on-going never-ending love I have for you. (170, my emphasis)
His speech is more effective when we compare him with the other three voices; for, as Simon Hattenstone notes, the desire for love is alternated with and related to “abuse and the ultimate desire: death” (2000). Two antithetic, yet closely connected movements emerge which structure the overall text. The surface structure reveals the four voices “on the same quest to find physical and emotional contact with each other” (Saunders 2009, 33). But the growing awareness that communication is failing and the “on-going,” persistent search of something that is lacking are also subject to the drive whose purpose, in Lacan, “is simply to maintain its repetitive compulsive movement, just as the purpose of desire is to desire” (Homer 2005, 76). So, for instance, A says that “Only love can save me and love has destroyed me” (174)—this, for Lacan, is the paradoxical nature of “enjoyment”—but he also craves the desire for “[a] long deep sleep with you in my arms” (197). This duality slowly falls apart and changes to a series of shared attempts at a pleasure far exceeding the material and the possible. The title of the play, in this respect, moves towards the articulation of a Lacanian real, a territory which is “beyond the realm of appearance and images” (Homer 2005, 82). “Crave” denotes a strong desire for something; here, it also implies an unfulfilled and unfulfilling desire. To crave is to feel a powerful desire for.8 But, in Lacan’s early theorizations in the 1930s, desire “returns ... in the form of a need, such as hunger” (Homer 2005, 82). The distinction between need and desire, whereby a need—the result of instinct—is always driven towards its own satisfaction came only at a later stage in his study. This point seemed to be highlighted by the Italian production of Crave at the Teatro della Limonaia (Florence, 2001) opening, in Barbara Nativi’s translation, as Fame (hunger).9 In a way, the Italian version stressed “the need that drives hunger not the object that satisfies it” (Homer 2005, 82). A parallel was thus set between need and desire as two movements which converged as regards the lack of the object to which they both aim. The objet petit a was that something out of representation for both. What this production also confirmed was that one of the play’s strengths is “not in action but in language” (Saunders 2009, 32), in a form of enjoyment, as I will show, provided in and by language. The split-monologue is the technique used to develop the intricate patterns in which the four characters’ speeches merge, clash, and overlap. Saunders is surely right when he remarks on the “endless interpretations that can be given to the exchanges, depending on which character one imagines is being addressed” (2009, 33). Another main line of interpretation Sarah Kane 169 is the dramatic rupture in communication, hauntingly represented by C’s “formless cry of despair” (190) or by the four characters’ “short one syllable scream” (186-7). This introduces an interesting point to the analysis of Kane’s work. About the creative process of Crave, Mel Kenyon says that Kane had slowly “disembodied herself as the author” (Saunders 2002, 149).10 Silence is a desperate form of communication, and this has been shown by the typical talk-show arrangement of the four actors remaining on stage throughout the performance in several productions of the play. Crave is informed by a metaphysical treatment of violence. Language replaces the much debated crude depictions which were symbolic of Kane’s earlier playwriting. This is especially the case with C’s stories of sexual abuse. The desire for death connects her to B—“I see no good in anyone any more” (163)—; theirs is the cry, “I feel nothing”—B on (156), C on (158)—reiterated in different parts of the text. C is a lesbian struggling with her split-subjectivity. Her personality is shaped by the trauma of child abuse: “I need a miracle to save me ... I’m evil, I’m damaged, and no one can save me ... I feel nothing, nothing. / I feel nothing” (172, 173, 175). Her abuses re-emerge in her confession to the audience:
He buys me a make-up kit, blushers and lipstick and eyeshadow. And I paint my face in bruises and blood and cuts and swelling, and on the mirror in deep red, UGLY. (180).
The alternating moments of despair and longing for love combine to present the desire for death as a desire for “the beyond of pleasure, the inaccessible, the forbidden—that is to say, the ultimate limit that cannot be overcome” (Homer 2005, 90), a limit that is related to a form of extreme enjoyment. In those instances when the various speeches are structured more like dialogue, the movements of love, by which I mean the duality presence/absence of the desired Other, surface in the shared awareness of an object that is always barred from view, as well as from representation: “C LEAVE. / A COME BACK. / All. STAY” (159). If, as Elaine Aston has put it, Crave refers to “a permanent site of being in exile from the pre- Oedipal or semiotic” (2003a 96), it is equally pertinent to view it as a Lacanian real. For, after the fundamental loss through which the subject enters the symbolic, the objet petit a is the activator of the desire for love. But desire, as Homer writes in his account of Lacan’s thought, “strictly speaking, has no object. Desire is always the desire for something that is missing and thus involves a constant search for the missing object” (2005, 170 Chapter Ten
87). This brings me to the exchange between C and B, an indication of a movement which, by its very nature, refuses its fulfilment: “C A motion away, / B Not a motion towards” (190-1)—even though, it could be pointed out, this apparently contravenes M’s preoccupation with the future of love, which she enquires upon earlier on in the play:
M One of these days B Soon very soon A Love you till then M (and after?) (178)
In Crave, the subject(s) acknowledge(s) the painful distancing from the desired Other; I would add, however, that because this is just what gives them consistency as subjects, we cannot, or should not, view the play as tending towards dissolution and bleakness. At one point, M says, “If love would come” (160), something she repeats later on: “Be the one ... If love would come” (165-6). Given that “it is loss that drives life through desire,” and the objet petit a that activates it in the first place, the closing exchange casts death as the absolute paradox, or a moment of paradoxical beauty. It is the beauty of a jouissance we are always aiming at, the beauty of both pleasure and pain, of “pleasure in pain” (Homer 2005, 89):
B And every shall be A Happy B So happy C Happy and free (200)
Lively debates, saying one thing at one point and its direct opposite as years passed and Kane’s reputation increased, have gone on about whether 4.48 Psychosis11 is the record of the final moments of a personal breakdown. Undoubtedly, they were, and still are fuelled by the aura of “deification” which according to Kenyon has characterised her place within European theatre.12 Produced posthumously, the piece reaches unprecedented levels of craft as regards the search of a voice on love via the explosion of theatre boundaries. The problem of a body no longer able to communicate—a “body no longer expellent” (205)—is put centre stage. 4.48 Psychosis is a visceral play; it gets straight to the very bone of performance; it is theatre laid bare, but it is also highly confessional in form (Saunders 2009), and extremely far-reaching in scope. During the writing of the play, Kane declared that “the only way back to any kind of sanity is to connect physically with who you are emotionally, spiritually and mentally” (Saunders 2009, 80). Whereas this Sarah Kane 171 contradicts one of the key assertions in her play, it is also an interesting point of entry into her work:
... I am deadlocked by that smooth psychiatric voice of reason which tells me there is an objective reality in which my body and mind are one. (209)
In performance, this aspect was addressed by the use of a mirror hanging above the stage. For the reviewers to the production, designer Jeremy Herbert and Macdonald conveyed, in this way, the sense of the three actors either giving the impression of released spirits, floating, or pinned down like insects on a (white) wall, as well as emphasizing the multiplicity of facets and questioning issues of the split-self.13 Also, there are clear references to Lacan’s theories on the “mirror stage,” in particular his later formulation of this stage—from marking the mental development of the child, to the fragmented self having the illusion of wholeness of his/her being, an aspect which is clearly relevant here. For Saunders, the mirror “directly commented on the different states of consciousness that the speakers inhabit in the play, especially the concerns about separation of mind from body” (2002, 116). In Lacan’s theories, there is no duality between mind and body. It is, on the other hand, a point that is reiterated later on:
Body and soul can never be married. ... How can I return to form now that my formal thought has gone? (212-3)
Signification, this passage seems to suggest, has ceased to mean. And, if in Crave the realisation of a love lacking was interrogated from the points of view of the four characters and the effects this painful acquisition had on them, in 4.48 Psychosis love, as objet petit a, becomes “the constant sense we have, as subjects, that something is lacking or missing from our lives ... we cannot quite pinpoint it but we know that it is there” (Homer 2005, 87)—that is to say, it is turned into healing optimism provided by that something which escapes communication itself. The comments above show the conflicting emotions affecting the play’s creative process. In this regard, Kenyon has revealed that she was often wondering, at that time about Kane, “whether the connection made with the outer world was becoming less and less, and therefore she was having to dig deeper and deeper to create” (Hattenstone 2000). In their analysis of Kane’s theatre, Selina Busby and Stephen Ferrier advance the hypothesis that 4.48 Psychosis illustrates “the fluidity of queer (non)identity 172 Chapter Ten positions,” a hypothesis exemplified by the absence of notes on production and characters. This aspect, they go on, was over-emphasized in performance by the use of the mirror, breaking “the fixity of the voice and the identity positions that might produce that voice”; it basically rejected “the theatrical normative desire to fix a vision” (2007, 154-6). The opening production, played by Daniel Evans, Jo McInness, and Madeleine Potter gave the sense of a psychiatric session, and perhaps also hinted at the gender economy potentially enclosed in the text. A play like 4.48 Psychosis undeniably attempts to confront the endless choices available both to actors and directors, as confirmed by its subsequent revivals. Among them, the 2009 staging at the Young Vic14 saw Romanian actor Anamaria Marinca as a “frail-looking, crop-haired, slightly androgynous” solo performer, a choice which inevitably seemed to read the play along Kane’s biography (Marlowe 2009). Whereas this choice could also be related to what Busby and Ferrier call a queer aesthetics of drama, I think the whole question of the speaking voice(s) in the play has more to do with Kane’s concern for love as an absolute, and for addressing the depth of human emotions available to individuals. Ravenhill brilliantly captures it, when he says that Kane was a writer who “saw the cruelties of the world but also the human capacity for love” (2005). Parveen Adams writes that the objet petit a brings about “a hole in the field of representation, but it does not simply ruin representation. It mends it as it ruins it.” This questions issues of the representable underlying the overall play. Love is first introduced as “this terrible so fucking awful physical aching fucking longing I have for you” (214), a desire directed towards a woman who is barred from view, or, as Paul Taylor (Independent) notes, “does not [even] exist”:
I dread the loss of her I’ve never touched love keeps me a slave in a cage of tears I gnaw my tongue with which to her I can never speak I miss a woman who was never born I kiss a woman across the years that say we shall never meet. (218)
Her absence traps the desiring subject/”I” that speaks in desire itself, as if in a vicious cycle:
Built to be lonely to love the absent
The objet petit a, Adams continues, “both produces a hole and is what comes to the place of lack to cover it over” (Homer 2005, 88). This hole, Sarah Kane 173 or void (see below) is paradoxically sustained by the lack that fills it, and it is where desire originates:
I can fill my space fill my time but nothing can fill this void in my heart
The vital need for which I would die Breakdown (219)
It is important to view this as a momentary breakdown, one whose attempt is not at self-annihilation. The void referred to is the origin of the desire for the same person who becomes “my doctor, my saviour, my omnipotent judge, my priest, my god, the surgeon of my soul” (233), someone with the curative potential only love can confer. Symbolizing “at once the void, the gap, the lack around which the symbolic order is structured and that which comes to mask or cover over that lack,” the objet petit a tendentiously sustains the voice(s) in the play as subject(s) trying to express, through words, the inarticulable, that which “escapes symbolization and is beyond representation” (Homer 2005, 88):
to win affection of desired Other
to adhere and remain loyal to Other
to enjoy sensuous experiences with cathected Other.
In Cleansed, Grace teaches Robin how to write and count, and he falls in love with her. In a way, he elevates the imaginary fantasy of love, that is, “to idealize the other person and feel perfect together” (Homer 2005, 88): I won’t strangle you. / I’m in love with you. / ... / I only want to kiss you, won’t hurt you, I swear. / ... / I want to be with you” (128). But he knows he is going to be rejected; he thus hangs himself. The same imaginary connotations attached to love return here in the form of a desire for an unnamed Other:
to form mutually enjoyable, enduring, cooperating and reciprocating relationship with Other, with an equal
to be forgiven
to be loved
to be free. (235) 174 Chapter Ten
The intent to dissociate the body from the mind becomes, ultimately, a metaphor of the disjunction in every communicative act. The stage offers an opportunity to build a form of communication which contests its own impulse to define and to articulate. But if the unity of being is shattered irreparably, then, the only way we can possibly preserve some attachment to form is the conviction that love shall always survive, as stressed in the optimistic, amorous cry which closes the play: “please open the curtains” (245). This study began with the assumption that Kane’s avowed interest in love and its survival in society is reworked, in her drama, either in terms of a constant testing of its surface, often brutal, manifestations, or in terms of a search of the lacking object of desire (Rebellato 2009). In one of the most compelling exchanges in Crave, C and B say:
C Silence or Violence. B The choice is yours. (187)
The choice at stake is between two modes of expressing and searching love; Kane explored both, and she did so without losing sight of our fundamentally human nature as individuals. Through love, Kane countered the fetishizing of violence fuelled by and typical of media broadcasts in late-capitalist societies, and which affect the private-personal/public- political scene. The all-well-too-known eye-gouging, male rape, and baby- killing scenes in Blasted (1995) are the exemplifications which brought her fame, and which earned her inclusion in a systems of labels and “movements” which were extraneous to her theatre sensibility.15 She said once that “theatre exists in the moment of the performance and then disappears ... [it] has no memory, which makes it the most existential of the arts” (Saunders 2009, 47). She showed that real love is what escapes representation, what resists signification, because it is by its very nature beyond our reach; but it is in giving, or trying to give voice to this indefinableness, in this tending towards which is required by such movement that we become humans, and show our humanness.
My thanks to Mary Nicotra for her generous advice. Sarah Kane 175
Notes
1 The notion first appeared in Lacan’s Seminars and came to replace the initial one of “The Thing” (das Ding) towards the 1960s (Homer 2005, 85). It is important to remember that, in Lacan’s theories, the key concept “always function differently according to each of Lacan’s three orders—the imaginary, the symbolic and the real—and in the different phases of his teaching” (Homer 2005, 10). 2 See Stephenson and Langridge (1997); and Aston (2003a) for further reference. 3 Kane 2001, 105-51; subsequent references are in brackets. 4 This point was discussed by Kane in interview with her German translator Nils Tabert, quoted in Saunders (2009, 76). 5 This comment is taken from an interview on the play by Tabert. 6 According to Judith Butler’s re-reading of Freud’s melancholia, gender is the effect of ungrieved love, a loss that has not been mourned. Tinker’s violence, in particular, would be a form of heterosexual expression of gender melancholia, a denial of homosexuality, towards which he feels “both disgust and desire” (Wald 2007, 205). 7 Kane 2001, 153-201; subsequent references are in brackets. 8 Oxford English Dictionary of Current English, 3rd edn, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. 9 In the published version, the title was changed into Febbre (fever). 10 We know now that, for instance, in Kane’s mind A also stood for (the voice of) the Author; see, amongst others, Saunders (2009). 11 Kane 2001, 203-45; subsequent references are in brackets. 12 See Rebellato (2009). 13 See Theatre Record, 17-30 June 2000. 14 The revival was directed by French-born Christian Benedetti. 15 Among them, “New-Brutalist”, “Neo-Jacobean”, “Cruel Britannia”, and “In-Yer- Face”. See Stephenson and Langridge (1997); Saunders (2002) and (2009) for a critical understanding of this point, and for Kane’s own opinions.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
FRANK MCGUINNESS
“Watch yourself, Dido. Watch yourself, Derry. Watch yourself. Watch yourself. Watch yourself” (379).1 With these lines, Dido in McGuinness’ Carthaginians (1988) is about to leave the atypical theatre space of the Derry graveyard where his drag performance has helped his friends to mourn over Bloody Sunday. McGuinness always makes it a truly theatrical experience to engage with agents-subjects of performance in performance. In characters such as Pyper (Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, 1985),2 Dido (Carthaginians), and Marco (Dolly West’s Kitchen, 1999),3 trauma provides the theatrical impulse to stress the redemptive power of performance; in Caravaggio (Innocence, 1986) and Micheál Mac Líammóir (Gates of Gold, 2002), performance becomes an intimately queer re-telling of personal stories.4 Through these characters, McGuinness conveys an Irish perspective which goes beyond the confines of the local and affects, as well as being affected by, contemporary gay experience. In his plays, overall unity is an effect of difference, which McGuinness tries to achieve in contexts where personal and public losses catalyse individual transformation. McGuinness admits that his plays are “absolutely ... about sexual politics” (Jackson 2002). Within this framework, he calls for a positive engagement with diversity, both sexual and political; for him, the acknowledgement of difference “is the best way to begin the process of unity” (O’Toole 1985a, 19). This aspiration towards unity affects his overall playwriting. In Observe,5 unity is achieved through the intimate telling of “the diversity within” eight Ulstermen, as McGuinness states (O’Toole 1985a, 19). For the elder Pyper, who opens the play with recollections of his Ulster friends lost in World War I,6 Ulster is both home and its Other; he is at home in Ulster but his homosexuality makes him feel like an outsider. Judith Butler speaks of homosexuality in the military as contagious, an act which spreads in uncontrollable ways through more or less concealed citations of itself. Pyper’s homosexuality is “contagious” to the extent that he offers cathartic redemption to his comrades, first by falling in love with Craig, then by preparing them for inevitable death. If the military is “already a 178 Chapter Eleven zone of partial citizenship, a domain in which selected features of citizenship are preserved, and others are suspended,” then Pyper’s queerness is edifying. McGuinness seems to contest assumptions that cast citizenship as “the attachment to and embodiment of the law” (1997b, 142, 153), where “the law” indicates the law of the fathers of Ulster against which Pyper is prepared to fight, as we shall see later. McGuinness interrogates citizenship in order to reject sterile versions of History and suggests that “cultural myths and individual friendship” be recorded instead of official events (i.e. military accomplishments) as in history books and in people’s memory (Lojek 1988, 45-6). It is at this point that the play raises the issue of home and its re- contextualisation. In an interview in The Guardian, McGuinness remarks that “by reason of my own sexuality, I never felt I belonged” (Higgins 2008)—hence the feeling that theatre is where he should be, where imagination makes him feel at home. Home is re-contextualised through Pyper in Observe, in the sense that it is made unstable, subject to constant flux. References to home are included in the homosocial thread suggested by the title of the two sections ‘Pairing’ and ‘Bonding.’ Also, home is associated with a pre-gendered being, the statue of the “asexual Celtic goddess” (Lojek 1988, 49) on Boa Island, where Pyper and Craig declare their love to each other while on leave from the trenches (in ‘Pairing’). This movement brings Pyper to find home in the “here and now” of the trenches:
It’s bringing us home. We’re not in France. We’re home. We’re on our own territory. We’re fighting for home. This river is ours. This land’s ours. We’ve come home. (188)
The sequence establishes a series of connections whereby home and Ulster are no longer conceived as stable places and/or identities (Heininge 2002). This is demonstrated further by Pyper and Craig’s last good-bye:
Craig ... One of us has to go on. Pyper David— Craig Calm. Pyper Home. Craig Here. (192-3)
It is not as if the trenches become a no-(heterosexual)-man’s-land. Pyper’s and Craig’s “here” is an elsewhere, a somewhere outside of Ulster which means that home is here, elsewhere, yet it is also nowhere, just as their sexuality is in stark contrast to the heterosexist rhetoric of and required by Frank McGuinness 179 nationalism. There is yet one further consideration to make on the queer influences in McGuinness’ play. When Pyper is visited by the memory of his “fathers”, he is admittedly haunted by the thought of reproducing his own “breed” (164). In order to accept fully the call to arms, Pyper has to self- deny his homosexuality which is “the prerequisite for military service” (Butler 1997b, 105). His anxiety over issues of citizenship is translated into Pyper’s oblivious acceptance of the law of the fathers:
... I would destroy my own life. I would take up arms at the call of my Protestant fathers. I would kill in their name and I would die in their name. To win their respect would be my sole act of revenge, revenge for the bad joke they had played on me in making me sufficiently different to believe I was unique, when my true uniqueness lay on how alike them I really was. (164)
His murder of the “three-legged” whore in Paris is both the surface effect of his closeted homosexuality and his implicit rejection of women as objects of desire according to the requirements of military rhetoric (Butler 1997b). Pyper’s refusal to conform to the vertical inheritance line of the family tree introduces a queer temporality (Halberstam 2005) that re- orientates desire and the present by means of his relationship with Craig and his comrades. For an Irish audience, a performance which recreates a historical fact through the lens of a homosexual re-writes the past from the point of view of the present. Here, as in other plays by McGuinness, the past is questioned “from the standpoint of the immediate social, sexual and gendered present shared by dramatists, actors and audience” (Cave 1999, 234). This reading can be extended to the references to the Aids epidemic hinted at in the play. It was McGuinness himself, in an interview in the Irish Sunday Independent, who first admitted that “the subject of Aids is very strikingly there in a play like Observe the Sons of Ulster.... Even if it is coded” (Jackson 2002). I think that this is what was fairly straightforwardly suggested by the red backdrop of the 1985 production at the Abbey theatre in Dublin. The result, according to Fintan O’Toole, was “a truly theatrical space where ... language finds physical realisation” (1985b). I would associate the colour red of the Ulster flag, blood, and the war on stage with the Aids hysteria that has been fuelled by governments in the West since the early 1980s. But there are other elements confirming this view, not least the presentation of a form of collective mourning. Ushered in by Pyper in Observe, this form of mourning is transmuted into a call to action, or a “play” for Dido, in Carthaginians. 180 Chapter Eleven
After the opening of Carthaginians, Patrick Mason’s production and Joe Vanek’s design were criticized almost unanimously. Critic David Nowlan wrote that the play “was staged with almost icy formality on a bleak depersonalised slope,” and concluded that it lost its message somewhere in its indeterminacy (1988, 12).7 This exposes a not uncommon problem regarding the reception of some of McGuinness’ plays. According to David Cregan, the frequent superficiality of criticism lies in the fact that, speaking in terms of sexuality, “Irish critics could sense the diversity, but failed to theorize it beyond the familiar, and arguably safe, borders of well-established identity politics, Irish history, and clichéd sectarian binarism” (2004, 674).8 Dido the transvestite, “a gloriously, self-dramatizing Irish queen” is the spiritual guide for a group of three women and two men who are waiting for the dead to rise (Lojek 2006, 338). Among them, Hark interests me not only as a sexually ambivalent figure, as he was reviewed in London (Milton Shulman, Evening Standard), but because his speech to Dido seems to move well beyond the present of the play:
Tell me what’s between your legs. Is there anything between your legs? Is there anything between your legs? (Hark grabs Dido’s groin.) Is the united Ireland between your legs? What happens when cocks unite? Disease, boy, disease. (314)
The lines are reminiscent of the habitual slogan sex=death by which authorities prompted discrimination against gay people on the grounds of promiscuity, thereby augmenting the fear of Aids (and its possible extension to heterosexual people). Writing in the 1980s, the writer and activist Michael Bronski claimed that, in order to break this association, gays and lesbians were faced with how “to bring death out in the open.” This is what Dido re-creates through the killings in his play-within-the- play, and through something which is hinted at in the graveyard setting. To begin with, Bronski continues, one had “to acknowledge the place of grief and mourning in our lives.” At the same time, one had to understand how “to use death as an impetus for social change ... to make death part of a seamless web of existence; neither avoided nor sentimentalized” (1989, 226-7). McGuinness follows this policy exactly in the same play-within- the-play, The Burning Balaclava. With the help of the carnivalesque body of Fionnuala McGonigle, alias Dido—“a black miniskirt, black tights, high-heels and beret” (330)—, the losses of the characters, more or less directly related to Bloody Sunday, are self-consciously mourned by setting up a hilarious parody of the Troubles. The Burning Balaclava is a “queer” Irish reading of sectarian violence Frank McGuinness 181 in which genders are swapped between male and female impersonators ending in a multiple killing by means of water pistols. Drag is used to unmask the social construction of gender as a series of norms inscribed on the body. In this sense, drag is, as Butler points out, “a kind of radical theatrical remaking of the body” (Osborne and Segal 1994, 33). Furthermore, by sharing their own personal losses, the characters hand something of themselves to the others, aware that they may undergo a transformation. Such transformation is crucial in Butler’s discussion of the power of mourning ([2004] 2006). She says that “mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance. There is losing, as we know, but there is also the transformative effect of loss, and this latter cannot be charted or planned” (21). This seems to be just what is at stake in Carthaginians, both in the relationships which develop among the characters and in Dido’s role as their spiritual guide. In this pattern of collective mourning, references to the Aids epidemic find realization. They reach a climax in Dido’s recollection of the names of those killed on Bloody Sunday. The naming of the lost loved ones was indeed a recurring practice of Aids activism, as demonstrated by the long- lasting “NAMES” project (Dawidoff 1989). In McGuinness’s play, Dido’s performance “shows a way of achieving a beneficial measure of distance from political circumstance through which to discover possibilities of social integration” (Cave 1999, 239). It seems plausible, then, to read the two aspects considered as part of a similar pattern of mourning over loss, and responding to it by means of a call to action. The interaction of personal and collective mourning evoked in Carthaginians is also a feature of Dolly West’s,9 in which McGuinness follows the West household over a time-span of six months during and briefly after World War II. McGuinness’ intent here is to use the kitchen as a simulacrum, a place where individual personality and exterior world converge. In particular, McGuinness states, “the table should represent the heart of the kitchen” (2002, 178). And indeed it is when American GI Marco and his cousin Jamie are invited for dinner at the West’s that a “queer effect” is created. Sarah Ahmed argues that the inter-relatedness between bodies and places follows a pattern built on specific directions, or orientations. A queer effect follows whenever the proximity of some bodies (more than others) affects their feeling out of place; in other words, the space they inhabit fails to extend the “lines”—to follow the directions already taken (2006). The only son in the West household is Justin, whose nationalist convictions reflect a male-stereotyped version of Irish history, and thus he cannot accept his homosexuality. Marco makes him overcome 182 Chapter Eleven his homophobia alongside those convictions which so far had him stand on the German side of the war, blind to the threat which Germany poses for him. Paul Taylor (Independent) points out “Hatred of the English has blinded Justin to the threat Germany poses both to his country and his sexuality.” Here, queer becomes itself “a way of inhabiting the world at a point in which things fleet” (Ahmed 2006, 172). This is represented both by Justin’s changing his own attitudes and his relationship with Marco, and by the emergence of other couples in the play. In performance, Marco is played with “outrageously anachronistic camp” (Dallat 2000). Joining the war is for him an act of revenge against his neglectful parents, as evidenced by his memory of his mother:
Our Lady of Second Avenue? She once found some sketches I’d done of dresses when I was seven years old. She poured ketchup on every page, salt and lots of pepper. She made me eat them one by one until I vomited. I thought it was blood, the red coming up my throat ... I’m fighting this war because of hatred.
Marco’s childhood abuses have sedimented, and he mistakes the blood of the dead he sees in war for red sauce: “All my dreams are red” (254). It is Justin, near the end of the play, who helps him see blood for what it really is. For the most part, reviewers in Dublin and again in London did not bother to engage as fully with the issues raised by the play as it deserves (Arnold 1999; Clarke 1999; Murphy 1999; Nowlan 1999; O’Kelly 1999).10 With very few exceptions it was generally accused of “failure of period authenticity” for its apparent lack of realism in the depiction of homosexuality and the military at the time of World War II (O’Kelly 1999). Both in Dublin and London, the cast was undoubtedly appreciated more than the production itself, and Pauline Flanagan’s performance of Rima was particularly favoured. Nowlan’s comment is worth quoting; he maintains that “Sexual love or hate is not comparable to love or hate of country, so that to compare ... the resolution of sexual relationships with the end of the war is merely sentimental.” This attachment to realism leads to miss the point of McGuinness’ challenging critique of an establishment which much too often fails to grasp how intimately related sexual and political wars are. Dolly West’s tells us that it is only through positive engagement with diversity and through surrender to the imaginative power of theatre that grief can be overcome. McGuinness’ envisioning of queer aesthetics in Irish drama is self- consciously performative11 in the last two plays considered here, Innocence and Gates of Gold. Most of the reviewers again misunderstood Innocence Frank McGuinness 183
(Dowling 1986; Rushe 1986; Sheridan 1986).12 When it played in London, David Tushingham (Time Out) cleverly pointed out that McGuinness’ Caravaggio is the embodiment of the struggle against the patriarchal structures which dominate society, “an artist proudly and defiantly himself in the face of authority and society.” The stress was and is not on the singularity of the event (Caravaggio’s life and works) but on the bigger picture, as McGuinness says on the “Catholic imagination” (Allen 1987). In Innocence, the body becomes a sort of theatre. In particular, the male body is presented “with a sexual zeal, with an extraordinary sense of the flesh’s capacity to provoke desire” (Tóibín 1986). The uses of body include the ways it is often seen crudely as exchange currency for sex; but they also build on the painterly visions of the body in Caravaggio’s paintings. This is confirmed by the association of Caravaggio with his own role of whore for Cardinal del Monte:
I do as I am told. Painter and pimp. Painter to Cardinal del Monte, pimp to the Papal Curia, whore to the Catholic church. And they need me. For I’m a very special whore. The cardinal is envied for his whore’s expertise. Jesus, what I get up to with these hands has to be seen to be believed. (239)
There seems to be a clear intent on the part of the playwright to group together Caravaggio, his “queer-match” Lena, and the two boys in “Rough Trade” (201), Antonio and Lucio, under the pretext of a family union. Caravaggio’s and Lena’s ambition is “to turn the world upside-down” (284), to queer both family and heterosexism as sanctioned by Catholic morals. This seems, then, to be an indirect response to what Caravaggio’s brother has told him: “Your family is dead. You are no one” (253). Traditional family roles are deconstructed on the grounds of the sexuality and sexual pleasure all four of them experience, albeit in radically different ways. Caravaggio would thus overturn conventional patriarchy. Lena, who would be the mother, in the play is a whore that has control over her own body by selling it in exchange for sexual pleasure. Antonio and Lucio are in control of their own bodies to the extent that they use them wisely to feed themselves and find a space within the corrupt society of the play; yet, their bodies are at the same time subject to the authority of Cardinal del Monte. They parallel Caravaggio, in a way, as he too prostitutes himself for the Cardinal in order to be able to paint. As queers, the three of them embody forms of resistance to and acceptance of Church authority whose inherent corruption destabilizes the association between charity and innocence. As a queer family, all four characters turn their world “upside-down”; and, insofar as they occupy a space where “norms fail to be reproduced” (Ahmed 2006, 198), they embody the queer moment 184 Chapter Eleven in the revised history of a controversial character such as Caravaggio. There is one last consideration to make. It is by now known that the use, in production, of anomalies such as contemporary costumes expressed “the refusal to confine the play to any one historical period.” Similarly, Eamonn Jordan views the association between “death and beauty, death and touch” as an indirect reference to Aids (2002, 51, 63). I would add that the reference becomes much more direct when we think of the Cardinal as the embodiment of the Catholic Church’s injurious speeches which viewed Aids as the gay plague. Accordingly, the illness becomes a judgement-day punishment for gay people, something they deserve, given their sexual promiscuity and their deviant sexuality. The allusions extend to the repetition of the colour red, recurring here in Caravaggio’s red cloak (see his John the Baptist), as we have seen earlier in Dolly West’s in Marco’s “all-red” dreams. And if McGuinness is indeed a playwright that deals with the past with the present in mind (Aleks Sierz, Tribune),13 the audacity of his feeling the present sadly re-surfaces as part of recent debates by the Church in Rome on the ongoing spread of Aids in Third World countries. The co-founders of the legendary Gate Theatre, the couple MacLíammóir and Hilton Edwards, inspire Gates of Gold.14 Gabriel (MacLíammóir) is dying. Admittedly, if references to Aids seem justified by the absence of direct references to any specific illness, McGuinness states that Conrad and he are a couple that has “gone beyond all that” (Jackson 2002)— again, a clear indication of how challenging for diverse audiences his works can be. In performance, Mac Liammóir’s rendition by Alan Howard showed “a fabulous hybrid, part exotic orchid, part Triffid, at once delicately gorgeous and monstrously voracious”, with Richard Johnson playing Conrad with “nicely judged gravity” (Macaulay 2002). References to the actual couple were retained in Vanek’s setting, “elegant orientalism ... divided between a bedroom and a sitting room,” similar to their home in Harcourt Terrace. And Mac Liammóir’s queer artistry and long-life masquerade was symbolized by the actor’s wig which remained on stage throughout. The play has been no exception as regards the failure of some critics to grasp the diversity of its message. Bruce Arnold’s comment interests me here when he says that “we would have been moved by the same thread of compassion in the strange mixture of affection and annoyance with which couples stumble into old age” (2002). He underestimates the depiction of an avowed gay couple and instead seeks similarities with a heterosexual one. He thus misses McGuinness’ real intentions, namely to “speak to an audience in general. Because I really don’t think there is that much Frank McGuinness 185 difference between a gay marriage and a straight marriage” (Jackson 2002; O’Flanagan 2002). The assumption made in this study is that critics have often domesticated the queer impulse of McGuinness’ theatre, trying to neutralize it within the mainstream.15 Gabriel and Conrad’s “marriage” seems ultimately to point to current debates on civil partnership in Ireland. The play now appears as a stern tribute to a love that dares not speak its name. And if we bear in mind McGuinness’ insistent views on the power of theatrical imagination (O’Mahony 2008), Gates of Gold remains a truly optimistic view of the possibilities for this kind(s) of love to continue to speak for itself precisely in virtue of its own un-nameability. His last play so far to be informed by a queer perspective, it celebrates the purely theatrical through the genius of performance, MacLíammóir; above all, it establishes once and for all the primacy of feeling for effecting social change. McGuinness’s movement in his plays is gradual and borderline, to the extent that it situates itself in a shifting continuum of dichotomies: private and public, personal and political, heterosexual and homosexual, men and women, Loyalism and Unionism, Nationalism and Republicanism, and primarily past and present. His artistry lies in viewing the theatre as a world in which diversity is the primary requirement for one’s identity—be political, sexual or otherwise—and for calling forth a rejuvenated Irish aesthetics of drama.
Dido caresses Seph’s guitar, half-covered with the tricolour. Play. Dido exits as the music plays. (379)
Blackout.
Notes
1 McGuinness 1996, 291-379; subsequent references are in brackets. 2 From here onwards, Observe. 3 From here onwards, Dolly West’s. 4 Discussions about the queer text of McGuinness’ theatre have been developed in illuminating criticism by Cannon Harris (1998); Cave (1999); and Cregan (2004). 5 McGuinness 1996, 91-197; subsequent references are in brackets. 6 The Battle of the Somme took place from July to November 1916. 7 Director and designer were unchanged also for the London production in 1994. See Theatre Record, 2-15 July 1989 for reviews to the British production. 8 Cregan is specifically referring to Observe... but I think his point of view is relevant for most of the plays dealt with in this section. 186 Chapter Eleven
9 McGuinness 2002a, pp. 171-263; subsequent references are in brackets. 10 See also Theatre Record (6-19 May 2000) for the London production at the Old Vic. 11 I here draw from Susan Cannon Harris’s essay on McGuinness, where she states that the characterization of Pyper and Dido intimates a wider awareness of national identity. They are versions of a new Irish identity, “self-consciously performative” (1998, 26). Performativity is retained, here as in Harris’s essay, in the sense of doing literally what one says, on the power of words to do what they name. 12 McGuinness 1996, pp. 199-289; subsequent references are in brackets. 13 This observation was carried out by some theatre academics (Cave 1997; Cregan 2004). 14 McGuinness 2002b; subsequent references are in brackets. 15 Cregan laments that criticism has tended “to absorb the queer into the normative, neutralizing its effects, emptying its politics, and defusing its inherent meanings” (2004, 683). He says this of Observe and The Bird Sanctuary (1994), but I think it is clearly visible also in Innocence and Dolly West’s as it is in this play. AFTERWORD
This volume has considered the shaping and performing of gender identity in British and Irish theatre since the 1980, and focused on a number of plays and playwrights whose role has been crucial for an understanding of changing cultural and political dynamics. Particular attention has been paid to how future directions in theatre writing may evolve from the standpoint of gender identity and its relation to sexuality, class, and race, as well as from their overlap. Critical moments have been the responses to Thatcher’s government in 1980s Britain, the Troubles and the advent of the Celtic Tiger in Ireland, the change from gay and lesbian to queer at the beginning of the 1990s, and the globalisation process which closed the twentieth century. One key point that has emerged is the impossibility to isolate gender or gender identity from the contexts of its production as a social category. This can be evinced at first glance from a queering of drama in recent plays by women. Works such as Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (2000) and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You (2006), or Rebecca Prichard’s dystopic Futures (2006) about the effects on September 9/11 on sexual politics and Marina Carr’s trenchant close-up on marriage in Marble (2009) show that gender can no longer assumed to be the sole location to articulate perspective and/or to effect change. Perhaps, a key text in this direction is debbie tucker green’s incisively daring and deeply affecting Stoning Mary (2005), a play with no specific setting where gender and race are interrogated along with Aids, war, and genocide. I began this work with an affirmation of the role of women’s writing in post-1980 British and Irish theatre. But similar directions can be found in Mark Ravenhill’s Product (2005), The Cut (2005), and his cutting-edge reading of the Iraq war in Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat (discussed in Chapter 4), to name but one of the male playwrights for whom issues of destabilized masculinity and reactionary politics in contemporary western societies are closely interconnected. Also, in the last plays by Neil Bartlett and Kevin Elyot, a movement away from purely gay matters and sensibility is redirected towards a broadening of the argument, either with a focus on the working classes—as in Bartlett’s look at bingo game, Everybody Loves a Winner (2009)—or on love and child abuse—as in Elyot’s Forty Winks (2004). The practice of looking through gender, spontaneously demanding a 188 Afterword series of affective journeys into the experiences of different “others,” has proved an effective method to deconstruct the discourses which structure compulsory performances of politics, citizenship and its subjects object of inquiry in this volume. It was thus possible to deal with plays and playwrights at times so profoundly diverse from each other as those I have chosen. What began as an attempt to trace some general lines for three decades of theatre writing and performance slowly, yet inevitably progressed into a political act via queer readings of cultural texts playing around gender issues. If one were to try and grasp a common thread for all the plays considered it would certainly have to be found in the blank spaces of the rapport between local experience and the postmodern need of “something larger that can establish and sustain social bonds without aspiring to attain universality or threatening to become intolerant, exclusionary, oppressive” (Quigley 2001, 13). Theoretically speaking, the period under consideration has been characterised by a series of labelling processes and the oft-repeated tendency to identify theatre movements and trends. If, on one hand, these attempts have sometimes been read as political acts, on the other they have somehow obscured the political implications of the much more straightforward act of reading. In his recent formulation of the postmodern “death of the reader,” Alan Sinfield deconstructs the notion of readership behind the use of the pronoun “we” whose nature is essentially coercive, subject to exploitation and manipulative practices. He thus dissociates the presumed literary quality of any cultural text in favour of an affirmation of the criteria chosen during the reading process, and proposes instead a new way of reading, which he calls “queer,” where “subcultural significance becomes the criterion” (2005, xiv). Sinfield’s position, in my view, could open up limitless possibilities for a re-contextualisation of theatre practices and texts, as well as for their rapport to the literary Canon and the exclusionary operations which structure it. In queering the texts examined here, I have been looking for the gaps and breaks opened up in and by representations of gender identity. I hope to have shown that, in order for this process to be successful, it is necessary to bear in mind that the discourses built in every specific situation work properly only insofar as they are always ready for on-going deconstruction. The analysis has been carried out with references both to British and Irish contexts, and at times when the domains of the social have been influenced by and dependant upon binary oppositions as a framework of reference for life in general. It is a truism that, for the new century, theatre studies need “new framework[s] for understanding contemporary developments in theatre in their social and cultural contexts” as Patrick Lonergan writes about Ireland Looking Through Gender: Post-1980 British and Irish Drama 189
(2009, 30). In my case, certain forms of writing have seemed to develop anarchic views on sociality and politics and to serve the purposes of overpassing stereotyped versions of gender and its representations. First hinted at in Ravenhill’s calls for a renewed socialism ahead of the twenty- first century, these instances have emerged more or less overtly from the treatments of sexuality in the work of the playwrights included in the case- studies sections. These contaminations offer a profoundly rich critical viewpoint from which to start with criticism of plays and performance in Britain and Ireland now at the end of the first decade of the 2000s; not least because they help to move out of the persistent bracketing through which exploitative dynamics of subjugation and indifference continue to underlie western societies and thought. They insist on the development of a new found notion of ethics and ways of life no longer defined by oppression and exclusion, but rather by an ever-present need to build more sustainable spaces—and rehearsed places—for being with others in culturally viable forms of sociality.
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INDEX
1982 Theatre Company Bevan, Richard 160 (see Bartlett, Neil) Bhabha, Homi K. 8-10 Adams, Parveen Billen, Andrew 158-9 (see Homer, Sean) Billington, Michael 29, 53n., 192 Adebayo, Mojisola 12-13, 81, 84-7, Bloomfield, Nicholas 126 93, 97, 100n., 191, 202, 204 Brady, Sarah (and Fintan Walsh) 10, Ahmed, Sara 10, 23, 24, 33, 63, 66, 192 84, 90-2, 97, 181-3, 191 Braidotti, Rosi 11-12, 31, 50, 116n., Alcoff, Linda M. 17n. 138, 193, 199 Allen, Paul 183, 191 Brecht, Bertold (influence of) 4, 66, Althusser, Louis (interpellation) 34 193 Amich, Candice 30, 36n., 191 Brewer, Mary 12, 23, 105, 193 Aragay, Mireia (and Pilar Zozaya) Brewster, Yvonne 84, 193 152, 190, 203 Brighton, Pam 42 Armitstead, Claire 138 Bronski, Michael 180, 193 Arnold, Bruce 182, 184, 191 Brooks, Peter 19, 26, 193 Aron, Geraldine 69-70, 79n., 191, Brown, Gavin 14, 17n., 145, 193 201, 203, 208 Brown, Georgina 48, 153 Arrowsmith, Aidan 41, 42, 191 Bundy, Reginald 127 Artaud, Antonin (influence of) 4 Busby, Selina (and Stephen Farrier) Aston, Elaine 6, 11, 12, 17n., 20, 22, 164, 171-2, 193 24, 28, 30, 32-4, 35n., 36n., 87, Butler, Judith 3, 12, 19-21, 34-5, 169, 175n., 191, 192, 194, 204, 53n., 68, 79n., 122-23, 139-40, 205 143, 175n., 177, 179, 181 (and Geraldine Harris) 11-12, 17n. Cannon Harris, Susan 185n., 186n. Audino, Antonio 17n., 192 Carlson, Susan 21 Austin, John Langshaw 110, 116n. Carr, Marina 7, 9, 12, 44-52, 53n., 110, 187 Barry, Todd 71, 192 Carter, Angela 29, 107 Barthes, Roland 163 Cartwright, Ivan 121, 128 Bartlett, Neil 8, 15-6, 17n., 73, 77-8, Case, Sue-Ellen 57, 92, 96, 100, 80n., 103, 121-34, 134n.-135n., 101n. 187, 207, 208 Cave, Richard A. 3, 5, 78, 80n., 128, Behan, Brendan 71 134n., 179, 181, 185n., 186n. Benedetti, Christian 175n. Cavendish, Dominic 64 Berkowitz, Gerald 142, 192 Celtic Tiger 4, 7, 9, 14, 44-7, 51-2, Bertens, Hans 45, 192 67, 188 Bette Bourne 128-9 210 Index
Charabanc Theatre Company 9, 16, Dollimore, Jonathan 5, 10, 15-16, 39, 42-3, 52n., 53n., 104-5, 107, 73 112, 116n. Donald, Caroline 144 Charnock, Nigel 145n. Donoghue, Emma 113-116, 117n. Churchill, Caryl 3-5, 12, 19-25, 29- Doughty, Louise 150, 160n. 31, 35, 35n.-36n., 74, 187 Dowell, Ben 158 (& Ian Lan) 5 Dowie, Claire 5, 16, 103, 137-45, Clapp, Susannah 156 145n. Clarke, Jocelyn 142, 182 Dowling, Clare 112 Cleugh, Grae 14, 17n. Dowling, Noeleen 183 Cooke, Rachel 158-9 Druid (Theatre Company) 79n., 104 Coppa, Francesca 17n. Dubost, Thierry 76-7 Coulter, Carole 106 Durrant, Sabine 127 Coveney, Michael 153 DV8 145n. Coward, Noël 8 Cregan, David 68, 180, 185n., 186n. Edelman, Lee 15, 65, 74-5, 78-9, Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. 105, 116n. 147-53, 155-160, 160n.-161n. Crimp, Martin 5-6, 17n. Edgar, David 38, 40, 126 Curti, Lidia 116n. Edwards, Hilton 184 Cvetkovick, Anne 71-2, 81, 83, 86, Elsom, John 147 90, 97, 99 Elyot, Kevin 16, 103, 147-160, 160n.-161n., 187 D’Monté, Rebecca 13, 143, 167 Euripides 49, 150 Dallat, Cahal L. 182 Evans, Daniel 172 Daniels, Sarah 4 Darley, Judy 63 Fitzpatrick, Liza 42 Davis, Paul T. 152 Flanagan, Pauline 182 Dawidoff, Robert 181 Flett, Kathryn 159 de Beauvoir, Simone 20 Foley, Imelda 38-9, 43, 53n., 104 de Certeau, Michel 10-11 Foss, Roger 151 de Jongh, Nicholas 14, 57, 161n. Foucault, Michel 3, 19-20, 39, 58 Deegan, Loughlin 10, 68-70, 72, Frank, Adam (and E. K. Sedgwick) 79n. 132 Deeney, John 134n. Freeman, Sara 57-58 Del La Grace Volcano 86, 97 Freud, Sigmund (influence of) 77, Deleuze, Gilles (and Felix Guattari) 90, 148, 161n., 164, 175n. 12, 30, 138-9, 141 Fricker, Karen (and Brian Derrida, Jaques 45 Singleton) 110 Devine, Harriet 10, 152 Friel, Brian 71 Devlin, Anne 12, 38, 40, 42, 44, 52, 53n. Gale, Maggie B. (and Vivien Devlin, Es 33 Gardner) 17n. Diamond, Elin 3, 23, 35n. Gallagher, Dessie 43 Dickenson, Sarah-Jane 75 Garber, Marjorie 114 Dolan, Jill 90 Gauntlett, David 13 Looking Through Gender: Post-1980 British and Irish Drama 211
Gay Sweatshop (Theatre Company) Inness, Sherrie A. 92-3 97, 103, 116n. “In-yer-face” theatre 5, 7, 58, 160, Gilroy, Paul 101n. 175n. Glasshouse Productions 16, 52n.- Irigaray, Luce 51 53n., 110, 112, 114, 116 Gloria Theatre Company 126 Jackson, Joe 177, 179, 184-5 Goddard, Lynette 5, 12, 82-3, 86-8, Johnson, Richard 184 93-6, 100n.-101n. Jones, Marie 4, 12, 38, 42-4, 52, Godiwala, Dimple 10, 20, 23-4, 30, 53n., 104, 106-7, 109, 116n. 40, 98-9, 100n. (and Neil Martin) 53n. Goodman, Lizbeth 17n., 104 Jordan, Eamonn 184 (and Jane De Gay) 12, 17n., 106 Graham Colin 104-106, 109 Kalitowski, Toby 134n. Gramsci, Antonio 106 Kane, Sarah 4, 16, 163, 165, 167, Greenspan, David 116n. 169-172, 174, 175n. Griffin, Gabriele 5, 82, 94, 96, 99, Kay, Jackie 13, 81-5, 93, 97, 100n., 100n.-101n., 137-8, 143, 145n. 103 (and Rosi Braidotti) 31 Kenyon, Mel 169-71 Gross, John 149, 155 Kiernander, Adrian 126 Grosz, Elizabeth 32, 145n. Kilroy, Thomas 73, 76-7, 80n. Kingston, Jeremy 149 Halberstam, Judith 57, 61, 179 Kinsman, Gary 125, 127 Halperin, David (and Margaret Kirby, Andy 103 Traub) 121, 131, 134, 135n. Kirby, Peadar (and Luke Gibbons, Haraway, Donna 17n., 116n. Michael Cronin) 45-6, 52 Harris, Claudia W. 116n. Kirk, Kris 128 Harris, Geraldine 11, 12, 17n. Kristeva, Julia (influence of) 30, 41- Harvey, Jonathan 13 2, 47, 53n. Hattenstone, Simon 164, 167-8, 171 Kurdi, Maria 45 Hayes, Clarke 142 Hayes, Kathy 112 Lacan, Jacques (influence of) 25, Hayes, Trudy 115 148, 150, 160n., 163-9, 171, Heckert, Jamie 15, 140-42, 144, 175n. 145n. Lathan, Peter 144 Heddon, Deirdre 17n., 40 Leeney, Cathy 49-50 Heininge, Kathleen 178 Leland, Mary 70 Hemmings, Clare 66 Lewis Herman, Judith 48 Hennessy, Rosemary 59 Lily, Peta 141 Hensman, Savitri 94, 101n. Llewellyn-Jones, Margaret 37, 42-3, Herbert, Jeremy 171 46, 53n., 68 Higgins, Charlotte 178 Lloyd, David 44, 47-8, 52, 106 Hodson, Matthew 126-7 Lojek, Helen 38, 40, 42, 44, 104-5, Homer, Sean 164, 166, 168-73, 107,178, 180 175n. Lonergan, Patrick 9, 14, 15, 44-5, Hynes, Garry 104 67, 188 Luckhurst, Mary 4-6, 13 212 Index
Mac Liammóir, Micheál 71, 177, North, Madeline 142 184 Nowlan, David 70, 180, 182 Macaulay, Alastair 184 MacGurk, Brendan 40 O’Flanagan, Mary Kate 184 MacKenzie, Susie 53n., 148 O’Kelly, Emer 182 Manera, Claudia 31 O’Mahony, John 25-7, 35, 185 Marber, Patrick 5, 7 O’Toole, Fintan 50-1, 177, 179 Marinca, Annamaria 172 Orton, Joe 4-5, 15, 17n. Marlowe, Sam 172 Osborne, Deirdre 84-7, 97, 100, Marmion, Patrick 138, 154 100n.-101n. Marshall, Stuart 122 Osborne, John 5, 8, 13 Martin, Carole 104 Osborne, Peter (and Lynne Segal) Mason, Patrick 180 181 Mason-John, Valerie 13, 93-100, Osment, Philip 103, 116n. 101n. Out of Joint (Theatre Company) 60, (and Ann Khambatta) 94 104 McDonagh, Martin 7 Macdonald, James 163, 171 Peacock, Keith D. 4, 12, 21-2 McGinn, Caroline 85 Peter, John 46, 151-52 McGuinness, Frank 9, 16, 46, 71, Philippou, Nick 74 110, 134n., 177-185, 185n.- Pinkosh, Mark 139-40 186n. Pinter, Harold 4-6, 17n. McInness, Joe 172 Ponnuswami, Meenakshi 83 McMullan, Anna 4, 43, 47-8, 114 Pool, Hannah 157 (and Caroline Williams) 37, 116 Posener, Jill 103 McPherson, Conor 7 Potter, Madeleine 172 Merriman, Vic 52 Prichard, Rebecca 5-6, 17n., 187 Methven, Eleanor 105 Minh-Ha, Trinh T. 81-2, 84, 86-7, Quigley, Austin 4, 6, 17n., 188 99 Quill, Siân 112 Mirza, Heidi S. 81 Moane, Geraldine 68 Rampton, James 157 Monforte, Eric 57, 62, 74, 128 Rapi, Nina 12, 87-93, 100n.-101n. Moore, Carole 105 Rattigan, Terence 8 Moxley, Gina 9, 12, 44-7, 52-3n. Ravenhill, Mark 5, 8, 16, 17n., 57- Müller-Muth, Anja 74 67, 73-5, 79n.-80n., 104, 165, Mulhall, Anne 14, 17n. 167, 172, 187, 189 Munt, Sally 62, 90, 92-3 Reade, Simon 139 Murphy, Trish 182 Rebellato, Dan 5, 8, 16, 17n., 58, Murray, Christopher 37 63, 166, 174, 175n. Red Kettle (Theatre Company) 104 Nagy, Phyllis 116n. Regina Fong 128 Nativi, Barbara 168 Reid, Christina 4 Neale-Kennerley, James 103 Reinelt, Janelle 30 Nightingale, Benedict 46, 148, 152- Rich, Adrienne 17n., 114-15 3 Roberts, Brian 127, 134n. Looking Through Gender: Post-1980 British and Irish Drama 213
Roberts, Philip (and Max Stafford- Thatcher, Margaret (influence of) 4, Clark) 60 6, 12, 20-25, 27, 103, 122, 187 Robinson, Tim 128 Thaxter, John 138 Roche, Anthony 7, 52 Tinker, Jack 151 Rose, Kieran 113 Tóibín, Colm 183 Roy, Duncan 121 Troubles 4, 42, 107, 110, 180, 187 Rushe, Desmond 183 tucker green, debbie 187 Tushingham, David 183 Saunders, Graham 13, 163-5, 167- 71, 174, 175n. Vanek, Joe 180, 184 Scaife, Sarahjane 47 Schmitt-Kilb, Scott 57, 61 Wald, Christina 76, 77, 167, 175n. Sedgwick, Eve K. 110, 112, 116n., Wallace, Clare 58, 124, 164 121, 123, 127, 129-33 Wallace, Robert 121-2 Segal, Lynne 181 Walsh, Enda 7 Shange, Ntozake 83-4 Walsh, Fintan 10, 68, 72-3, 79n. Shaw, Paul 127 Walshe, Éibhear 73, 76-7, 80n. Sheridan, Michael 183 Wandor, Michelene 4, 10, 17n., 167 Shulman, Milton 180 Wardle, Irving 53n., 126, 150, 160n. Sierz, Aleks 5-8, 16, 153, 184 Watkeys, Colin 145n. Sihra, Melissa 10 Watkins, Beth 32, 33 Sinfield, Alan 188 Weaver, Lois 97, 103 Siren (Theatre Company) 104 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 4, 12, Smyth, Ailbhe 37, 112 17n., 19-21, 25-7, 29-31, 34-35, Solomon, Simeon 125, 128-30 35n.-36n., 104 Spivak, Gayatri C. 106 White, Victoria 37, 111 Split Britches 97, 101n., 103, 104 Whitmore, Robin 121, 124, 130, Stafford-Clark, Max 26, 60 134n. Stanford Friedman, Susan 138 Wilcox, Michael 80n., 134n. Stembridge, Gerard 5, 67, 79n. Wilde, Oscar 16, 73-4, 76-79, 79n.- Stephenson, Heidi (and Natasha 80n. Langridge) 47, 137, 163, 175n. Williams, Albert 121n., 134n. Stratton, Kate 161n. Williams, Caroline 37, 112, 117n. Sullivan, Esther B. 21, 26 Williams, Raymond 62, 79n. Svich, Caridad 57-9, 62-3, 74, 77 Wittig, Monique 101n. Woods, Alan 130, 132 Tabert, Nils 175n. Woodworth, Paddy 69 Talawa (Theatre Company) 104 Wyllie, Andrew 5, 17n., 149, 160n. Taylor, Joelle 90 Taylor, Paul 14, 78, 154, 172, 182 Yeats, William Butler 111 Testory, François 126