LISA FITZPATRICK RAPE ON THE Contemporary STAGE Rape on the Contemporary Stage Lisa Fitzpatrick Rape on the Contemporary Stage Lisa Fitzpatrick University of Ulster Derry, UK ISBN 978-3-319-70844-7 ISBN 978-3-319-70845-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70845-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017959599 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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Cover illustration: Marta Orlowska / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland PREFACE The starting point for this research was the project Women Writing Rape, conceived and coordinated by Sorcha Gunne and Zoe Brigley Thompson at the University of Warwick in 2007, which called for responses to two essays by Sharon Marcus (1992) and Carine Mardorossian (2002). These essays, which remain central to this book, raised questions of women’s silence around rape and sexual assault, the ways that rape might be under- stood as a process of imposing or reinscribing gender normativity, and the conception of rape as a social script. My contribution to that project was a conference paper and an essay on representations of rape on stage, pub- lished in Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives (Routledge, 2010). Once I had begun to look for plays that represented rape, however, I found that the issue recurred over and over in writing for performance by both men and women. Rape is referenced in twentieth-century plays from Brecht to Denis Potter to Harold Pinter, and from Tennessee Williams to Trevor Griffiths, though often only in passing, as a minor detail that reveals something about a character or a situation. It may function as a metaphor for defeat or colonization (Howard Brenton, Bill Morrison), or as a shock tactic expressing hopelessness or rage, as in the ‘in-yer-face’ playwrights of the 1990s, or witnessing rape may be a defining experience for the male protagonist. It is present in comedy as well as tragedy, in the ‘bed trick’ and in various guises that lead the hero to win the heart of the female character. It is a recurring trope in the work of women dramatists, both historically and on the contemporary stage. Indeed it is so present in women’s writing that it seems that many women writers find it imperative to explore this issue in their dramaturgy and their artistic practice, as v vi PREFACE Lizbeth Goodman has suggested. Representations of sexual violence are also ubiquitous in film and television, often sensationalized, and often used in publicity to attract an audience, which is nothing new: images of dishevelled heroines struggling against an assailant were used to promote melodramas in the nineteenth century. Sexual violence repels and horrifies but it also fascinates. There is scopophilic pleasure, of course, in all kinds of violence; this is an enduring feature of mimetic entertainment. It is not surprising that sexual violence, so closely aligned with popular under- standing of romance and passion, so embedded in normative conceptions of active powerful masculinity and delicate femininity, should hold an enduring appeal. This study explores rape on the contemporary stage, starting with Strindberg’s Miss Julie and a selection of its translations and adaptations. Strindberg’s naturalistic tragedy continues to attract theatre-makers and theatre audiences, based in part on the uncertainty whether this is a story about rape or about seduction. Subsequent chapters examine women’s representations of rape from the beginnings of feminist theatre to the present day; the representation of rape in wartime; the tangled cultural conceptions of eroticism, vulnerability and affect, and recent work which brings personal experience to the public stage. The aim of the work is to examine how cultural beliefs about rape—though often false—are com- municated, reinscribed, and sometimes interrogated and protested, in live performance. It also aims to open further discussion of the representation of rape in performance, and the ways in which performance might be used to contribute to anti-rape activism. I have many people to thank for their help and support. Firstly I would like to thank my colleagues in Drama at the University of Ulster (Giuliano Campo, Tanya Dean, Matt Jennings, Tom Maguire and Adrian O’Connell) who have been generous in allowing me time to complete this, and who have listened to seminar papers and offered feedback and ideas. Carole- Anne Upton first suggested that violence on stage might be an interest- ing research topic, Niamh Thornton read early drafts of chapters, and my students studied a number of the plays discussed here and offered interesting and sometimes surprising opinions and responses to the work. The archives of the Women’s Library at the London School of Economics, and the Druid Archives at NUI Galway, both provided very valuable information; in particular I’d like to thank Barry Houlihan of NUI Galway. I have presented material at various conferences over the years and have benefited very much from the questions and comments PREFACE vii of those in the audience, especially at the Irish Society for Theatre Research, the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures, and the International Federation for Theatre Research. Joel Beddows, Isaac Aronovitch, Maggie Cronin and Karl O’Neill worked with me on scenes from On Raftery’s Hill, which was thought provoking and reveal- ing about the performance of rape and the interpellation of the audience into the fictional world. My thanks to my friends who debated and dis- cussed with me and told me to finish the book, including Veronika Ambros, Natalie Harrower, Silvija Jestrovic, Yana Meerzon, Michael Sidnell, and my very dear friend Paul Devlin who died suddenly in 2015. And of course, my love and thanks to Chris and my family. Derry, UK Lisa Fitzpatrick CONTENTS 1 Introduction 1 2 Rape on the Naturalistic Stage: The Example of Miss Julie 41 3 Women Playwrights: Subverting Representational Strategies 75 4 The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield: Rape and Conflict 137 5 Eroticism, Vulnerability and Affect 181 6 In Extremis: Staging Rape in the 2010s 213 7 Conclusion 245 Bibliography 257 Index 277 ix CHAPTER 1 Introduction The story of the Levite’s concubine1 appears in the biblical Book of Judges. A woman and her husband are returning from her father’s house in Bethlehemjudah, and they stop on the way at the home of an old man in the city of Gibeah. After they have washed and eaten and drunk, some of the men of the city come to the house and demand that the Levite be given to them so that they may ‘know him’. The old man goes out to them, and begs them to leave the man alone. In his place, he offers his daughter and the Levite’s wife. But the men paid no attention to him, so … the man took his concubine, and brought her forth unto them; and they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning: and when the day began to spring, they let her go. Then came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the man’s house where her lord was, till it was light. (Judges 19:24–26) In the apparently pragmatic sacrifice of the concubine, the household- er’s offer of his own virgin daughter to protect a man who is a stranger to him, and the erasure of the women’s subjective experience, the absence of human value attached to the women is succinctly expressed. Yet this era- sure, this absence of representation in the text, simultaneously offers a gap for the reader to imagine the woman’s terror at being forced out of the security of the house to the street and the gang of rapists, her desperation, and the physical violence that leaves her dead or dying. When she is © The Author(s) 2018 1 L. Fitzpatrick, Rape on the Contemporary Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70845-4_1 2 L. FITZPATRICK released, she has nowhere to go but back to the man who gave her to her torturers. But of course the story is not about the concubine: her body is a message between men, a metaphorical site for a public or political strug- gle. The Levite brings her body home and cuts it into twelve pieces, send- ing one to each of the twelve tribes of Israel: as Mieke Bal notes, the body is thus literally transformed into a message (1991, 86).