Contemporary

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

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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 understood 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, published 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 understanding 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 communicated, 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 interesting 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 revealing about the performance of rape and the interpellation of the audience into the fictional world. My thanks to my friends who debated and discussed 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 householder’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 erasure, 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 struggle. The Levite brings her body home and cuts it into twelve pieces, sending one to each of the twelve tribes of Israel: as Mieke Bal notes, the body is thus literally transformed into a message (1991, 86). The expected reception of the text is clearly constructed within it: the householder offering his daughter; the brief description of the concubine’s death; the fact that she is never named and the earlier characterization of her having ‘played the whore’ (Judges 19:1), all encourage the reader to focus on the impersonal, political significance of the story in which all the valuable characters (the men and the virgin) are saved, and only the dishonoured woman is punished. Although this story is separated from us in time and culture by more than two thousand years, it demonstrates common literary and dramatic representational strategies that use rape and sexual violence to communicate an idea or message that may have little to do with rape per se. These include the silencing of the victim’s voice, the erasure of her subjectivity, the use of her body as a site for the enactment of conflict between male protagonists, and the use of rape as a metaphor (for war, defeat, political oppression, colonization, and so on), that frequently displaces the ‘real- ness’ of rape as a lived, personal, embodied experience. These issues recur in the plays explored here. Sometimes, these works seek to reclaim or reinstate the victim’s subjectivity; sometimes they use rape as a metaphor, or for other dramaturgical purposes; sometimes they seek to challenge dominant cultural stereotypes to capture or interrogate the lived, bodily experience of the rape survivor. This book examines the representation of sexual violence on the Western Anglophone stage over the past three decades, with the main focus on work performed in Britain and Ireland. The sheer numbers of plays that include rape scenes or narratives, even within a relatively narrow time-line and limited to the British and Irish stages, makes an exhaustive survey impossible; but here I draw upon examples by both male and female authors and directors, selecting work that has been widely produced and/or controversial or influential for scholarship and theatre practice. Working on the understanding that theatre is dialogic and that it speaks to its own social moment, that its process of reception and meaning- making is culturally and historically specific, and artistic choices made will tend to reflect or respond to tensions within a society, this study seeks to INTRODUCTION 3 explore the following questions: How is rape to be understood in its relationship to the cultural representations of gender, sexuality, power and the body in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? How do theatrical and dramatic representations of sexual violence reflect the dominant metanarratives of our own cultural context, and how can they be remade to challenge those narratives? And how is sexual violence to be understood against a contemporary scholarly understanding of gender as performative and of the importance of performance in the materialization of the gendered body? Finally, how might any of these speculations and investiga- tions meaningfully influence anti-rape activism?

Feminist Theories of Rape Rape became an increasingly urgent subject of public debate during the second wave of the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Feminists campaigned strongly on the issue of violence against women, particularly domestic abuse and rape, seeking changes in the law, increased support for women from social services, and changes in cultural attitudes and practices. Early examples of activism include the ‘Take Back the Night’ or ‘Reclaim the Night’ marches which began in the mid-1970s and which assert women’s right to occupy public space, including after dark; the foundation of the first women’s shelter by Erin Pizzey in England in 1971, and the opening of the first Rape Crisis Centre in England in 1973 and Ireland in 1979. Emerging from this backdrop, Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 book Against Our Will was a ground-breaking study in the field and remains an important source of early second-wave anti-rape analysis. It makes the influential statement that rape is a form of systemic violence, ‘a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear’, rather than an act of interpersonal violence as it had been understood (1975, 15) (italics in original). Her reading of rape, though now often critiqued, has fundamentally shaped feminist analysis and theory. By identifying rape as a systemic form of violence, Brownmiller shifts the focus from the credibility of the individual rape victim and the scrutiny of her behaviour to a structural examination of gendered power structures and relationships. Furthermore, by identifying the threat and perpetration of sexual violence as systemic, she points to the way it operates invisibly to limit women’s freedom, as is still reflected in advice given to women on how to avoid rape. By refusing a formulation whereby rape is a conse- quence of the actions of an individual (immoral) female or an atypical, 4 L. FITZPATRICK brutal male and is instead part of the functioning of normative gender relations, Brownmiller opened new ground for feminist strategies to address shortcomings in legislation and to formulate methods to campaign against violence against women. Although she does not address male/ male rape in her analysis, subsequent scholarship has argued that male/ male rape operates to express and enforce power differentials between men, often by feminizing the victim (Projansky 2001; Coulthard 2010; Mardorossian 2014). In the light of Brownmiller’s argument, this is unsur- prising: feminizing the victim becomes a way of identifying him as the cause of the violence, or at least as having provoked it through non- normative behaviour that undermines normative gender identities; and it reiterates the issues of structural power that underpin gender violence. In this study, two graphic depictions of male/male rape are discussed: Howard Brenton’s Romans in Britain and Sarah Kane’s Blasted. Brownmiller’s work was aligned with the feminist campaign against pornography, which produced the powerful slogan that ‘Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice’ (Morgan 1977/2014). Morgan writes, ‘So we can admit that pornography is sexist propaganda, no more and no less’, and she takes care to distinguish between pornography and ‘genuine erotic art’ (Kindle 3247–3249). The archives at the Women’s Library in London contain materials on the Campaign Against Pornography and the counter- campaigns against censorship as they unfolded.2 What is perhaps most striking to a contemporary reader about the material from the 1970s and 1980s is the transformation wrought by digital technologies in terms of the ubiquity of porn, the ease of secret access to it, and the levels of violence depicted in it. In the 1970s, pornographic material was mostly in the form of still images in print magazines like Playboy or Penthouse, with some film that in the main would have been viewed in the public space of a cinema (though at-home video viewing first became available circa 1972 with the development of the VCR). An example of ‘“massive” exposure’ was 4 hours 48 minutes over a six-week period. The majority of the images were not violent (Baxter 1990, 37), though the archival material evidences growing anxiety about an increase in depictions of various kinds of fetish material including sado-masochism. As several commentators have pointed out, the situation changed during the 1980s and 1990s, with feminist opposition to censorship gaining momentum and a debate emerging between those who favoured censorship and those who argued that censorship rarely benefits women and minorities. This debate continues in the work of legal scholars like Clare McGlynn whose research has been very INTRODUCTION 5 significant in the past decade for the regulation of violent pornography and revenge pornography in the United Kingdom, and in other ongoing legal debates about the status of sex workers and crimes of trafficking human beings within the sex trade. While the Campaign Against Pornography was centrally concerned with the relationship between pornography and rape, a debate which remains unresolved, certain pornographic tropes are reflected in common myths about rape. These tropes may shape women’s—especially young women’s—understanding of their sexuality, a question that Anna Jordan explores in Freak (2014). But more troublingly, it may also influence popular understanding of female sexuality and sexual consent. Cultural beliefs about female masochism, the ‘sleeping beauty’ conception of female sexuality as passive, and the idea that female sexuality needs ‘awakening’ by force all shape commonly held attitudes to sexual violence. Bataille’s Eroticism includes extensive discussions of violence and a comparison of sexual intercourse to the sacrifice of the woman. Its emphasis on female physical vulnerability as erotic and its concomitant representation of female sexuality as helpless and masochistic is important in the reception of narratives of rape, and is a factor in the difficulty of signifying sexual violence on stage. These rape myths are reiterated in pornographic material online, in performance, and in pulp fiction. Despite the emphasis in many texts, critiques, studies and performances on empathetic engagement with the victim of sexual violence, rape remains a potentially erotic subject for representation. The exposure of the (usually female) body to the spectator’s gaze can, deliberately or otherwise, titillate, and imagery of endangered or violated women is frequently used in promotional material for film and television for this reason. Although rape has a long history of representation in the high culture forms of visual art and theatre, the ubiquity of rape narratives in other forms of entertainment including television drama, film, video and online digital content, is important to note. Like theatre, mediatized performance represents fictional worlds in which sexual violence, or the threat of it, are common. The constancy of violence of all kinds is signified in the performances of gendered characters who threaten physical violence or who cower from it, employing everyday gestures that speak powerfully to gender roles and normative gender constructs. Simple visual sequences such as the camera following a woman down a dark alleyway indicate sexual danger while positioning the spectator in the perspective of the attacker. Actor Doon Mackichan has queried the ubiquity of rape and murder in 6 L. FITZPATRICK

British television drama, pointing to the graphic and often overtly titillating representation of violence against women (BBC 2015). She notes that it is now ‘de rigueur’ to start a drama series with the body of a raped and murdered woman, and that rape is increasingly incorporated into story- lines in costume dramas and soap operas as well as crime dramas and thrillers. Her interviews with television critics note that the British and Irish consumer now has access to more, and more diverse, television than ever before through digital content providers like Netflix and Amazon Prime. She raises the concern that this kind of violence is becoming increasingly ‘normalized’, even as it is fetishized and eroticized for both male and female spectators. Although the rape and murder is often not explicitly depicted, but is signified by cut-away shots, fades, or straight cuts to indicate the passage of time, the body of the victim is often shown on screen, posed, naked, often for quite a long take.3 The feminist campaign against censorship clearly did not intend this outcome, but it is not the only example of women’s assertion of rights and freedoms being subverted within the marketplace, and by the persistence of social and cultural attitudes to gender and sexuality distorting or limiting progressive movements. Women’s sexual freedom is often similarly remade as the freedom to have sex (but not the freedom to abstain). A considerable body of scholarship on rape addresses difficulties that women (and victims more generally) face in voicing their experiences, including historical-cultural reasons which attach shame to the victim rather than the aggressor, cultural beliefs about women’s credibility and sexuality, and contemporary social and cultural pressures on women to minimize sexual aggression against them. Liz Kelly and Jill Radford describe this as a social process whereby ‘women’s experiences of sexual violence are invalidated’ with resulting impacts on understanding experiences of male violence and related social policy (1996, 19). The authors identify the issue of female credibility relative to male credibility; the potential for women’s testimony to be rejected as ‘hysterical’ or for them to be accused of over-reacting, a conflict between female lived/bodily experience and the narratives available with which to express it, and the related question of the limits of representation. Their research gathers women’s experiences of verbal harassment in public spaces, unwanted touching and kerb-crawling amongst other intimidating behaviours, and they comment: ‘On one level all these women were clear that something had happened—they told their stories for that reason, including what the impacts of these encounters were. They were saying “nothing” happened INTRODUCTION 7 because they know that their perceptions of “something” are unlikely to be validated’ (20). Lisa Frohmann (1991) analyses two communities on the West Coast of America, to identify the bias inherent in selecting rape cases for trial. Frohmann notes that a ‘good witness’ is one whose appearance and demeanour will convince a jury. The victim’s testimony should be consistent, articulate and credible and the victim should strike prosecutors as ‘sincere’ and cooperative (213). She argues that the tendency is for prosecutors to look for holes or problems in the victim’s statements, rather than seeking reasons to believe the complainant (214). The prosecutors are trying to identify the cases with the best chance of conviction, and this relies heavily on the victim’s apparent good character. Returning to the public attitudes gathered in the UK surveys, the woman’s testimony is likely to be less consistent, and thus judged less credible, if her memory is impaired by the consumption of drugs or alcohol. The social class, level of education and race of both accuser and accused may also affect a jury’s perception of their relative credibility. This concept of the ‘good witness’ in a rape case is echoed by Susan Ehrlich (2001), as she examines the impact of stereotypical attitudes on the prosecution of rape through the US legal system. Nicola Gavey’s 2005 study Just Sex? identifies the set of (racist, sexist, class-inflected) beliefs underlying the concept of ‘real’ or credible rape accusations. Much of the emphasis in this body of work is on credibility: challenges to women’s credibility, difficulties for women in expressing their lived experiences, and limited opportunities for women’s experiences to be heard and validated. Despite growing recognition and acceptance that rape is an act of violence, distrust of women’s speech, and particularly the belief that women lie about rape, is remarkably persistent. Surveys of social attitudes to rape repeatedly show high levels of victim blaming, and these attitudes are stable across age groups.4 The four most common reasons given in a survey by the UK Office of National Statistics for not reporting rape to the police were: embarrassment; did not want more humiliation; did not think that they could help; did not think that they would believe me (2015, www. ons.gov.uk). These attitudes are explored in much of the literature on rape, especially cases where the assailant and the victim know each other. Joan McGregor (2005) notes that ‘in legal practice and in the minds of many in society … nonviolent non-consensual sex with someone you know … is not rape’ (1). In her examination of acquaintance rape to explore the legal determinants of rape, she details cases from the United 8 L. FITZPATRICK

States where the victim’s fearful compliance is interpreted as consent and the perpetrator is freed. In her conclusion she sets out proposals for criminal law reform. But central to McGregor’s argument is that ‘views about women feigning disinterest in sex and, consequently, needing to be forced into it, and about men’s inability to control their sexuality’ lead to the belief that ‘some force and overriding verbal protests [are] consistent with legitimate sex’ (220). She concludes that society and law must ‘stop treating women as if they don’t know what they want and are afraid to say it when they do’ (245). Kahn, Mathie and Torgler examine the impact of these attitudes on rape victims, finding that ‘nearly half of college-aged women who experience forced, non-consensual sexual intercourse, do not label their experience as rape’ because their ‘script’ for rape is stranger rape, and normally uses a greater level of violence than they have experienced (1994, 53). In 2003, Kahn et al. broadly replicated these findings, suggesting that little had changed. Peggy Sanday’s work on rape on campus similarly finds widespread indulgence of young men who commit rape—even gang rape—in circumstances where the victim was drunk, went voluntarily to a party or to a fraternity house, or had consensual sex with one young man before being raped by his friends. In Ireland, the 2009 study commissioned by the Rape Crisis Network identified the most common rape scenario as acquaintance rape characterized by low levels of additional violence, delayed reporting and very low levels of prosecution (Hanley et al. 2009, 360). As the researchers point out, this does not fit with the common perception of rape so the complaint is not judged to be credible. Foucault’s writing on rape has been significant and highly provocative for feminist analyses, and is picked up again in Carine Mardorossian’s 2014 Framing the Rape Victim, though she refocuses some of the terms of his argument. In situating rape as a crime of violence rather than desire, Foucault is in sympathy with the dominant feminist analysis. However, his proposal that rape is similar to a punch in the face minimizes its impact upon the victims, and disregards the intimate exposure, the coerced physical intimacy, and the cultural consequences of shame, humiliation and ostracism often experienced by rape victims. It also disregards the relationship between sexuality and subjectivity, and the centrality of sexual orien- tation and experience to the formation of the subject. As Holly Henderson points out, his proposal disregards both the lived experience of rape victims and their subjective experience of ‘self-shattering’ violence, as well as the material context and conditions of gender identity in a patriarchal INTRODUCTION 9 society (2007, 228). She argues, ‘feminist theorizing on rape … argued that rape was specifically not about sex in order to highlight the power relations and politics that are involved in rape … Thus while Foucault seeks to avoid the disciplinary effects of power, feminist theorizing attempts to bring to light the very differentials of power that structure rape’ (239). His argument has also been vigorously disputed by Monique Plaza (1981, 26), who argues that he ignores the materialization of sexual difference and the concomitant cultural meanings of rape. Similarly, Teresa de Lauretis critiques Foucault’s argument, writing that ‘to speak against sexual penalization and repression, in our society, is to uphold the sexual oppression of women, or, better, to uphold the practices and institutions that produce “woman” in terms of the sexual, and then oppression in terms of gender’ (1987, 37). Holly Henderson, however, criticizes this aspect of feminist rape scholarship arguing that ‘this relentless focus takes the very occurrence of rape for granted and offers limited possibility for intervention or prevention’ (2007, 228). She seeks strategies that can prevent or intervene early in the process, that work to eliminate rape rather than merely deal with the aftermath. Germaine Greer, in her characteristically combative style, has argued that ‘It is not women who have decided that rape is so heinous, but men … The notion of rape is the direct expression of male phallocentricity’ (2006, Independent on Sunday). While Greer is often provocative for the fun of starting an argument, anthropologist Christine Helliwell’s experience among the Dayak of Indonesian Borneo prompted her to reflect on Western attitudes to sexual violence. She was living in a Dayak community when a man attempted to have sex with or rape a young widow, entering her room in the middle of the night. Although the woman was angry, and afraid at the time, she responds to Helliwell’s questions with ‘“Tin [Christine], it’s only a penis,” she said. “How can a penis hurt anyone?”’ (2000, 790). Helliwell’s essay explores the Dayak conception of gender and contrasts it with the dichotomous Western model, to critique Western feminist arguments about the ‘universality’ of sexual violence and to argue that fundamentally different understandings of gender and sexuality shape very different conceptions of gender relations in different societies and cultures. Is it possible, therefore, that a missing aspect of this debate is a re-examination of the relationship between sexual integrity and physical or psychic integrity? The bitter arguments within feminism about anti-rape activism and sexual freedom in the 1990s and early twenty-first century saw Camille 10 L. FITZPATRICK

Paglia arguing that feminist anti-rape activism was infantilizing young women, who needed to be vigilant, resilient and aware of the dangers of sexual freedom (1990, and subsequently). This argument was picked up by Katie Roiphe (1994), who argued that bad sexual experiences were being treated as rape by American universities in thrall to feminist politics. These studies were divisive, and characterized as being either dismissive of a real and urgent problem, or supportive of a conception of feminism that emphasized choice, with the choice represented as being between freedom and safety. More recently, Laura Kipnis (2017) addresses the range of on- campus actions developed over the decades since Roiphe’s book, including trigger warnings and prohibitions on personal staff–student relationships, which she argues unhealthily position all students as vulnerable, lacking agency, and incapable of dealing with life challenges; however, her study does not address acquaintance rape. Kristin Bumiller’s In an Abusive State (2008), explores neoliberal ideology, rape and gender politics to interrogate the relationship between feminist anti-rape activism and the neoliberal state. Bumiller argues that state intervention has profoundly limited the capacity for radical grassroots activism by women, and has in effect redefined women as victims to be protected and cared for by the (patriarchal) state. Bumiller’s work doesn’t dismiss or minimize the experiences of rape victims, but rather considers the ways in which the state has taken ownership of women’s radical action and in doing so, has reinscribed gender and racial stereotypes and limited women’s capacity for agency, both as individuals and as a class. Bumiller also explores those political discourses that universalize the issues of gender justice, critiquing approaches that see ‘the regulation of sexual violence … become integral to a wide range of forms of social control’ to the detriment of ‘personal autonomy and freedom’ (166). In her identification of the tension within which the promise of ‘safety’ becomes the justification for ‘control’, Bumiller’s argument resonates with Elisabeth Grosz’s writing on the paradox of freedom. Grosz argues, with reference to Henri Bergson, that freedom has two potential expressions: freedom from certain kinds of oppression, and freedom to act. Bumiller’s study strongly suggests that neoliberalism promises women freedom from certain kinds of oppression but in doing so, renders them less able to act, and less confident in their ability to take action and to protect themselves. Grosz takes Bergson’s essay Time and Free Will and points to its concern with the questions of free will and determinism: ‘an ancient debate, still articulating itself with great insistence, ironically, even within contemporary INTRODUCTION 11 feminism’ (2010, 142). She summaries the conventional conceptions of the subject, determinism and free will to point out that on both sides of this debate the subject is understood to be separate from his or her choices, presuming a subject who somehow remains essentially unchanged throughout. Bergson rejects this dichotomous approach to argue instead that the subject or being exists immersed in time, and that it is acts (rather than actors) who can be judged to be free or not. For an act to be free ‘“the self alone will have been the author of it, and … it will express the whole of the self”’ (Bergson, 165–166 qtd Grosz, 144). The same choice cannot be made twice because the time has changed, and the individual has changed—in part as a result of the earlier acts. Thus there is not a subject who chooses from a range of available options outside his or her self, but only the free or not acts of an individual in a material world whose actions are transformative. Those acts are only actualized in performance; they do not exist prior to that. Freedom can only characterize a process, it is not a property of an individual subject (Grosz, 151). Feminism, Grosz argues, is not about giving women more choices, but about ‘transforming the quality and activity of the subjects who choose and who make themselves through how and what they do. Freedom is not so much linked to choice … as it is to autonomy, and autonomy is linked to the ability to make (or refuse to make) activities … one’s own, that is, to integrate the activities one undertakes into one’s history, one’s becoming’ (151–152). This question of freedom remains relevant to two significant essays that address feminist responses to rape: Sharon Marcus’s 1992 essay ‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words’, and Carine Mardorossian’s 2002 essay ‘Towards a New Feminist Theory of Rape’, which responds to Marcus’s work. These essays address rape as a systemic form of violence and as an expression of gendered power relationships, but otherwise present different discursive positions on the operation of rape as an expression of structural power.

The ‘Rape Script’ Sharon Marcus argues that feminist discourse needs to find a language to talk about rape, and also an understanding of rape as a ‘language’. She proposes that rape can be understood in terms of a ‘script’. Using the word ‘script’ in a broad sense to encompass the range of discourses that the individual is exposed to and shaped by, Marcus argues that ‘rape as a linguistic fact asks how the violence of rape is enabled by narratives, 12 L. FITZPATRICK complexes and institutions which derive their strength … from their power to structure our lives as imposing cultural scripts’ (1992, 388–389). She does not use the term ‘rape culture’,5 which has recently entered the everyday lexicon, but it evokes a similar sense of rape as ubiquitous in patriarchal culture, embedded in socializing myths as well as moral norms of gendered behaviour. Her argument particularly identifies discourses that demand submission and an eagerness to please on the part of women, which can impede attempts at self-defence. She argues that both victim and aggressor perform variants of traditional gender roles, which are socially scripted, and that these ‘scripts’ render up vignettes of male–female interactions and the power relationships that are often invisible beneath them. This is in opposition to Mary Hawkesworth’s argument for a feminist epistemology (1989), which critiques postmodern theory for its ‘over- insistence’ upon the subjective and situated nature of knowledge and experience to assert that ‘[r]ape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment … are not fictions or figurations that admit of the free play of signification … It would be premature to conclude from the incompleteness of the victim’s account that all other accounts … are equally valid’ (555). She continues, ‘Based on a consistent belief in and acceptance of fallibility as inescapable and consonant with life in a world of contingencies, feminists need not claim universal, ahistorical validity for their analyses’ (557). This, she argues, is the flaw in conventional epistemological analysis: that it privileges only the perspective of the male half of humanity. Marcus rejects Hawkesworth’s reading of postmodern epistemology, arguing that ‘Feminist thinkers have asked: Whose words count in a rape and a rape trial? Whose “no” can never mean “no”? How do rape trials condone men’s misinterpretations of women’s words? How do rape trials consolidate men’s subjective accounts into objective “norms of truth” and deprive women’s subjective accounts of cognitive value?’ (1992, 387). In so arguing, she seeks to emphasize feminist commitment to the assertion that ‘rape is a question of language, interpretation, and subjectivity’ (387). Accusing Hawkesworth of seeing women as already raped and rapable, whose only outlet for justice is in seeking the punishment of the rapist, she states that she ‘will argue against the political efficacy of seeing rape as the fixed reality of women’s lives, against an identity politics which defines women by our violability, and for a shift of scene from rape and its aftermath to rape situations themselves and to rape prevention’ (387). It is not a matter of lived bodily experience; for the victim to speak and be understood it is necessary to transpose bodily experience into a coherent spoken INTRODUCTION 13 testimony. Marcus sees in this the possibility to intervene prior to the rape, and to effect a politics of rape prevention that will empower women. While Hawkesworth and Marcus occupy opposing positions on the opportunities that postmodernism offers to feminism, and particularly to anti-rape activism, there are significant overlaps in their end point. Both recognize the contingent nature of knowledge; both reject monologic conceptions of truth, and both are concerned with recognizing the material impact of gender discrimination and violence on women’s lived lives. Marcus’s concept of the ‘script’ is useful for this study because it makes explicit the range of cultural and social forces that underlie the crime of rape, including attitudes towards the other gender, assumptions about male and female sexuality, respect for women’s bodily autonomy on the part of both men and women, and so on. Yet Hawkesworth proposes something very similar when she writes that a feminist approach to epistemology can ‘preserve important insights of postmodernism and serve as a corrective to a variety of inadequate conceptions of the world’ by focusing on ‘claims about the known’ rather than ‘questions about knowers’. She continues, ‘By adopting a conception of cognition as a human practice, a critical feminist epistemology can identify, explain, and refute persistent androcentric bias within the dominant discourses without privileging a putative “woman’s” perspective and without appealing to problematic conceptions of “the given”’ (1989, 538). Writing a decade later, Carine Mardorossian responds to Marcus’s essay. While rejecting positivist feminist politics, Mardorossian draws on the work of historian Joan Scott to problematize the notion of experience and to argue that experience must be contextualized within ‘the ideological systems and categories of its representation’ (745). She names Marcus, and Wendy Brown, as problematic theorists and in particular rejects Marcus’s concept of the ‘rape script’. Mardorossian sees this construct as a way to blame women for not effectively resisting the ‘script’, and as another process that places some or all of the blame for the rape onto the victim rather than the perpetrator, while reinforcing the political/social status of men and women: ‘A model like Marcus’s … downplays the “materiality of gender” and ignores that social inscriptions … do not simply evaporate because we are made aware of them’ (2002, 13). Mardorossian also reflects upon her own experience of working with rape victims, and on their very different and unpredictable responses to the experience of sexual violence. The turn to experience does not herald an uncomplicated epistemological reading but argues for a theorization of rape that 14 L. FITZPATRICK problematizes, is self-reflexive, and ‘questions the terms through which reality is made intelligible’ (2002, 745). In relation to the concept of experience, Mardorossian argues that the same experience can be subjected to different explanations, and that victims’ accounts cannot easily be separated from ‘the signifying practices and discursive frameworks culture … has made available to them for making sense of their experience’ (in relation to blame, for example), while critiquing the ‘politically reactionary’ implications of academic treatment of victimization’ (2002, 747). Marcus and Mardorossian write from opposite ends of the 1990s backlash against feminist and anti-rape activism (Camille Paglia 1990; Kotie Roiphe 1994) and Mardorossian acknowledges and responds to this. She identifies her aim in writing as to propose ‘an alternative theoretical model’ for understanding rape that ‘challenges the over-emphasis on subjectivity and interiority without falling back on the unproblematized category of “experience”’ (747). A recurring concern of all these theorists is the insistent identification of women as vulnerable to rape, and Mardorossian is particularly alert to this. While many of Mardorossian’s interventions into Marcus’s work are valuable, Marcus’s argument is more nuanced than Mardorossian allows. Far from offering a simplistic suggestion that women simply resist, she identifies rape as ‘one of the specific techniques which continually scripts these [gender] inequalities anew’ (1992, 391). Marcus notes that rape is not only scripted—‘it also scripts’ by acting to ‘feminize’ the woman and by imprinting upon her the ‘gender identity of “feminine victim”’ (1992, 391). In this, her proposal is close to Mardorossian’s argument that: ‘The feminist community needs to become more alert to the ways in which the source of women’s powerlessness is constantly located within victims themselves rather than in the institutional, physical and cultural practices that are deployed around them’ (2002, 772). Although Hawkeworth, Marcus and Mardorossian all engage with and critique the theoretical paradigms underlying each other’s work, and although the philosophical differences in their arguments cannot be easily erased, the key issues each raises are, together, useful for the analysis of the representation of rape on the stage. In dramatic writing and performance, the scripting of the rape scene does have a relationship to the ways in which victims and defendants construct the narratives of their respective experiences; they do present competing narratives, and these narratives are clearly drawn as commentaries on social and moral attitudes towards rape, sexuality and gender. Marcus’s construct of the ‘rape script’ in an art-form that literally scripts, offers a way to think about performance and textual INTRODUCTION 15 analysis. Furthermore, the debate that Mardorossian and Marcus both feel is lacking—the discussion of the individual subject and (normatively) her experience, the fractured nature of the postmodern subject and the con- tradictions at the heart of expressing a bodily experience in language—are all part of the business of theatre as it grapples with aesthetics and politics of representation.

Rape on Stage: An Historical Survey While the staging of rape and sexual violence may seem like a feminist concern, or a product of post-1960s ‘liberal’ attitudes to sex on the one hand and anti-rape discourses on the other, historically the spectacle of sexual violence has been commonplace. Some scholars begin their analyses of rape on the English Restoration stage with the introduction of female actors in the 1660s (Howe 1992), while others like Kim Solga (2009) have investigated the representation of rape in the earlier, Renaissance period. Rape remains a thematic element in melodrama and comedy as well as tragedy, through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until the present.6 And although sexual violence is not commonly performed on stage in view of the audience until the introduction of female actors in the seventeenth century, the Jacobean tragedy represents—even while it erases from view—extraordinary levels of sexual violence performed off stage. Karen Bamford notes that there were so many representations of sexual violence in Jacobean drama that a comprehensive survey of the field would be near impossible (2000, 1). Solga frames the question differently, asking ‘how and why does violence against women go so spectacularly missing’ (2009, 1) during the early modern period, examining its cultural invisibility and the relationship of theatrical performance to social norms and mores. She situates the historical text against its place in the contemporary repertory. In the texts that Solga explores, which include The Duchess of Malfi, The Changeling and Titus Andronicus, sexual violence is all- pervasive. It shapes the contexts of the play’s action and its elision in representation is itself a deliberate act of meaning-making (4), which Solga argues reflects the cultural concerns and debates of the time. Elizabeth Howe identifies the introduction of the actress onto the stage as the moment that rape becomes ‘a major feature’ of English tragedy. She points to a long history of tragedy’s ‘salacious spectacles of blood and violence involving women’ that begins with the saints’ legends (1992, 42). Stabbing is popular for ‘the striking image of a naked bosom spattered 16 L. FITZPATRICK with blood’; madness, which is almost the sole preserve of female characters, also offers opportunities for violence and exposure of the body, and she notes that—while Restoration audiences might be more inured to images of violence because public spectacles of flogging and the pillory were so commonplace—‘the advent of actresses certainly encouraged a great deal of stage violence which was clearly intended to provide a sexual thrill for spectators’ (43). Rape becomes suddenly more common on the English stage with Thomas Porter’s tragedy The Villain in 1662, which was a huge success and remained a favourite for the next forty years; and Edward Howard’s The Usurper two years later. Prior to that point, Howe identifies only nine plays between 1594 and 1625 in which rape occurs on stage (43); after 1660 ‘rapes occur regularly in plays right into the eighteenth century. Anne Bracegirdle actually specialized in having her virgin innocence brutally taken from her’ (43). Howe interprets this phenomenon as an attempt by the playwrights to maintain the nobility and honour appropriate to actresses in tragedy and heroic drama and to arouse the tragic emotions of pity and fear in the spectators, while still exploiting the opportunities presented by the physical presence of female actors. Her distinction—rapes that occur on stage—is significant, because it identifies the centrality of the presence and exhibition of the female body. A significant recent addition to this debate is Jennifer Airey’s The Politics of Rape (2012), which argues that rape imagery only becomes ubiquitous after 1670, ten years after the introduction of the actress. She proposes that the exceptionally violent imagery of the late 1600s reflects the cultural, religious and political struggles of the Restoration period, and points to examples of rape metaphors that focus on male victims while using the same language and dramatic forms. These sources dealing with Renaissance and Restoration texts that represent rape have been useful for this study, not only in providing an historical context but because they reveal the persistence of cultural beliefs and dramatic tropes about rape, women and sexuality from the early modern period into the present day. Jocelyn Catty points to the trope of the woman threatening to disfigure herself so that she will no longer tempt men to rape her (2011, 103), a strategy still used by women in wartime to protect themselves (by not washing, or disguising themselves as boys7). Meanwhile, current rape myths that confuse rape with seduction posit the woman’s beauty as an irresistible lure, making her partially responsible for her rape. Another of the most explicit signifiers of rape is the suicide of the woman, which occurs so commonly that when Bianca in Women Beware INTRODUCTION 17

Women refers to suicide as a possible course of action (ll.426–428) this ‘strongly suggests that she regards the experience as rape’ (Catty, 93). Catty also points to the comic device of threatening rape, in which the hero sets up a threat in order to rescue the heroine from it, so that her gratitude will lead her to love him. In each case the plot ‘may marginalise the woman’s perspective’ (104) since her fear is rendered as comic while the audience is manoeuvred into complicity with the deception. Overall, Catty identifies three core concerns of rape plots that determine the heroine’s fate, and these are: ‘whether rape constitutes a loss of chastity, whether it necessitates death for the victim, and whether the mind or spirit and body are distinct’ (105). These issues remain current in contemporary attitudes to rape, and rape prosecutions can still examine the sexual history of the victim.8 Catty argues that ‘voyeurism … may be heightened rather than modified by the transvestism of the boy actors … which contributes to a problematizing of the whole concept of the visual—the known and the unknown—in relation to rape’ (95). She argues strongly that the erotic potential of rape scenes was a constant factor in their staging, even where the act carries a political meaning. Scholars like Peter Stallybrass, Susan Zimmerman and Alisa Solomon suggest that the Renaissance audience’s interpretation of gender in performance was more fluid and sophisticated than a straightforward iconicity, and that the boy actors inhabit an ambivalent gender that is useful for considering the relationship between what is seen and what is signified, and the gap between what is done on stage and the meaning created by the stage business. Solomon (1997) explores the boy actors’ representation of feminine distress and desire to foreground the performativity of gender and the complex understanding of the relative statuses of men and women/boys in the early modern period. Post- Restoration, Howe argues that staging rape ‘became a way of giving the purest, most virginal heroine a sexual quality’ (43); it allowed dramatists to create female heroines who were of ‘greatness’ and ‘perfect honour’ (43) as befitted tragedy while allowing the display of the female body, with torn clothes, breasts exposed and hair loosened and dishevelled (45). She quotes Restoration playwright and critic John Dennis’s cynical comment that rape scenes appealed both to men, and to ‘hypocritical lady spectators who would censure sex scenes in comedy’ (45). The emergence and dominance of sentimental comedy and melodrama in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offered women a range of roles, while the Victorian music hall offered often highly sexualized representations of femininity in particular. Tracy C. Davis writes, ‘In burlesque, 18 L. FITZPATRICK opera bouffe, pantomime, music hall, musical comedy, ballet, and extrava- ganza, conventions of costume, gesture, and theatrical mise-en-scène ensured that the most banal material was infused with sensuality—this sensuality was deliberately manipulated to result in the erotic arousal of male spectators’ (1989, 294). She notes the anomaly that, even as theatre was increasingly recognized as socially valuable and actor managers were offered knighthoods, ‘actress’ remained synonymous with ‘prostitute’ (296). The Grand Guignol, though its main characteristic was horror, offered a similar erotic spectacle of rape and attempted rape, often by monstrous or deformed male protagonists, or presented the beautiful heroine tied up, struggling and helpless against the threat of the murderer. Mel Gordon notes that Maxa, one of the most famous Grand Guignol actresses, was raped over 3000 times in different plays and: ‘… an early historian of the Grand Guignol calculated that on stage, Maxa cried “Help!” 983 times, “Murderer!” 1,263 times, and “Rape!” 1,803 and one-half times’ (2011, 25). Clearly, for this form of entertainment, spectacle was central to the audience’s pleasure and the spectacle of the imper- illed woman sold shows. René Branca asserts that ‘a staging of attempted rape would … draw a crowd’ and that posters often used images of ‘distressed or dishevelled young women, clinging to their armed protectors’ (2005, 34–35). As in the conventional plays of the time, there is clear distinction between innocent women who are virginal and vulnerable to male harm, and knowing or uncouth women who are available for sexual adventures; different kinds of affective pleasure are aroused by the rape or attempted rape in each case. Two popular examples, the first comic and the second tragic, include Oliver Goldsmith’s 1773 She Stoops to Conquer, and Dion Boucicault’s 1859 melodrama The Octoroon. Goldsmith’s play has retained its popularity to the present day, with Peter Hall’s 1993 production for the National Theatre in London, a 1995 production at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, and a 2014 production at the Abbey Theatre. The five-act play has the convoluted plot typical of an eighteenth-century comedy, with multiple minor plots and misunder- standings to amuse the audience, before the lovers are united and order is restored. It presents an example of the comic use of sexual threat. Mrs Hardcastle hopes her ward Constance Neville will marry her stepson Tony Lumpkin, but Constance loves the aristocratic young Hastings and he loves her. Mr Hardcastle is hoping his daughter Kate will marry Hastings’ friend Marlow, because Marlow’s father is his old friend. The two young men are invited to stay, but Lumpkin tricks them into believing that the INTRODUCTION 19

Hardcastle home is actually an inn, and that Mr Hardcastle is an innkeeper with aristocratic pretensions. They therefore behave very rudely towards him on their first meeting. Hastings later encounters Constance, and she tells him the truth: that they are in a private house and the home of her guardian. They decide to extend the prank, however, by hiding this information from Marlow. Therefore, when Marlow enters, Hastings introduces him to Constance and Kate as the two young aristocratic girls they are to court. Marlow, having spent most of his life as he says ‘in a college or an inn’ has no experience in socializing with women of his own social class: ‘I don’t know that I was ever familiarly acquainted with a single modest woman—except my mother’ (Goldsmith 1968, 30–31). Part of the comedy, therefore, turns on Marlow’s stuttering awkwardness when speaking with Kate when his shyness makes it impossible for him to look directly at her, in contrast to his flirtatious, even aggressive approaches towards her when he believes her to be a servant at an inn. In his scene with barmaid Kate, he first ignores her attempts to speak to him, and then attempts to kiss her, calling her ‘child’ and ‘my dear’. When rebuffed, with Kate saying ‘I’m sure you did not treat Miss Hardcastle that was here awhile ago in this obstropolous manner’ he responds by saying that Miss Hardcastle is ‘a mere awkward, squinting thing’ who cannot attract his attention as this pretty barmaid does (72–73), to the amusement of the audience. He introduces himself under a false name, and boasts that he is a ‘great favourite’ among the ladies in town (73). In a later scene between Hastings and Marlow, Marlow reveals his intention to seduce the barmaid. Hastings, perhaps concerned at the success of his prank, asks him:

HASTINGS: But how can you, Charles, go about to rob a woman of her honor? MARLOW: Pshaw! pshaw! We all know the honor of a barmaid of an inn. I don’t intend to rob her, take my word for it; there’s nothing in this house I shan’t honestly pay for. HASTINGS: I believe the girl has virtue. MARLOW: And if she has, I should be the last man in the world that would attempt to corrupt it. (81)

Marlow is convinced that Kate (as the barmaid) has indicated her sexual interest in him. His assurance to Hastings indicates his faith in his ability to differentiate between virtuous women and those who are available for sexual adventures, though the action reveals that he is deluded. When 20 L. FITZPATRICK

Kate reveals his mistake to him, that he is in Hardcastle’s home and that she is a member of the family (describing herself as a ‘poor relation’), he is horrified:

MARLOW: … I mistook you for the barmaid. MISS HARDCASTLE: Dear me! dear me! I’m sure there’s nothing in my behaviour to put me upon a level with one of that stamp. MARLOW: Nothing, my dear, nothing. But I was in for a list of blunders, and could not help making you a subscriber. My stupidity saw everything the wrong way. I mistook your assiduity for assurance, and your simplicity for allurement … (88)

Kate pretends to weep, saying ‘I’m sure I should be sorry people said anything amiss, since I have no fortune but my character’. Marlow replies, reassuring her, but explaining that he cannot have any ‘honorable connection’ to her because he has to marry someone wealthy ‘I can never harbor a thought of seducing simplicity that trusted in my honor, or bringing ruin upon one whose only fault was being too lovely’ (88). This causes Kate to admire him, as she tells the audience in an aside. Although there are further plot twists before the two couples are happily united, the question of Marlow’s behaviour towards the ‘barmaid’, and his willingness to pursue her forcibly, are not scrutinized. The framing of the action deliberately minimizes the violence of his intentions, since the audience are not shown any violence beyond his attempt to kiss her and his taking her hand; and also because the violence is safely directed away from the modest and honourable young lady, thereby reassuring the spectators that any sexual aggression will be reserved for those who deserve or invite it. This clear differentiation between middle-class or aristocratic young women who must be treated with respect, and working-class women who are available for sex and flirtation, persists in the melodramas of the nineteenth century. In comedy, this is often framed as a case of mistaken identity, in which a young man foolishly takes a liberty with a young woman that he will later fall in love with. Boucicault’s The Shaughraun offers an example, where in the opening scenes the English lieutenant Molineux mistakes aristocratic Claire Ffolliott for a milkmaid:

MOLINEUX: I know a dairymaid that was intended for me. CLAIRE: That speech only wanted a taste of the brogue to be worthy of an Irishman. INTRODUCTION 21

MOLINEUX (Kissing her): Now I’m perfect. CLAIRE (Starting away): What are you doing? MOLINEUX: Tasting the brogue. Stop, my dear; you forget the crown I promised you. Here it is (he hands her the money). Don’t hide your blushes, they become you. (2015, 3)

When his error is revealed to him, he is very embarrassed, giving Claire the opportunity to return his compliment: ‘Don’t hide your blushes, they become you.’ (5) The comedy of the mistaken identity predominates, and the interaction is, after all, only a kiss between two beautiful protagonists destined to fall in love. Thus the exploitation at the heart of this is veiled by the comedy and the audience’s laughter. In Boucicault’s 1859 tragic melodrama The Octoroon, however, the sexual politics is far more explicitly threatening. The title character is the beautiful, pure-hearted, doomed Zoe who is the daughter of a ‘quadroon’ (a woman who is one-quarter Black) and her owner Mr Peyton; Zoe is therefore one-eighth Black. The hero George Peyton, the nephew of the family, is in love with Zoe, but a beautiful, rich, good-hearted young White woman named Dora offers an acceptable alternative bride. The villain, McCloskey, lusts after Zoe and schemes to buy her. Because the deceased Mr Peyton is acknowledged by all the characters to be a good and moral man, kind to his slaves and a loving parent to Zoe, the play never suggests that her conception is a result of rape. Yet clearly, her mother could not give or withhold consent from a man who owns her as a chattel. The issue of rape is dealt with far more explicitly in relation to McCloskey, who sees ownership of Zoe as including sexual ownership. The climax of the plot comes when the family is revealed to be deeply in debt, and the bank forecloses on their mortgage. The slaves are sold, including Zoe, who is made to stand on a table on stage for the auction scene. On her last night in the house she hears George saying that he would rather see her dead than belonging to McCloskey, and she commits suicide. Returning to Catty’s analyses of the conventions of Renaissance texts, Zoe’s suicide clearly indicates her intention to evade rape. McCloskey’s villainy is revealed in the nick of time and the estate is saved, but it is too late for Zoe. She dies in George’s arms. This fortuitously solves the problem of inter-racial love in a way that is affecting for the spectator but does not challenge American laws and attitudes of the time. These plays, both the comic and the tragic, repeat a common trope of the rape narrative. That is, the status of the act as rape or sex depends 22 L. FITZPATRICK upon the characters of both the aggressor and the victim. If the aggressor is respectable, attractive, a hero, then the sexual violence is represented as comic and harmless, as it is in the case of Mr Peyton in The Octoroon, Molineux in The Shaughraun or Marlow in She Stoops to Conquer. If the man is reprehensible, as McCloskey is, then the violence is rape. The same conventions apply to the female characters: in all of these plays, barmaids or dairymaids can be raped or seduced and abandoned. The only more complicated case is Zoe: the audience and George Peyton cannot bear for her to be passed to McCloskey, but the other characters regard it as a sad event since for them, Zoe has never been as fully human as a White woman. It is her suicide that makes her completely human. In the twentieth century, film begins to replace theatre as a form of popular mass entertainment. Rape in film, whether implied in dialogue and cut-away shots, or explicitly represented, has a history as long as that of film and functions in a widely varied way.The Birth of a Nation uses rape as a way of pathologizing the African-American population, and stok- ing racist hatred through the representation of the White woman in peril. This trope finds echoes in the genre of the Western, where rape may be indicated or represented by the snatching away of the White woman by Native American men, or even by a close-up of her terrified face cross-cut with the fierce face of the Native warrior, framed as ‘Other’ by his clothes, primitive weapons and merciless expression. As in The Birth of a Nation, rape is used as a metonym for the battle to settle and ‘civilize’ North America, and to justify and obscure the genocide of the nineteenth century (in much the same way that Birth of a Nation obscures the dreadful racist violence of slavery, racial purity laws and lynching). Sexual violence is frequently used as shorthand to denote a villainous or psychopathic character, thereby reinforcing beliefs that rape is rare and committed by strangers, hardened criminals or the criminally insane. Sarah Projansky’s survey of rape in American films up to the early 1970s finds it to be ubiquitous, though ‘shifts in particular modes of representation have occurred’, with explicit representation common until about 1930 and again from the 1960s (2001, 63). Her survey suggests that ‘rape narratives are much more versatile and varied than previous research has assumed’ (66). In the late 1920s, the increasingly accepted Production Code stated that ‘rape and seduction’ should only be suggested, never explicitly shown, and should only be included at all when essential to the plot (64). The Code notes that these are not suitable subjects for comedy—though as Projansky INTRODUCTION 23 points out, all kinds of sexualized violence remain commonplace in comedy throughout the period. Broadly speaking, rape in film spans different genres and a number of representational modes, but is usually represented as a crime of violence when the perpetrator is ethnically or culturally ‘Other’ to the White, Anglophone, American spectator. If the hero commits the rape it is understood as an act of passion and is romantic. One of the most famous examples is the rape sequence in Gone with the Wind which cuts to the next morning and Scarlett O’Hara waking up happy and in love, singing to herself (Projansky 2001, 65). Projansky also points to a series of films that explore women and vulnerability. Female vulnerability may lead to rape; and conversely, an independent woman may be raped to render her vulnerable. ‘Most narratives solve this paradoxical relationship of vulnerability and independence by providing a resolution that incorporates the woman into a stable family setting’ (Projansky 2001, 66). Another popular plot line that ‘associate[s] women’s independence and sexuality with sexual violence’ (70) effectively represents the victim as provoking the rapist so that he loses self-control. Projansky refers to the famous example of Straw Dogs (1971), and of course the debate around Jonathan Kaplan’s The Accused (1988), in which a young working-class woman who gets drunk and dances provocatively in a bar is gang-raped while an ‘audience’ of the bar’s customers cheer and encourage the rapists. The film was the project of two female Hollywood producers (Dawn Steel and Sherry Lansing) and was based on real-life cases in the United States in 1964 and 1983. The female character’s search for justice is initially thwarted by the court’s judgement that by her behaviour she ‘asked for it’, an attitude that was echoed in the debate following the release of the film.9 The film’s representation of the rape as an act of misogynistic violence and its plot line that punishes the men who watch without intervening, made it an important work at the time in opening public discussion about rape. One of the two leading actors, Kelly McGillis, is herself a survivor of rape and spoke openly about this at the time, as it was part of the motivation for taking the role; this also increased the social impact of the work. Projansky argues that rape narratives are so common that ‘they always seem to be available to address other social issues’, including race, social class and the social role of women. She calls for a ‘feminist intersectional analysis’ that would be sensitive to the very many variations in the narrative function of rape (2001, 81). She brings the same careful approach to her study of rape in film and television 2001( ), which examines the 24 L. FITZPATRICK representation of rape since the 1980s to investigate the influence of ‘post-feminism’ with its neoliberal emphasis on individual choice and freedom on the social meanings that circulate around rape. Projansky’s emphasis on the ubiquity of rape narratives in cinema finds an echo in Lynn Higgins’ essay on Last Year in Marienbad (2010). Higgins’ essay proposes that the film is about rape, a reading that is not explored or acknowledged in any of the previous scholarship. A full engagement with the representation of rape in film is beyond the scope of this study, but excellent recent sources include Claire Henry’s study of the rape-revenge genre which compares the original 1970s films (like I Spit on Your Grave) with their twenty-first century remakes 2014( ); and Dominique Russell’s edited collection Rape in Art Cinema which includes essays on canonical films likeLast Year in Marienbad, Rashomon, Breaking the Waves, and the work of auteurs Jane Campion, Quentin Tarantino, Todd Solondz and Catherine Breillat (2010). The essays meet the challenge thrown down by Sarah Projansky, to fully and carefully anal- yse filmic representations of rape rather than relying on clichéd assumptions. In addition, they illustrate the recurrence of rape as a dramaturgical and performative trope in different film genres.

Methodology The definition of rape underpinning this study is the current, legal one in the United Kingdom and the slightly broader definition given in the Irish Republic.10 But dramatic representations are of course not necessarily dependent on legal definitions for their power or affect. The representation of sexual violence in marriage, for example, does not depend on the illegality of marital rape for its effective representation as a brutal and degrading act. The study situates the representation of rape in an historical context because much of the existing scholarship on the representation of rape relates to the early modern period, and the literature identifies difficulties and debates that are still relevant for the study of contemporary theatre. A recurring issue both thematically and in terms of staging strategy is the difficulty of clearly distinguishing between rape and seduction in representation. As rape changed from being a crime against property to a crime of violence against a person the defining issue became consent, which is problematic for representation since so many cultural factors col- lide at that point. These include social and cultural codes that formalize courtship practices; attitudes towards sexual expressivity and especially INTRODUCTION 25 female sexual expressivity; social and cultural constraints upon women; women’s status relative to men as credible witnesses; patriarchal and heteronormative power relationships, and so on. To argue that it is difficult to distinguish, in representation, between rape and seduction is not to suggest that it is difficult legally, ethically or subjectively to distinguish one from the other. Rather, it is to acknowledge that in representation, one act visually resembles the other; that even sexual acts that use physical violence may be consensual, and that consent or lack of consent is not necessarily visually or mimetically representable. Given the complexities and problems of representation, and the marked tendency of dramatic narratives (in live and mediatized performance) to revert to familiar tropes, images, strips of dialogue or gesture to communicate meaning, the theoretical frames required to address the representation of rape are quite various. Those at play in this study are primarily theories of violence and of the subject, with a particular interest in how violence engages with the ‘addressability’ and ‘response-ability’ of the subject (Oliver 2001); critical work on rape and violence, affect, and feminist performance theory. The book chapters each identify one or two key texts or performances as case studies, while also situating those key works in their wider context. This approach allows for an exploration of the performance history of the key text, and an analysis of one or more productions with attention to archival material and reviews. I have seen many, but not all, of the plays discussed here; so my analysis is based on a combination of the published text, spectatorship at the live event, and access to video documentation of the work. Although this book is concerned with contemporary theatre, two art history studies have been particularly useful in developing the method of reading what is erased in the text or performance, and in forming an overview of the roots of misogynistic rape myths and the lack of credibility afforded to women. Mieke Bal’s scholarship as a cultural theorist exploring the semiotics of rape has included explorations of Rembrandt’s work and a study of paintings depicting the Rape of Lucretia. Her analyses are concerned with the representation of narrative in visual art, and she argues that the perspective offered by these artists frequently obscures or elides the woman’s experience, to privilege that of her attacker. She proposes a complex method that she names ‘hysterical’ poetics (1991, 62) in com- memoration of Emma Eckhard, one of Freud’s patients. Using Freud’s letters to Fliess, Bal points out that Eckhard’s voice is never heard; ‘we observe the scene only through Freud’s language’ (62). She asks how we 26 L. FITZPATRICK can know Eckhard’s experience, how we can infer it from the account given by the ‘Other’, and proposes an approach that will ‘read the unsaid, recover the repressed’ (63). This approach utilizes signs—the first of which might be silence—and it reads for image and not for plot, for detail rather than the main narrative line and for victim rather than for hero. It places the event ‘in the “hysterical” present of identification’ (63). Bal identifies problems in the visual representation of rape that are also pertinent for theatrical performance. She describes it as ‘a topic that is at once popular in the culture, difficult to represent yet often represented, and real’ (61). It operates semiotically on two levels: ‘the semiotic behaviour surrounding rape … [and] the semiotics of rape itself, its status as, among other things, body language, as a speech act of aggression, as an attempt at destroying the victim’s subjectivity, which equates rape with murder’ (61). The semiotic behaviour around rape includes the difficulty for survivors to express their experience in language, to communicate it to someone who has not shared it. Susan Brison reflects upon this in her autobiographical account Aftermath, which explores her experience of being raped, badly beaten, and left for dead by her attacker. The other difficulty in representation in visual art and theatre is the interiority of the act: the victim is ‘covered’ by the perpetrator, and the act is inside the victim’s body. The act is also ‘inside’ in the sense that it is the violence of the forced sexual act (which retains the appearance of a sexual act) and the crucial absence of consent that makes it rape, and these are internal concerns. Rape is ‘never adequately objectifiable’, Bal argues; it exists ‘only as experience and as memory’ (68). From Bal’s semiotic analysis, I am borrowing three points. The first relates to her methodology of hysterical poetics, which informs my reading of particular scenes in performance. The second relates to her brief discussion of the representation of rape by women, which reflects some of the concerns of feminist theatre-making by foregrounding women’s experience. Together with Wolfthal, Bal’s analysis of women artists like Artemisia Gentileschi (2005) directly contradicts the assertions of Roy Porter (1986) and Johan Huizinga (1928; 1996 trans.) that preindustrial women were not aware of, or did not fear, rape. These artists clearly did fear of rape, and attempted when possible to represent it from a woman’s perspective. The third point is Bal’s description of allegory, that it can never replace the literally real and that it ‘takes the represented event out of its own history to put it into a different one’ (83). This observation is particularly germane to the exploration in Chap. 4, on the use of rape as INTRODUCTION 27 a metaphor for the representation of colonization, oppression and intra- community conflict. Diana Wolfthal’s fascinating study of rape imagery in the heroic period reveals the persistence of one rape narrative since the medieval period: her analysis of depictions of the Rape of the Sabine Women points out that the women are shown as coming to love their aggressors and forming family units with the Roman men. This particular narrative finds a contemporary echo in popular culture, where the woman who resists only wants the man to demonstrate his passion and commitment by forcing her to submit. This rape plot, transposed to theatrical performance, is used to express colonial and postcolonial conflict where rape is used as a metaphor for imperial conquest; the colonized country comes to be portrayed as a happy and loving wife or mistress to the imperial power. Reception is central to this study, linking all of the chapters and providing the central locus for the theoretical exploration. Most simply stated, this is an exploration of a range of representations of rape on stage and of the critical and audience responses to them. I am framing reception as a discursive practice, and as one that is deeply engaged with the discourses in circulation around the individual subject; I am working from the pre- sumption that theatrical practice emerges from, and speaks to, a particular social and historical moment and that it is essentially a public form of entertainment and of artistic practice, in which issues of concern to the populace can be represented for public deliberation. Drawing upon a range of theories of the construction of the subject and the ‘Other’, remembering trauma, and witnessing (both in the sense of testifying and in the sense of observing another’s testimony) this study attempts to unpick the relationships between the construction of dramatic narratives and performances to express embodied experiences of sexual violence, and the spectator’s capacity to receive and make sense of the work. The effectiveness of violence may be measured by its capacity to instil fear in its object and in those who witness its ravages. If rape is to be understood primarily as a method of demonstrating and perpetuating patriarchal power, then its capacity to instil fear in all women is key to its efficacy, as Brownmiller argues. In contemporary theatrical representation, rape is normally shown as painful—though the signifiers of pain vary; but this is to counter sexualized representations rather than increase fear. Feminist or woman-centred representations of rape also normally make disgust explicit—I would suggest that disgust is normally one element in the representation of rape, but often only implicitly so—and this often 28 L. FITZPATRICK involves the use of the grotesque. The disgust is aimed not at the violated body of the victim but at the body of the aggressor, and is frequently aimed specifically at the phallus. By ridiculing the phallus, and reducing it from the mythical weapon of heroic rape imagery and narratives to what Greer calls the ‘thin-skinned penis’ (2006), these texts and performances seek to return some of the power and agency to the female characters. Affect is a significant factor in the reception of a work, particularly in the communication of pain and fear. It has been the focus of considerable scholarly work in a number of different disciplines over the past decade, with significant works by Sara Ahmed, Teresa Brennan, Patricia Ticineto Clough, and Gregg and Seigworth. These scholars, whose work originates from that of the philosopher Spinoza, distinguish between affect and emotions as follows: emotions are changes in the state of the body, born of an encounter with a stimulus that triggers a physical response, while feelings require a level of awareness; they are emotions that are consciously recognized and named (Damasio 2000; Ahmed 2004; Ducey in Clough 2007). Thus affect, rather than feelings, is normally activated first in performance spectatorship, where the spectator responds viscerally to the plot events on stage or to the visual or aural effects, before he or she processes those affects into a narrative of reception that makes sense of the entire experience. Therefore, in considering live performance, I am interested in its affective power, since this is the spectator’s response before any conscious interpretation occurs. In my reading of the plays, I aim to identify moments of performance that create potential for a visceral, embodied experience that may sometimes be aligned with Jill Dolan’s concept of utopia in performance (2005).

Theories of Violence and the Subject ‘Force is that which makes a thing of whoever submits to it’,11 Simone Weil writes (2003, 45) in her study of The Iliad. Here I am using force as a synonym for violence because it makes sense in Weil’s essay to do so, though of course other scholars distinguish between the terms: Hannah Arendt argues that ‘force, which we often use in daily speech as a synonym for violence, especially if violence serves as a means of coercion, should be reserved, in terminological language, for the “forces of nature” or the “force of circumstances”’ (1970, 45). She defines violence as being distin- guished by its ‘instrumental character’ and by it harbouring within itself ‘an additional element of arbitrariness’ (4). Overall her definition is close INTRODUCTION 29 to Slavoj Žižek’s definition of subjective violence—recognizable, interpersonal actions performed by an agent against another or others (2008, 1). Žižek’s work on violence, along with Weil’s examination of the operation of ‘force’ in The Iliad, has been influential in shaping my own understanding and use of the term. Žižek argues that violence may be objective or subjective. Subjective violence is the most apparent form of violence and is the one that tends to dominate in news reports and political discourses of law and order. I would add that it is also the form of violence most commonly performed on stage, though in representation subjective violence may stand for, or express, other forms of violence as well. Thus the seduction/rape of Miss Julie by Jean can be read as a subjective act performed by two actors in their representation of dramatic character and dramatic plot, but it can also be understood as a metaphorical expression of the objective violence of social change, through which one social class expresses its new-found dominance over another. Objective violence, which normally operates invisibly, may be either systemic, or symbolic. Žižek briefly outlines symbolic violence as ‘embodied in language and its forms, what Heidegger would call “our house of being”’ (1). He argues that this is not only at work in the obvious ways: incitement to hatred, or relations of social dominance ‘reproduced in habitual speech forms’; but more fundamentally it pertains ‘to language as such, to its imposition of a certain universe of being’ (1). Systemic violence is concisely defined as ‘the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems’ (1). Initially, my interest in the performance of violence centred very much around systemic violence, and in particular in theatrical strategies that make systemic violence visible. Some of the dramatic texts explored here are concerned with representing sexual violence as systemic. Ficky Stingers by Eve Lewis dramatizes the argument that rape keeps all women in a state of submission and afraid to challenge male dominance. The play seeks to express an explicitly feminist analysis of rape by developing a plot that does not conform to stereotypes of stranger rape, but instead sets out to explore acquaintance rape and the credible difficulties the victim has in telling other people and getting them to believe her. While Lewis’s is the most overtly and indeed, naively, political in its representation of rape on stage, there are moments in many of the texts, particularly those by women writers, that identify the act of rape as an act of violence and dominance for which the perpetrator is solely responsible. The very fact that rape and 30 L. FITZPATRICK sexual violence recur to such an extent in women’s dramatic writing suggests its systemic—as well as subjective—nature. Sexual violence and fear of sexual violence shapes ordinary women’s lives, influencing decisions about relationships with men, about dress and appearance, about which route to take when walking home, about whether or not to be outside at night, and so on. However, the work of Marcus and Mardorossian amongst others suggests that rape should be understood—and represented—as a form of symbolic violence as well. The symbolic nature of violence is apparent in its role in the formation of the (gendered) subject, as explored by de Lauretis and by Veena Das, Ann V. Murphy and others. Žižek explains symbolic violence’s relationship to the operation of language as a process of symbolization through which the object is wrenched from its natural context and a set of meanings not inherent in it are forced upon it: a process that Heidegger refers to as ‘essencing’ (2008, 58). He gives the example of ‘gold’ which, once named, is no longer a soft metal in the earth but takes on our meanings of power, wealth, decoration and so on. This is not always what ‘gold’ signified: ‘For a medieval Christian, the “essence” of gold resides in its incor- ruptibility and divine sheen’ (58). Drawing upon Heidegger’s concept of ‘Wesen der Sprache’, Žižek argues that this ‘essencing of language’ is a fundamental violence that imposes ‘a certain disclosure of world, this world constellation also involves social relations of authority’ (60). Thus the violence of rape is not only subjective, not only systemic, but is rooted in symbolic violence that makes rape possible, and conceivable. Under analysis, this symbolic violence becomes visible at the levels of plot and character: as the fragments of the dramatic text that make it comprehensible to an audience: that is, at the level of making meaning. There are, of course, a number of studies of violence and theatrical performance; these include the work of those Renaissance scholars who developed the concept of decorum, borrowing from the Poetics and from Horace: Castelvetro, Scaliger and Robortello. Recent publications include edited collections like Anderson and Menon’s Violence Performed (2009) with its focus on conflict and post-conflict cultures; Beumers and Lipovetsky’s study of new Russian drama, Performing Violence (2009); Fitzpatrick’s Performing Violence in Contemporary Ireland (2008); Ozieblo and Hernando-Real’s Performing Gender Violence (2012) which focuses on the work of contemporary American women dramatists, and mono- graphs that focus on specific movements like Alek Sierz’sIn-Yer- Face Theatre (2001) or Ken Urban’s work on ‘Cruel’ British Theatre; or on INTRODUCTION 31 specific playwrights like Sarah Kane (Saunders2002 ). Although these studies have been useful in providing a range of critical approaches and method- ologies and analyses of particular texts and productions, they do not advance a theory of violence in performance; nor are any of these works focused on the representation of sexual violence on the contemporary stage. It has been philosophical and political explorations of violence found in the work of Slavoj Žižek (2008) and Ann V. Murphy (2012), alongside Kristeva’s work on the abject, Judith Butler’s recent work on grief (2004) and dispossession (2013), Kelly Oliver on witnessing (2001) and Cathy Caruth on trauma and memory (1995), as well as work on affect (Brennan 2004; Ahmed 2004; Shaughnessy 2013) that have informed the development of this project. These have emerged from my sense of the significance of symbolic violence to the construction of the individual subject, the capacity for interpersonal engagement and, crucially, the relationship between rape on stage and rape myths. These concerns form the core of the study.

Chapter Outlines Each chapter addresses various genres of dramatic representation, with the emphasis on particular theoretical issues that arise from the research. The analyses of texts and performances are also inflected by my experience of teaching these plays to undergraduate and postgraduate students. In many cases their seminar responses to the written texts and their practical explorations in workshops have raised questions and offered insights into the meaning-making processes of the play. The second chapter focuses on Strindberg’s Miss Julie as an example of a naturalistic drama that stages an off-stage sex act that may be either rape or seduction. Written in 1888, the play is regularly translated, adapted, produced and toured, and the dynamics of the relationship between Julie and Jean, including the staging of the rape/seduction scene, is central to the ongoing fascination of the text. Significant productions discussed here include Bergman’s 1981 and 1985 productions in Munich and Stockholm; Patrick Marber’s version After Miss Julie which adapts the text to post- World War II England, and Yaël Farber’s Mies Julie which sets the action in post-Apartheid South Africa. Three film versions also form part of this exploration: by Alf Sjöberg (1951), Mike Figgis (1999) and Liv Ullmann (2014). Miss Julie’s representation of rape is problematic because it is not clear to what extent she consents: the act takes place off stage; her behaviour earlier in the play is flirtatious, and she makes reference to the 32 L. FITZPATRICK story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife which seems to suggest that she is sexually available. There is much seeming at play in Miss Julie, and this together with the naturalistic aesthetic of the work is the main focus of the first chapter. The relationship between feminist performance practice and naturalism provides a secondary strand of analysis, as this is an issue that troubles feminist performance practice and remains a current topic in feminist performance scholarship. Miss Julie sits squarely in this debate, I would suggest: a radical, troubling representation of gender, class and sex. The third chapter examines feminist dramaturgical strategies to ask how patriarchal narratives of women’s seductiveness, mendacity and masochism can be subverted through strategies of plot, characterization or dialogue structures. Franca Rame’s The Rape (Il Strupro) focuses on the solo speaking body, thereby engaging the spectator in the spectacle of suffering while still granting the female subject the agency required to shape her world through language, to shape her experience and present her testimony. Yet, this shaping of testimony itself foregrounds two key issues that recur through the study: the transformation of material from bodily experience to language—the bodily experience of violence and the accompanying pain, fear and trauma, and the problem of ‘truth’. The chapter offers an analysis of key plays from the past three decades that use a wide variety of strategies to represent rape and to interrogate social attitudes towards it. Irish playwright Marina Carr’s gothic family drama On Raftery’s Hill is the focus of the second main case study. The fourth chapter explores examples of rape in wartime, from Trojan Women to representations of genocidal rape in the Balkans and sub-Saharan Africa to the thirty-year conflict in Northern Ireland. Rape is commonly used as a metaphor to express defeat, colonization and anti-colonial revolu- tion; this chapter attempts to reclaim the allegorical uses of rape and to return the attention to the embodied, individual experience—what Bal calls the ‘reality’. The troubled and troubling relationship between eroticism, vulnerability and affect is the focus of the fifth chapter. The vulnerable body is a gendered one: though the masculine body can also be figured as vulnerable it does not signify or telegraph vulnerability in the way that women’s bodies normatively do. Furthermore, the masculine body in pain is not an erotic object in the way that the feminine body often is. In this chapter, vulnerability is defined from the work of philosophers Judith Butler, Erinn Gilson and Ann V. Murphy as an ontological quality of the human being, and a potential factor in an ethical model of interpersonal relationships. In contrast, Bataille’s Eroticism includes extensive discussions INTRODUCTION 33 of violence and a comparison of sexual intercourse to the sacrifice of the woman. Its emphasis on female physical vulnerability as erotic and its concomitant representation of female sexuality as helpless and masochistic is important in the reception of narratives of rape, and is a factor in the difficulty of signifying sexual violence on stage. The chapter examines a range of dramatic texts that stage corporeal vulnerability while exploring strategies that foreground the need for an ethical and non-exploitative response, potentially based in the spectator’s affective engagement with the spectacle. The chapter moves from a consideration of the affective power of the body on stage in the male/male rape in Romans in Britain, to investigate the affective power of objects. Taking Lara Foot-Newton’s Tshepang and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale as key examples, the chapter explores the possibility that, by displacing the problematic body of the female victim and substituting an object, particular problems in the reception of women’s testimony are overcome or at least set aside. The representation of male/male rape on stage can foreground particular issues of gender and performance such as issues of the staged display of the body, the erotic potential of rape scenes, and the position and meaning of the rape in the plot structure precisely because the male/male rape is normally and normatively understood as an act of violent domination. Romans in Britain—included because of the controversy at its first performance—is one of relatively few plays that explicitly stage the rape of a male character; Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Cleansed are other examples. The sixth chapter then examines some very recent representations of rape on stage in a sub-genre described by April de Angelis as ‘Theatre of the Abused’. These texts, some scripted and some verbatim, explore human trafficking, sexual exploitation and female objectification in contemporary Western society, and real-life experiences of sexual violence. The concluding chapter seeks to draw the strands of the discussion together: questions of the female subject; subjectivity and trauma/violence; the reception and affective power of sexual violence in performance; and the social and cultural scripts that acquiesce to, even if they do not quite condone, acts of sexual violence and a culture of sexual violence. From this, I seek to identify a politics and practice of rape prevention that can emerge from the transformative potential of theatrical performance, a mode of expressing and understanding the world that feminist theorists outside of the discipline frequently draw upon in their own scholarship (Marcus 1992; Mardorossian 2002, 2014; Brison 2002; and much of Butler’s work on violence and dispossession). The chapter and the book as 34 L. FITZPATRICK a whole resists conclusion, given the increasingly urgent attention paid to rape as a war crime, rape threats online, and ‘rape culture’ around the world. This final chapter therefore draws upon what has gone before to question theatrical efficacy in relation to the performance of rape, and to reflect upon the potential for a radical theatrical practice that introduces new approaches and new ‘scripts’ to the representation of sexual violence.

Notes 1. This biblical text has been cited by a number of authors writing on rape, in such disparate work as Mieke Bal’s semiotic study Reading Rembrandt (1991) and Susan Brison’s memoir and philosophical reflection on trauma in Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (2002). The story of Lot (Genesis 19) follows an almost identical narrative trajectory, with Lot offering the men of Sodom his virgin daughters: ‘Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof.’ Lot’s daughters are saved by the intervention of the Angels, who strike the men blind. 2. The Campaign Against Pornography and the campaigns against censorship emerged in the late 1970s and continue in altered form into the present. The debate basically centres on whether violent pornography influences its consumers’ perceptions of and behaviour towards women, and there is evidence that it does. However, there is less evidence to suggest that pornography causes rape, and there is also the question of cause and effect: are men who rape influenced by their consumption of violent pornography, or do they consume violent pornography because they are already inclined to find sexual violence stimulating? The campaigns against censorship counter-argued that censorship would primarily affect women and the LGBTI community, and would have minimal impact on material that denigrated women where such violence was already framed as erotic. 3. A recent example is in Tom Ford’s visually beautiful Nocturnal Animals (2016), in a series of takes that linger over the posed naked bodies of the murdered mother and daughter before cutting to the naked body of the central character’s daughter and her lover, sleeping in the same pose. 4. Polls conducted in 2005 (Amnesty International) and 2015 (Office for National Statistics) both show significant minorities blaming the rape victim. The 2005 poll finds from 22–37% believing that the woman was INTRODUCTION 35

‘partially or totally responsible’ if she was wearing ‘sexy or revealing’ clothing, if she had had multiple sexual partners, if she was drunk, or if she failed to say ‘no’ clearly. The same survey showed that the majority of the public underestimated the number of rapes reported annually by a factor of 5, and overestimated the conviction rate by a factor of 5. https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/uk-new-poll-finds-third- people-believe-women-who-flirt-partially-responsible-being. The 2015 poll recorded very similar attitudes, with teenagers identified as the age group most likely to blame the victim (45%) compared with 25% of those aged 23–34 www.ons.gov.uk. Reported in http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/uknews/crime/11409210/Drunk-or-flirty-rape-victims-often-to- blame-says-survey.html. 5. The term ‘rape culture’ is used from the early 1970s onwards, but has become more widely used in the past decade by scholars, bloggers, and sometimes in the mainstream media. For an excellent multidisciplinary exploration of the concept see Buchwald, Fletcher and Roth’s edited collection Transforming a Rape Culture (2005). This includes essays, poems and excerpts from a multi-ethnic group of scholars and artists, examining different aspects of rape culture in different communities in the USA, in the form of personal testimony, analysis of young men and rape culture, rape in marriage, and cyber-sex alternatives to violent sexuality. 6. It has been argued by some historians that an analysis of rape at other periods of time or in other cultural contexts is impossible, because there is no shared definition of the term. While this can constitute another aspect of the complexity of signification in representation, which is dependent in large part on the manipulation of reception, it seems wilfully misguided to attempt to argue that women only fear rape because it is defined and understood as an act of violence and bodily desecration, rather than because of its lived, phenomenological, experiential nature. Diane Wolfthal challenges the argument advanced by Roy Porter (1986) and Johan Huizinga (1928; 1996 trans.) amongst others, that preindustrial women were not aware of, or did not fear, rape. Historians like Albrecht Classen are also strongly critical of Porter’s reading. Wolfthal points to texts by Margery Kempe and Christine de Pizan as evidence that women did fear rape and, in fact, developed strategies to protect themselves from it (1999, 127). In addition to the written texts, some of the art works she analyses clearly represent rape as a crime of violence against an individual woman— particularly the non-canonical legal and religious illustrations. Catty, similarly, argues that during the early modern period rape began a transition from being a crime against property, to being a crime against the person (xiv)—a shift that was not entirely a positive one for women’s experience of the justice system. 36 L. FITZPATRICK

7. The Irish Times reports from Nigeria of a mother who hid her daughter for nine months to protect her from Boko Haram, and to repel them she explains: ‘I decided to strip myself of all of my clothing and just walk around naked in the village. I un-plaited my hair to look like a mad woman. I urinated and put faeces on my hair and my body. I’d go to the town centre and roll around in trash so they would think I was mentally unstable.’ Sally Hayden, ‘Escaping Boko Haram’, The Irish Times, 22 July 2017. 8. Although the victim’s sexual history is no longer normally admitted into evidence in the United Kingdom or Ireland, one recent exception was the appeal of footballer Chad Evans against a rape conviction. In his case, the accuser’s sexual history was controversially admitted into evidence and the footballer was exonerated. See Ali Massem Bajwa QC and Eva Niculiu, ‘Sexual History Evidence: Fair Game?’ in Counsel Magazine online at https://www.counselmagazine.co.uk/articles/sexual-history-evidence- fair-game. 9. An online search for ‘The Accused’ will show links to porn sites that show the video of the scene, with commentary from the site’s users that frequently comments approvingly on the violence, and on the eroticism of the scene. 10. The legal definition of rape in the United Kingdom in the 2003 Sexual Offences Act is that it is the intentional penetration of the vagina, anus or mouth of another person without that person’s consent, and without the perpetrator having a reasonable belief that the person has consented. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) defines consent as agreement by choice, where the person has the freedom and capacity to make that choice (CPS online, 2009). In the Republic of Ireland, the law is similar but the penetration of the vagina by an object is also defined as rape (Irish Statute Book, online). In the USA ‘forcible rape’ is defined by the FBI as ‘carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will’ (online), but definitions and laws vary from state to state; and in Canada there are three levels of sexual assault offences which replaced the offences of rape in the Canadian Criminal Code in 1983. The aim of this revision was to focus on the violent, rather than the sexual, nature of the offences, to clarify that both men and women can be the victims of sexual assault, and to identify spousal sexual assault as a crime (online). The Code for both assault and sexual assault, like other legal frameworks, crucially identifies the victim’s lack of consent as the key issue. Several times in the book I have used the phrase ‘rape and sexual violence’. Sexual violence is the term used to cover a wider set of criminal and abusive behaviour than rape, and it is defined by the Rape Crisis Network Ireland to include ‘rape, sexual assault, child sexual abuse, sexual harassment, rape within marriage / relationships, forced marriage, so-called INTRODUCTION 37

honour-based violence, female genital mutilation, trafficking, sexual exploitation, and ritual abuse’ (www.rcni.ie). Marital rape has been recognized as a crime since 1982 (Scotland), 1990 (Ireland), and 1991 (England and Wales). 11. ‘La force, c’est ce qui fait de quiconque lui est soumis une chose’ (Weil 2003, 19) in the original. The translation is by James Holoka.

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Books and Articles Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Airey, Jennifer. The Politics of Rape. Newark, NY and Plymouth: University of Delaware Press, 2012. Anderson, Patrick and Jisha Menon, eds. Violence Performed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. London: Penguin, 1970. Bal, Mieke. Reading Rembrandt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; Amsterdam Academic Archive, 2006. Bamford, Karen. Sexual Violence on the Jacobean Stage. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Baxter, Mike. ‘Flesh and Blood: Does Pornography Lead to Sexual Violence?’. New Scientist 5 (May 1990): 37–41. BBC. Is This Rape? Television. BBC 3, 2015. Boucicault, Dion. The Octoroon: Or, Life in Louisiana. Victoria, Australia: Leopold Classic Library, 2015. Branca, R. Rene. ‘Melodrama, Convention, and Rape’. American Drama 14:1 (2005): 32–45. Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. London and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Brison, Susan. Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will. London: Penguin, 1975. Bumiller, Kristin. In an Abusive State. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008. 38 L. FITZPATRICK

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso, 2004. Butler, Judith and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. London: Polity, 2013. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Catty, Jocelyn. Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999; 2011. Clough, Patricia Ticineto, ed. with Jean Halley. The Affective Turn. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Coulthard, Lisa. ‘Uncanny Horrors: Male Rape in Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms’. In Rape in Art Cinema, ed. Dominique Russell. London: Continuum, 2010: 170–184. Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens. New York: Mariner Books, 2000. Davis, Tracy C. ‘The Actress in Victorian Pornography’. Theatre Journal 41:3 (1989): 294–315. De Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Ehrlich, Susan. Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Fitzpatrick, Lisa, ed. Performing Violence in Contemporary Ireland. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2008. Frohmann, Lisa. ‘Discrediting Victims’ Allegations of Sexual Assault’. Social Problems 38:2 (1991): 213–226. Gavey, Nicola. Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Goldsmith, Oliver. She Stoops to Conquer. New York: Washington Square Press, 1968. Gordon, Mel. Theatre of Fear and Horror. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2011. Greer, Germaine. ‘Rape’. The Independent on Sunday, 2 April 2006. Grosz, Elisabeth. ‘Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom’. In New Materialisms, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010: 139–157. Hanley, Conor, with Deirdre Healy and Stacey Scriver. Rape & Justice in Ireland. Dublin: Liffey Press, 2009. Hawkesworth, Mary. ‘Knowers, Knowing, Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth’. Signs 14:3 (1989): 533–557. Helliwell, Christine. ‘“It’s Only a Penis”: Rape, Feminism, and Difference’. Signs 25:3 (2000): 789–816. INTRODUCTION 39

Henderson, Holly. ‘Feminism, Foucault, and Rape’. Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law and Justice 22 (2007): 225–253. Henry, Claire. Revisionist Rape-Revenge: Redefining a Film Genre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Higgins, Lynn. ‘Screen/Memory: Rape and Its Alibis in Last Year in Marienbad’. In Rape in Art Cinema, ed. Dominique Russell. London: Continuum, 2010: 15–26. Howe, Elizabeth. The First English Actresses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Huizinga, Johan. The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928; 1996. Jordan, Anna. Freak. London: Nick Hern Books, 2014. Kahn, Arnold, V. Mathie and C. Torgler. ‘Rape Scripts and Rape Acknowledgment’. Psychology of Women Quarterly 18 (1994): 53–66. Kelly, Liz and Jill Radford. ‘“Nothing Really Happened”: The Invalidation of Women’s Experiences of Sexual Violence’. In Women, Violence and Male Power, ed. Marianne Hester, Liz Kelly, and Jill Radford. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996: 19–33. Kipnis, Laura. Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus. New York: Harper, 2017. Marcus, Sharon. ‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention’. In Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and J. W. Scott. London and New York: Routledge, 1992: 385–403. Mardorossian, Carine. Framing the Rape Victim: Gender and Agency Reconsidered. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014. Mardorossian, Carine. ‘Towards a New Feminist Theory of Rape’. Signs 27:3 (2002): 743–777. McGregor, Joan. Is it Rape? Aldershot: Aldgate, 2005. Morgan, Robin. Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist, 2nd Edition. New York: Open Road Media, 1977; 2014. Murphy, Ann V. Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012. Office of National Statistics. ‘Violent Crime and Sexual Offences’. Contact person: John Flatley. 12 February 2015. Available online at https://www.ons.gov.uk/ Oliver, Kelly. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Ozieblo, Barbara and Noelia Hernando-Real. Performing Gender Violence: Plays by Contemporary American Women Dramatists. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. 40 L. FITZPATRICK

Plaza, Monique. ‘Our Damages and their Compensation’. Feminist Issues 1:3 (1981): 5–35. Porter, Roy and Sylvana Tomaselli. Rape: An Historical and Cultural Inquiry. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Porter, Thomas. The Villain, a Tragedy. London: British Library Historical Print Editions, 2011. Projansky, Sarah. Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture. New York and London: New York University Press, 2001. Roiphe, Katie. The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994. Saunders, Graham. Love me or Kill me: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Shaughnessy, Nicola. Applying Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and Affective Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Sierz, Aleks. In-Yer-Face Theatre. London: Faber & Faber, 2001. Sjöberg, Alf. Froken Julie. Film. Directed by Alf Sjoberg. Sweden: AB Sandrew- Produktion. First released Cannes, April 1951. Solga, Kim. Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Solomon, Alisa. Redressing the Canon. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Weil, Simone. The Iliad or the Poem of Force. Ed. and Trans. James P. Holoka. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Wolfthal, Diane. Images of Rape in the Heroic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Žižek, Slavoj. Violence. London: Profile Books, 2008. CHAPTER 2

Rape on the Naturalistic Stage: The Example of Miss Julie

August Strindberg’s Miss Julie: A Naturalistic Tragedy was written in 1888 and given its first professional performance in Stockholm at the People’s Theatre in 1906. Strindberg produced it for his own Intimate Theatre (Intima Teater) the following year, where it ran for 134 performances. Its initial appeal seems to have been limited: it was staged at Antoine’s Theatre Libre in 1893 and Reinhardt’s Kleines Theater in 1907, as an experimental piece of theatre of interest mainly to a specialist audience. In London, the Adelphi Play Society produced it in 1912 at the Little Theatre, and it played for just three nights on Broadway as Countess Julia in 1913. The play is normally published with the author’s preface, in which he explains his attempt to create a piece of naturalistic theatre, with detailed explanations of the staging, plot and characterization. It was a controversial piece from the beginning: the Lord Chamberlain Lord Cromer banned it from performance in England in 1927, writing that ‘there is a sordid and disgusting atmosphere, which makes the immorality of the play glaring and crude. There is a very questionable theme in these days of the relationship between masters and servants, which the play tends to undermine’ (Petley 2012). The play has a cast of three: Miss Julie, daughter of the Count who owns the estate; Jean, the Count’s valet, and Kristin the Cook who is Jean’s fiancée. There is also a chorus of peasants that functions as a crucial plot device, invading the stage to perform a song and dance sequence that effectively splits the play into two parts. Thematically, the plot revolves around the flirtatious behaviour of Miss Julie towards the valet Jean, and a sexual encounter between the two that

© The Author(s) 2018 41 L. Fitzpatrick, Rape on the Contemporary Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70845-4_2 42 L. FITZPATRICK takes place off stage. The second half of the play follows the couple’s increasing desperation, as their attempts to evade the consequences of their actions are frustrated. Finally at dawn the Count returns and Jean persuades Julie that her only remaining option is suicide. The closing moments see her leave the stage, a blade in her hand. Miss Julie is a perhaps not an obvious text to use in a discussion of staging rape, since the sexual act occurs off stage, and it is never clear whether the eponymous heroine is raped or is seduced by her family’s valet. Yet it is this very ambiguity, which forces us to rely on what we see on stage and our interpretations of the characters’ words and actions before and after the event, that raises productive questions about staging rape and audience response. In the sense that the audience engage in these judgements, Miss Julie resembles real television dramas about acquaintance rape like The Verdict or Is This Rape?, that ask an on-screen jury or audience to decide what happened. In particular, the play in its various forms creates uncertainty about Julie’s truthfulness, because we see her earlier interactions with Jean and are likely to judge those to be sexually provocative; because both have consumed alcohol; because they know each other and she willingly enters his bedroom, and because Jean is in many ways a sympathetic character who is working hard to better his social position. This is intriguingly similar to contemporary cases of acquaintance rape as described in a number of studies, including a legal study of rape in Ireland commissioned by the Rape Crisis Network (Hanley et al. 2009). Peggy Sanday (1990) and Joan McGregor (2005) both explore the problems of prosecuting acquaintance rape, identifying the ways in which such attacks depart from the legal and cultural conception of rape as ‘a violent assault by a stranger’ (McGregor, 1) (italics in original). Historically, extreme force by the aggressor and utmost resistance by the victim were the only evidence of rape; otherwise, the woman was deemed to have consented. In many cases, as McGregor points out, legal processes elide compliance with consent, so that compliance for fear of being further harmed or killed becomes evidence that the victim was not unwilling. Julie never uses words that denote rape; she says that he ‘seduced’ her and begs him to tell her that he loves her. In its historical context, ‘seduce’ is ambiguous: it is often used to include non-consensual sex where the aggressor is the victim’s lover, or fiancé, or in any case does not use extreme levels of violence to force compliance. Because she looks to Jean to tell her he loves her, and he will not, Julie also recalls the stereotype of the rejected woman seeking revenge; and her appeal for reassurance further undermines for the RAPE ON THE NATURALISTIC STAGE: THE EXAMPLE OF MISS JULIE 43

audience the possibility that she has been raped. Yet as repeated studies show, victims of rape do not respond identically, and they often do not immediately classify acquaintance rape as rape, assuming along with most of the population that rape is committed in darkened alleyways by monstrous strangers, and not in familiar rooms by people they know.1 For this chapter, I have used different translations of Strindberg’s text and refer mainly to Harry Carlson’s translation contained in the Bedford Anthology of Drama, Michael Robinson’s 1998 translation for Penguin Classics, and Peter Weiss’s German translation used by Ingmar Bergman in 1981 and 1985 (for clarity, all subsequent quotes from Strindberg’s text will reference the translator). Following the analysis of the play, I compare three film versions by Alf Sjöberg, Mike Figgis and Liv Ullman, finally turning to recent stage rewritings of the work by Patrick Marber and Yael Farber. My aim is to explore the ways that the unseen encounter between Jean and Julie in his bedroom is understood by different theatre makers, and to investigate the insistence within the text and most of the adaptations on Miss Julie’s culpability and unreliability as a witness. In the essay as well as in the play itself, Julie is clearly constructed to express Strindberg’s distrust of women and loathing of the women’s emancipation movement. The Preface characterizes her as ‘a modern character … the man-hating half-woman … Victim of a superstition … that woman, this stunted form of human being who stands between man, the lord of creation, the creator of culture, [and the child] is meant to be the equal of man … She is synonymous with degeneration’ (Robinson 1998, 61). Ultimately, her hopes of attaining equality with men will be crushed, and she will ‘succumb’ (61). Although Julie comes from a noble line, Strindberg is explicit that her social class is dying and Jean’s is rising. He writes, ‘Jean … is superior to Miss Julie in that he is a man. Sexually he is the aristocrat because of his masculine strength, his more finely developed senses, and his ability to take the initiative’, while his inferiority is only circumstantial (62). In addition to her inherent inferiority as a woman, Julie is also provided with circumstances that shape her ‘tragic fate’, and these include ‘her mother’s “bad” basic instincts; her father’s improper bringing-up of the girl; her own nature and the influence her fiancé’s suggestions had on her weak, degenerate brain’ (58). He lists as other factors the festive atmosphere, her father’s absence which means she is without male guidance and governance, her menstruation, the flowers, the bright midsummer night, the dancing, the chance happening that brings Jean and Julie alone in his room, and ‘the boldness of the aroused man’ (58). This multiplicity of motives is important to Strindberg’s conception of 44 L. FITZPATRICK characterization and to his attempt to create what he repeatedly calls ‘modern’ characters. The other female character in the play, Kristin, he describes simply as a ‘female slave … subservient and dull’, who uses religion and morality as a ‘cloak and a scape-goat’ because she is weak (63). Strindberg’s conception of Julie’s character is borne out in the dialogue. In her scenes with Jean, Julie describes her upbringing and its effect on her personality and actions. She says that her mother ‘was brought up according to contemporary theories about equality, women’s emancipation, and all that’ so that when Julie was born, her mother decided to raise her as a ‘child of nature’, but dressed as a boy, learning to handle horses and run a farm. Her mother organized the estate so that ‘the men were put to women’s work, and the women to men’s, so that everything went to the dogs, and we became the laughing-stock of the neighbourhood’ (Robinson 1998, 93). Drinking wine as she talks, she explains that she was raised to hate men but that sometimes a ‘weakness’ comes over her—presumably desire (95). In the scenes where the other characters discuss her, she is characterized as out of control, behaving in ways that scandalize the servants. The opening lines of the play are Jean’s to Kristin: ‘Miss Julie’s crazy again tonight; absolutely crazy!’ Robinson’s translation notes that the word translated as ‘crazy’ has connotations of being on heat, like an animal (1998, 294). In the absence of her father, she spends midsummer’s night dancing in the barn with the men servants without regard for decorum—and, crucially, without a male guardian or protector in proximity. The text draws attention to the ways that the Count’s absence frees all the characters to behave reck- lessly, even as his boots visible on stage throughout indicate that this freedom is short-lived. Jean describes Julie ‘leading off the dance with the gamekeeper! But as soon as she saw me she rushed over to ask me for the next waltz. And she’s been waltzing ever since’ (Carlson 1997, 735). Robinson renders this as ‘she comes rushing on over and invites me to join her in the ladies’ waltz. And how she waltzed!—I’ve never known the like. She’s crazy!’ (1998, 71). Her apparent preference for Jean has drawn the attention of the other servants, as Jean warns her when she seeks him out and invites him to dance again: ‘It doesn’t look right to prefer one of your retainers before others awaiting the same rare honour’ (74). His warning, which she angrily dismisses, is borne out by the later arrival of the servants on stage singing an obscene song about a lady and her servant. RAPE ON THE NATURALISTIC STAGE: THE EXAMPLE OF MISS JULIE 45

The dialogue between Jean and Kristin in the opening scenes of the play provides background information on Julie that perhaps motivates her decision to stay at home and her actions on the night. Their dialogue also reveals the very claustrophobic atmosphere of the house, where the Count and his family are the object of close scrutiny by their staff. Kristin tells Jean that Julie has ‘got her monthly’ and that she ‘always acts strange’ when she is menstruating (1998, 72), the first mention of the play’s blood motif. Menstrual blood foreshadows the hymeneal blood, shed during Julie’s seduction by, or of, Jean; the sexual mingling of the body’s fluids; the shared ‘blood’ of a possible child of the union; the ‘bad blood’ of Julie’s mother; the blood potentially spilt in a rape, and finally the blood shed at the play’s denouement of the caged bird and of Julie herself. By indicating that Julie is menstruating Strindberg draws attention to the supposed intellectual weakness of women, and emphasizes Julie’s fleshi- ness and corporeality. A further factor in Julie’s erratic behaviour is the recent end of her engagement, an event that might suggest disgrace or dishonour. Jean recounts what he witnessed between her and her fiancé in the stable yard: Julie ‘made him jump over her riding crop … He jumped twice and she hit him each time. But the third time he grabbed the crop out of her hand, hit her with it across the cheek, and broke it in pieces. Then he left’ (Carlson, 736). The most common translation has the scene end with the fiancé simply snatching the whip and breaking it, as in Robinson’s version (1998, 72). But Robinson notes that there is an increasing return to Strindberg’s original ‘drew a weal across her left cheek’ (294), drawing attention to the humiliation that is part of the reason for Julie’s behaviour. Frank McGuinness’ adaptation has ‘he let her have it across the left cheek’ (2000, 8). In Bergman’s translation, Kristin comments that Julie has been covering the welt left by the crop with make-up (Steene 2005, 767), and it becomes visible again later in the play. The described scene of domination and humiliation is not unlike the power struggle between Jean and Julie in the first half of the play, or the gradual destruction of Julie that unfolds during the second half. Julie first enters after this exchange, checking that Kristin has cooked a potion to bring on a miscarriage in her dog—it has mated with the ‘gamekeeper’s mutt’ (1998, 75), another foreshadowing of the sex between Julie and Jean. But she is also in pursuit of Jean. She flirts with him, flick- ing her handkerchief at him, praising his dancing; gently mocks his knowledge of perfume and ability to speak some French and invites him to come 46 L. FITZPATRICK and dance the schottische with her. When he demurs, she insists; when he then submits she responds ‘(gently) Don’t take it as an order! On a night like this we’re all just ordinary people having fun, so we’ll forget about rank. Now, take my arm!—Don’t worry Kristin! I won’t steal your sweetheart!’ (Carlson, 736). The scene establishes multiple layers to these interactions, with Julie using her authority as daughter of the house to command, while verbally assuring the servants that tonight they are all equal. Her exiting comment to Kristin is insulting in its suggestion that she could steal Jean if she wanted to, making the improbable scenario possible by stating it in words. Some versions have Kristin responding with jealous distress, though in most she is fairly unconcerned; later, when she knows he has slept with Julie, she says ‘If it’d been Klara or Sophie, I’d have scratched your eyes out!—but her now—no—I don’t know why’ (Robinson 1998, 100), while in Bergman’s 1981 version she and Jean col- laborate to trap and destroy Julie. Initially, Jean is reluctant to take too many liberties with Julie. He returns to the kitchen to get Kristin, but Julie follows and is ‘disagreeably surprised’ to find them together, speaking with ‘forced jocularity’ (1998, 75). She orders him to change his jacket but refuses to leave the room while he does so; she orders him to sit with her, and to drink with her. Her pursuit of him in these scenes is active. She remains alone with him when Kristin first sleeps, then disappears off stage to bed. She demands he kiss her shoe, kiss her hand, she leans over him to remove a speck of dust from his eye and she feels the muscles in his arm. When he warns her to stop—‘je ne suis qu’un homme’—she mockingly calls him a ‘Don Juan’ or a ‘Joseph! Yes, upon my soul, I do believe you’re a Joseph!’ (1998, 80–81). A Don Juan is a seducer, but a Joseph—the reference that Julie favours—refers to a biblical story that would have been very familiar to the play’s original audiences. In the Book of Genesis, Joseph is a slave in Egypt. His master Potiphar recognizes that ‘the LORD was with him’, and makes him overseer of his house. But Potiphar’s wife ‘cast her eyes upon Joseph; and she said, Lie with me’. Joseph refused her, but ‘she spake to Joseph day by day … to lie with her, or be with her’. One day, being alone in the house with him, she caught him by his ‘garment’ and he fled, leaving the garment in her hands. Potiphar’s wife then makes an accusation: ‘he came in unto me to lie with me, and I cried with a loud voice: And it came to pass, when he heard that I lifted up my voice and cried, that he left his garment with me, and fled, and got him out’ (Genesis 39–40). Joseph is imprisoned, but he later finds favour with the Pharaoh RAPE ON THE NATURALISTIC STAGE: THE EXAMPLE OF MISS JULIE 47 and is released and elevated to a high social position. This was a popular story, confirming a common rape myth that rejected women often make vengeful false accusations of rape and sexual assault. It echoes with Congreve’s often-quoted verse, normally rendered as ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’.2 Renaissance and Baroque artists picked up the story, and there are many depictions by Reni, Rembrandt and Gentileschi of Potiphar’s wife enticing Joseph or accusing him. These images would have popularized the story for a largely illiterate audience, while also attesting to its cultural popularity and the widespread acceptance of the beliefs about gender encoded in it. Thus Julie’s reference to Jean as a ‘Joseph’ may attest only to her impression of his chastity in the face of temptation from a high-ranking woman, but for her audience it also warns that she may falsely accuse him of rape. By referencing this biblical tale, Strindberg reminds his audience that women lie and honest men are falsely accused, shifting responsibility for what will happen on to Julie while also pre-emptively undermining the audience’s sympathy for her distress. This judgement is mirrored on stage in the responses of the other characters: Kristin agrees with Jean that Julie’s behaviour shows a lack of self-respect and she disapproves so strongly that she decides to give notice and leave her job since she can’t work for people she can’t respect (1998, 100). The ballet of peasants similarly demonstrates contempt for Julie and her flirtatious behaviour. From Julie’s dialogue, and from the play’s historical context, the audience understands that the Count and her peers will also regard her as having dishonoured herself and her family. Perhaps in deference to the secular audience of contemporary Britain who may not understand the connotations of Jean as ‘a Joseph’, Patrick Marber’s adaptation After Miss Julie3 puts an explicit threat rather than an allusion in Julie’s mouth. After the scene in John’s bedroom—in which it is she who initiates sex—she warns him ‘Listen to what I say or so help me God I will scream rape and I will not stop screaming until you are in prison’ (2004, 160). The flirtation that unfolds on stage, with Julie apparently intent on seducing Jean yet rejecting his more forward moves, involves an attempt at emotional intimacy as well on her part. It is she who initiates reminis- cences about their childhoods, and the sharing of their deepest dreams and ambitions. Jean’s dream is to rise socially: he dreams of a tree with the first branch just beyond his reach. Julie dreams of oblivion: she wants to fall to the ground and keep falling (1998, 79–80). Their dialogue continues with Jean alternately flirting with her and begging her to leave, 48 L. FITZPATRICK warning her that the other servants will notice that he is getting her attention. Eventually, they hear the approach of the Chorus singing an obscene song about a swineherd and a princess. Frightened, Julie realizes that the peasants do not admire her, that she has compromised herself, and that they will find her sitting alone with Jean. There is no way out. Since she cannot get back to the main house, nor can she enter Kristin’s room, the only option is to go into Jean’s room:

JEAN: … there’s my room. Necessity knows no rules. Besides, you can trust me. I’m your friend and I respect you. JULIE: But suppose—suppose they look for you in there? JEAN: I’ll bolt the door, and if anyone tries to break in, I’ll shoot!—Come! (on his knees) Come! JULIE: (urgently) Promise me … ? JEAN: I swear! (Miss Julie runs off right. Jean hastens after her). (Carlson, 741)

The exit of the two main characters marks the end of the first half of the play, and the internally motivated Ballet provides an interlude for the audience. The peasants dance, sing, play music, and smash some of the kitchen in their drunken midsummer festivities. Strindberg’s Preface includes the Ballet or crowd scene to allow for a resting moment for the audience and the actors, without breaking the audience’s concentration on the action as he believes an interval would do (1998, 64). Within the world of the play it provides the reason why Jean and Julie leave the stage and go into Jean’s bedroom. This Ballet provides spectators with a short break from the intensity of the first half and in preparation for the heightened tension of the second half. The ‘ballet’ further provides a sense of the violence happening off stage. When the peasants leave, Julie re-enters, followed shortly afterwards by Jean. They must now plan what to do next. For Julie, it is imperative that Jean should claim to love her and that he should marry her; it is the only way to save some of her honour. She begs him ‘Say you love me, otherwise—yes, what am I otherwise?’ (1998, 88). Jean unveils his ambition to open a hotel at the Italian lakes, spinning a dream of a successful business, wealth, and perhaps eventually a Romanian title that he will buy. This plan falls apart when Julie reveals that she has no capital, no money of her own. She and Jean begin to argue as their dialogue veers from vicious and abusive exchanges to desperate attempts to arrive at a solution. Their plight is confirmed by the judgemental Kristin, who RAPE ON THE NATURALISTIC STAGE: THE EXAMPLE OF MISS JULIE 49 returns to the stage to pour scorn on their plans to open a hotel in Italy. ‘Listen Miss Julie’, she says, ‘do you really believe this?’ (1998, 105). Her blunt question forces Julie to realize that the plans to escape are mere fantasies. The dawn brings the two characters to a realization that escape is not possible. The Count’s return is heralded by the ringing of his bell, and Jean reverts to his subservient role as valet, while Julie faces public disgrace and dishonour. The only way out is to kill herself, as Jean counsels her to do:

MISS JULIE: What would you do in my place? JEAN: In yours? Wait, now. A woman of noble birth who’d—sunk? I don’t know—or yes, maybe I do. MISS JULIE: [takes the razor and makes a gesture]. Like this? JEAN: Yes—but I wouldn’t do it—mind, for there’s a difference between us! MISS JULIE: Because you’re a man and I’m a woman? What difference does that make? JEAN: Precisely that—the difference between a man and a woman. (1998, 107)

In the closing scene, the Count rings the bell and Jean cringes at the sound. Straightening up, he says ‘It’s horrible! But there is no other way!—Go!’ The stage directions read ‘[MISS JULIE walks resolutely out through the door. Curtain]’ (1998, 110). The question of what happened between Jean and Julie in Jean’s room is never fully answered by the text, though some contemporary adaptations have attempted to settle the question by staging the scene in view of the audience, or by introducing dialogue that clarifies it (as a consensual seduction). Given that the play is identified in its subtitle as a tragedy it is arguable that Miss Julie must have consented to sex with the valet so that her dishonour and downfall can be understood as a result of her own flawed actions and character. This ‘flaw’ may be variously understood as masochism, as her identification with a decadent and dying social class, or as her weakness caused by her mother’s ‘bad basic instincts’ (1998, 58) and her misguided upbringing. And yet, the action is ambiguous, the singing and carousing of the Chorus cover any possible off-stage sounds, and the play reiterates conventional beliefs about women’s credibility and sexuality. The play shows the isolation of the female character, the other woman’s rejection of her, and her removal from the social sphere (through suicide; social ostracism is the alternative). Dramaturgically, however, her suicide suggests that she was raped: the convention of the raped woman 50 L. FITZPATRICK dying by her own hand was an enduring one (Catty 1999, 93), and indeed even in contemporary attitudes to rape, evidence of extreme trauma or suicide adds credibility to an accusation.

Naturalism and Feminism The relationship between naturalism and feminism is a contested one, with scholarly critiques of representation, and feminist theatre practice frequently seeking alternative aesthetics. Feminist scholars and theatre makers explore forms of practice that empower the spectator, and motivate him or her to engage in a critical response, to interrogate, challenge, perhaps even to take direct action. In the 1990s, Elin Diamond made her powerful and influential case for the potential of Brechtian practice to be read intertextually with feminist theory, setting out an exploration of this potential relationship and a response to ‘the ubiquitous feminist critiques of representation’. She identifies the problem of naturalistic theatre, arguing that by ‘setting out to offer truth version of experience, realism universalizes but one point of view, ignoring the force-field of human-social contradiction. In the process of exploring social (especially gender) relations, realism ends by confirming their inevitability’ (xiii). But, she adds, ‘any critique of a representational practice needs to situate itself in the historical materials and desires of that practice’ (xiii). In her ground-breaking study she asks if a feminist mimesis is possible and, if it is, how a scholarship of feminist mimesis might be developed, making the case for rediscovering the radical potential of Brechtian practice. Diamond sets out the recurring questions in any exploration of power and mimetic representation: who is speaking and who is listening? Whose body is in view and whose is not? What is being represented, and with what effect? (ii). Working from Irigaray, she considers the relationship between mimesis and mimicry, and points to the tension in the two conventional definitions of mimesis: representation as a ‘truth model’ or verisimilitude, and mimesis as generative, performative, as an act of representing (v). But it is also significant that ‘the discourse of theater … cannot rid itself of the temptation to refer, to emplot, to remember, to show. The actor’s body cannot forget its gender … cannot shake off the referential frame imposed by text, mode of production, and spectators’ narrativity—those trajectories of scopic desire and identification that performer and performance text can only partially control’ (vii). Diamond’s RAPE ON THE NATURALISTIC STAGE: THE EXAMPLE OF MISS JULIE 51 questions are pertinent to both a consideration of the staging of rape, and to a reading of Strindberg’s character Miss Julie. As audience members and as readers of a written text, are we encouraged to regard Julie as a singular aberration, or is she to be understood as a representative example of the modern woman? Strindberg’s Preface makes clear that Julie is also representative of her class which he imagines as ‘rotten, superannu- ated trees, which have stood too long in the way of others with just as much right to their time in the sun’ (1998, 57). He explains that he has ‘motivated Miss Julie’s tragic fate with an abundance of circumstances’ (1998, 58) attempting to capture a sense of the complexity and contra- dictions of human behaviour. Yet he is also explicit that her tragedy is in part a result of her socialization as a modern emancipated woman. The ‘Preface’ thus introduces Miss Julie to the reader (including the director, actor, and creative team) in profoundly misogynistic terms that position her in a particular cultural and historical moment, but also describe her as a timeless type. The ‘man-hating half-woman’ has existed ‘in every age’ but has now ‘come out into the open and made herself heard’ (60). Like Ibsen’s heroines, she challenges social mores and appears at first to assert the individualistic non-conformity that is counter to the Victorian ideal of the Angel in the House (Diamond 1997, 4). But unlike Ibsen’s Nora or Mrs Alving or even Hedda Gabler, Julie arguably loses all capacity to act early in the drama, and becomes the paralyzed hysteric that Diamond posits as being at the dramatic and ideological core of naturalism (Diamond 1997, 4). However, if Julie is read as primarily desiring her own annihilation, then her flirtation with Jean, like her behaviour towards her fiancé, can be understood as a struggle with her own desire to self-destruct. In the second half, her vacillating rejection of Jean and assertion of her social superiority may be indicative of the moments when her instinct for self-preservation asserts itself. This makes Jean incidental to Julie’s behaviour and allows it to be read as a manifestation of her internal struggle between self-destruction and survival. In opposition to the hysteric, Diamond sets forth the body-centred performance, feminist ‘semiotic’ realism, and Brechtian practice (xiv). However, Patricia Schroeder’s case for a feminist realism (1996), and recent work by Kim Solga on the radical potential of theatrical naturalism, encompasses Diamond’s recognition of the enduring spectatorial enjoyment of naturalism and the potential for intense identification that realism offers. I return to this question in the next chapter, in the exploration of women writers’ strategies for staging rape. 52 L. FITZPATRICK

Una Chaudhuri’s analysis of sex, class and space in Miss Julie identifies the structural problem of the play in its attempt to ‘renegotiate and fix in place the relationship between individual, private experience and its public meaning’ (italics in original) (1993, 318). While the play and the Preface attempt to establish sex and class as ‘powerful explanatory systems’, Chaudhuri examines the operation of space and the metaphor of the hypnotist in the development of the plot and the power struggle between the characters. She points out that the reversal of power in the second half of the play is most commonly understood through the ‘profoundly misogynistic logic’ (327) that the sexual act reduces Julie to her gender thereby removing her class advantage and leaving Jean as the dominant character. The play and the Preface explicitly support this argument; the Preface words its denunciation of female emancipation particularly strongly, and clearly assigns the dominant role to the male servant. Chaudhuri interrogates this reading, drawing her readers’ attention to the metaphor of hypnosis and the hypnotic power the Count exerts on all the characters. In fact the play reasserts traditional power structures of gender and class at the end, in Jean’s reversion to his subservient role and in the closing down of his opportunities to escape. While the logic of Julie’s disempowerment is, as Chaudhuri argues, ‘profoundly misogynistic’ it is also largely compelling, at least to the point where Julie decides to commit suicide. At this point the demands of naturalism cede to the demands of the genre (tragedy), and Julie enters the gallery of dishonoured women who die at their own hand. While Miss Julie’s naturalistic aesthetic along with its genre as a tragedy might over-determine the outcome for the central character, a close analysis of the text also reveals the deliberate process of trapping Julie alone with Jean, a process that is echoed in a number of contemporary plays about rape including Eve Lewis’s Ficky Stingers (discussed below). Julie’s mistake is to believe that the servants on the estate are loyal to her. When Jean warns her that they are coming and ‘if they find us here together, you’re lost!’ she replies, ‘I know these people, and I love them, just as they love me. Let them come, you’ll see!’ (1998, 85). Within minutes she has listened to the words of their song as they move closer and closer to the house, and realizes that she must not be caught alone with Jean. From the kitchen, the only possible exits will take her into one of the servant’s rooms.4 To go into Kristin’s room is to reveal that she and Jean have been alone in the kitchen drinking, and risk Kristin returning them to the scorn RAPE ON THE NATURALISTIC STAGE: THE EXAMPLE OF MISS JULIE 53 of the crowd. The only other option is to go into Jean’s room, and it is clear that Julie is unsure if this is safe; but Jean assures her that it is:

JEAN. … I’m your true, loyal, and respectful friend … Come on! MISS JULIE [significantly]. You promise—— JEAN. I swear! (1998, 86).

Frank McGuinness offers a very similar version:

JEAN … you can trust me. I am your friend—a genuine friend … (He gets on his knees.) come on. Miss Julie asks urgently: JULIE: Promise me – JEAN: I swear. (2000, 28)

The dialogue, though ambivalent, suggests that Julie’s hesitation is overcome by Jean’s assertion of honest friendship and his ‘promise’; it appears to reassure her that he will not take advantage of the situation when she is in his room. The fact that Julie was earlier silenced when Jean deliberately revealed that he sleeps with Kristin, suggests that she is a virgin (1998, 77). But consensually or not, she is deflowered by Jean and their sexual union is destructive of their formal relationship as mistress and servant, their wider family relationships, and their social order. Different productions, however, have interpreted the scene between Jean and Julie differently, usually indicating degrees of consent through the interpretation of the scenes immediately before the characters enter the bedroom, and after they return to the stage. In the translation by Carlson, Julie re-enters first, and the stage directions read ‘She notices the mess in the kitchen, wrings her hands, then takes out her powder puff and powders her nose’; Jean then enters, ‘agitated’, points out that she has heard the peasants and that they ‘can’t possibly stay here now’ (741). The stage directions, though detailed, are ambiguous. Does Julie ‘wring her hands’ (Carlson) or ‘clasp her hands together’ (Robinson) over the mess in the kitchen as the phrasing suggests, or does her gesture indicate a deeper distress and a recognition that the havoc wrought in the kitchen is a physical reflection of the havoc wrought in her body and in her life? Does powdering her face, then, indicate distress and an attempt to patch over the damage with the inadequate means available to her, or does it indicate a lack of concern with anything 54 L. FITZPATRICK but her own appearance? The dialogue doesn’t provide an answer to these questions, leaving them open to interpretation. Julie’s brief responses to Jean could reflect either her lack of awareness of the gravity of thesituation, or her profound alienation from him and from her own physicality following a rape. Similarly, Jean’s agitation may be understood as his shock at his own violence, or his realization that by succumbing to Julie’s advances he has endangered his livelihood regardless of the legalities of his actions, and also that an opportunity to reach that first branch of the tree has unexpectedly materialized.

Film Adaptations: Sjöberg, Figgis and Ullmann In film adaptations, the camera tends to remain on the protagonists while they hide from the Chorus, so that the viewer is positioned with Jean and Julie, anxiously listening to the off-stage, off-screen noise. Three film adaptations offer three different interpretations: Alf Sjöberg’s 1951 Froken Julie, Mike Figgis’s 1999 Miss Julie, and Liv Ullmann’s 2014 Miss Julie, set in Fermanagh in Northern Ireland. In each of these, crucial moments are unseen so that the spectators are forced to arrive at their own conclusions; but in all there is at least a suggestion of Julie’s lack of sexual experience and inability to effectively resist Jean. Sjöberg interprets the bedroom scene—which is not performed for the camera—as more clearly a rape than either of the other films. Julie resists when Jean tries to bring her into his room: she cries out ‘Ne!’, and crouches beside the dresser. However, realizing that the crowd is coming, he pleads with her—‘Komm! Komm!’ and she goes with him into his room. The door closes behind him. There is a shot of them both on his bed, cowering away from the mob in the kitchen, and then the Ballet scene unfolds with increasingly frenetic dancing, three rifles raised into the air and shot, and finally the image of an overturned keg pumping beer onto the floor. The imagery suggests what is happening in the bedroom; then after a pause Julie enters, half- staggering, buttoning her dress and weeping. In this interpretation, her ‘powdering her nose’ suggests her drying of tears and attempt to compose herself. This film was influential for Bergman’s interpretation of the scene in his 1981 stage production. Figgis’s film takes a different approach. He films the sex scene, keeping the camera in close-up on Julie’s face as she struggles to remain silent so that the Chorus will not discover her; beads of sweat break out on her brow and she grimaces. Although neither character’s body is visible, what RAPE ON THE NATURALISTIC STAGE: THE EXAMPLE OF MISS JULIE 55 is happening is clear from their proximity, their laboured breathing, and Julie’s small movements. But it is not clear whether her response is one of pain or pleasure, and the question of consent is left deliberately vague. Julie’s earlier lack of consent is evident from her on-stage rejection of Jean when he tries to kiss her (she slaps him), and her incomplete plea before she enters his room (‘Promise me…?’), though it is possible that Jean’s sharing of his dream and of his childhood crush, together with the alcohol, have changed her mind. Certainly Figgis’s choreography of the scene, which has the characters standing against a wall, also suggests a degree of force: Jean presses Julie into the wall immobilizing her, and it is difficult to reconcile this rather rough position with Julie’s characterization as aristocratic, virginal. This interpretation makes clear that Julie is trapped from the moment she enters Jean’s room: because neither the peasants nor Kristin must find her there, she cannot risk rejecting Jean’s advances or shouting out in protest. She has given her consent by entering his room, though she doesn’t realize it in time. In a remarkably claustrophobic play, in which the servants know everything about her even to her menstrual cycle, it is at this moment that Julie realizes her power is illusory and she has been out-manoeuvred. Ullmann’s film allows the action to roam beyond the claustrophobia of the kitchen and adjusts sections of the dialogue to emphasize Kathleen’s (Kristin) subservience to Miss Julie, and the overall characterization of her as ‘a slave’, in Strindberg’s words. This includes showing her distress when Julie asks John (Jean) to dance, and her repeated requests to Julie to allow her to go to bed to sleep. John trembles with repressed desire in the flirtation scenes, as Julie sits on his lap to flick the dust out of his eye. In this version, Kathleen shows concern for Julie’s lapdog, and she listens at Jean’s bedroom door; this is something that Bergman’s Kristin also does (discussed below). The rape or seduction at the centre of the plot remains ambiguous here: the scene is filmed in John’s bedroom, and shows them kissing on his bed; the kisses rapidly become rougher; Julie seems uncomfortable but the camera cuts away to the other side of the door, to watch Kathleen’s grief as she hears the laboured breathing of the couple inside. Is it rape or seduction? When the camera returns to the room, Julie is lying on the bed and John is washing himself, apologizing, asking her to forgive him. She doesn’t speak. When he asks her to stay in the room until he checks where Kathleen is, Julie sits up and uses her underpants to slowly wipe between her legs. In an interview with Catherine Shoard, Ullmann describes this action as ‘She sees blood—maybe she’s a virgin, maybe it’s 56 L. FITZPATRICK her period, and that explains everything, maybe it’s something from him. She’s thinking: I cross-bred with something. It’s ugly’ (online). In her analysis, Ullmann reminds the reader that the play opens with Kristin cooking a foul-smelling mixture to induce an abortion in Miss Julie’s lapdog, which has bred with the ‘gamekeeper’s mutt’; pet and owner are drawn into an analogy. She describes her desire to interrogate Strindberg’s text and the representation of women in it: ‘He was not very good in his thoughts towards women and that’s why it’s good a woman adapted it’ (Shoard, online). In all of these interpretations, it is clear that by entering Jean’s bedroom Julie unwittingly consents to sex. This question of implicit consent will continue into contemporary representations of rape and contemporary attitudes towards rape and consent, including attitudes tested in courts of law. Once inside the bedroom Julie cannot protest against Jean’s advances because doing so will reveal to the peasants and to Kristin that she is there alone with him: so she is already dishonoured. Later, in the kitchen, they fight: John calls her a whore who threw herself at him, behaving like an animal in the zoo. She shoves him away when he tries to have sex with her again on the kitchen table. She reminds him that a man has responsibilities to a woman he seduces, but he counters by throwing a coin on the table as payment, a calculated insult. He argues that she was the one who seduced him, a charge that the audience may well sympathize with, having watched Julie’s earlier drinking and flirting; and Jean is probably truthful when he says that he would not have dared presume if she had not encouraged him. These same arguments are rehearsed on social media in response to contemporary rape cases, and scholars continue to raise the difficulties of prosecuting rape where the balance of judgement is based on who is more credible.5 The play’s lexicon—a man ‘shames’ a woman; Julie has sacrificed her and her family’s ‘honour’; her submission to Jean is described in the stage directions as ‘shy, very feminine’—is profoundly misogynistic as Chaudhuri asserts and emphasizes an attitude to sex and sexuality that is not confined to the late 1800s, but persists in double standards about men’s and women’s sexuality, promiscuity and chastity into the present day. These attitudes, taken together with the play’s ambiguity about what has transpired between Jean and Julie, gives the work a contemporary significance and interest so that it is one of Strindberg’s most studied, most performed and most adapted texts. The sexual tension between the upper-class woman and the lower-class man resonates in adaptations like Patrick Marber’s RAPE ON THE NATURALISTIC STAGE: THE EXAMPLE OF MISS JULIE 57

After Miss Julie set in the post-war period, an adaptation in which Julie initiates sex, and most strikingly in Yael Farber’s racially troubling 2012 production, Mies Julie, set in post-Apartheid South Africa. These plays suggest that upper-class women might like a ‘bit of rough’, the passion of a man who works physically and is close to nature, over a refined gentle- man with less physical prowess. The plays present a contemporary spectator, and perhaps particularly the contemporary feminist spectator, with several interpretive challenges. How should the spectator understand Julie’s vacillation between overtly flirtatious behaviour and apparent shock when Jean attempts to respond by kissing her? How is the ambivalence of her consent managed in the staging of the work? To what extent does the play validate earlier feminist concerns about naturalism as antipathetic to feminism? In what ways might the characterization of Julie as masochisti- cally attracted to Jean reiterate social stereotypes about female sexuality and sexual violence? These questions are interlinked. The representation of gender in the play, which represents Jean as the strongest and healthiest character (while Kristin is described in the Preface as a ‘slave’ and Julie represents a dying class) is deeply rooted in naturalism as an aesthetic. Strindberg provides Jean and Julie with family and personal histories that explain their attitudes and their actions. Jean tells of growing up ‘in a shack with seven brothers and sisters and a pig, in the middle of a wasteland, where there wasn’t a single tree’ (739); his stories of his early years emphasize the great distance he has already risen to become a valet in a secure position, with room and board, engaged to the cook, able to read and write and speak a few words of French. Jean does not set out to seduce or rape Julie, but he is an opportunist and her apparent interest in him makes his dream of a hotel seem briefly possible. When he realizes that they are trapped, his determination to save himself is understandable because his rise to his current post is so hard-won. But while Jean remains a convincing and perhaps sympathetic character to a contemporary audience, Julie’s explanation for her behaviour is more problematic. She blames her mother, who believed in women’s emancipation, and her father who was too weak to oppose her. She is intended as an anti-feminist figure who reveals the distorting impact of female emancipation on a woman’s physical, moral and psychological development. Her toying with Jean can be read therefore as an attempt to exert power and control over a man, particularly in the wake of her humiliating broken engagement. Her extraordinary and prolonged behaviour which swings between demands that he ‘kiss her hand’, calling him ‘a 58 L. FITZPATRICK

Joseph’ and then immediately afterwards slapping him when he ‘boldly tries to put his arm around her waist and kiss her’ (Carlson, 739) strongly suggest a deliberate attempt to arouse, confuse and frustrate him. Even reading her earlier behaviour as a complete negation of Jean as a human being, in which she cannot imagine his desire because she cannot empathize with him in any way, can only offer a motivation for part of her behaviour: at a certain point, it must become knowingly provocative. But Strindberg provides his character with a further degree of complexity: a desire for humiliation, seen both in her attempt to bully her fiancé and in the recurring dream she confides to Jean: ‘I long to be able to fall, but I don’t fall. And yet I’ll have no peace until I get down, no rest unless I get down, down on the ground! And if I did get down to the ground, I’d want to be under the earth’ (Carlson, 738). This desire for an obliteration of the self echoes with Bataille’s description of the sexual act that subjects the woman to the power of the male (phallus), and with psychological interpretations of female sexuality as inherently masochistic. In any staging, Julie’s earlier flirting with Jean engages the audience in complex questions about gender, consent and masochistic desire. Three stage productions that explore these tensions are Ingmar Bergman’s 1981 production at Munich, Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie (2004) and Yael Farber’s 2012 Mies Julie which premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival.

Ingmar Bergman’s Miss Julie Bergman’s Miss Julie was originally staged in the Residenztheater in Munich in 1981 as part of a ‘triangle’ of plays, with Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and a stage adaptation of Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. In an interview with Frederick and Lise-Lone Marker, Bergman describes his interest in these three texts as examples of how society forces itself upon, and dis- torts, male–female relationships. He staged the work again in December 1985 at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, with the same designer, Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, and a new cast. The play toured in February 1986, first in Sweden and then internationally. Birgitta Steene notes, ‘The greatest critical attention focused on Bergman’s interpretation of the characters: his upgrading of Kristin’s supportive role to make her a powerful presence in the drama; his portrayal of Julie as a wing-clipped bird: “It is a death process that is depicted, and it is enormously fascinating and moving”’ (2005, 677). Working from Peter Weiss’s translation of the text into RAPE ON THE NATURALISTIC STAGE: THE EXAMPLE OF MISS JULIE 59

German, Bergman included details taken from early drafts of Strindberg’s manuscript. One of these is a scar left on Julie’s cheek by her fiancé, when he strikes her with his riding crop. In this production the scar was visible: ‘Beneath her white, mask-like makeup, Bergman’s Julie bore an ugly scar on her face … this humiliating injury became the outward sign of a deep, inner wound’ (Marker and Marker 1983, 32). Steene writes, ‘To Bergman the scar … explains Julie’s motivation (shame) for not travelling with her father to visit their relatives.’ She quotes Bergman as saying: ‘“Instead she stays in her room until twilight and then she uses so much make-up that she looks like a little clown: she believes she can cover up that scar. Then she goes down to the barn and dances like a madwoman. Later, when she comes into the kitchen, those birds of prey [Jean and Kristin] are ready, become provoked and attack. This becomes important for the production and it has been one of our premises”’ (676). Lise-Lone and Frederick Marker comment on ‘Jean’s brutal humiliation of Julie’. They also note that this is ‘unexpectedly naturalistic’ in a staging that recovers details from earlier drafts as well as using blocking and the silent presence of Kristin on stage at key moments to deepen and complicate the audience’s understanding of Julie and her situation. The Markers describe the work over a period of several revivals, beginning with the first presentation of the work at the Residenztheater in Munich in 1981, and subsequently in Sweden in 1985 and 1991. Each revival cast a different actress as Julie, but although there were subtle differences—and the Markers regard the 1981 staging as the most effective— the interpretation of the play did not change significantly. Noting the influence of Alf Sjöberg’s film version, they describe Bergman’sJulie as employing ‘a cool, camera-sharp exactness of detail to create a magic realism—a distillation of reality, as it were, constantly perforated by an intro- spective, dreamlike tone that became steadily more insistent as Julie’s ordeal continued, until at last it completely suffused her long, exhausted revelations about her ingrained family heritage of sexual strife and man- hatred. Her destruction at the hands of the “real” world of Jean and Christine thus became a gradual process of growing disillusionment and revulsion on her part, orchestrated by Bergman much as a conductor would orchestrate a musical score.’ The musical structure of the work, ‘a rhythm built upon deliberately sustained phrasing, lighter and more acute changes of dissonance, beats of rest, changes of tempo, and what can only be described as monologue-arias’, creates a narrative that is more ‘associa- tional and expressive’ than ‘strictly literal or sequential. Scenes of explicit 60 L. FITZPATRICK and often violent reality were thus infused with an atmosphere of unreality and dream—one in which Christine’s kitchen-world was transformed for Julie, into a prison-world of the spirit in which she must act out a dreamlike and hopeless struggle to exist. Rarely, if ever, has the dreamplay texture inherent in Strindberg’s “naturalistic tragedy” been revealed in the theater with such unexpected clarity’ (1992, 104–106). Bergman’s interpretation offers a different motivation for Julie’s suicide, one that recalls Chaudhuri’s analysis of the hypnotic: Julie falls so far under the poisonous spell of Jean and Kristin that she loses her own will and her own sense of reality. Bergman’s reworking of the script and his interpretations of key pas- sages—included as stage directions in A Project for the Theatre—suggest the bedroom scene between Julie and Jean as violent and brutal, and follows it with a further on-stage assault that Julie successfully repels. In Bergman’s text the stage directions read:

Julie rushes from Jean’s room in complete disarray. The scar on her cheek has begun to bleed, and streams of blood can be seen down her right leg. Bent over double, she dashes across the kitchen, up the stairs to the swinging doors at the rear, and reaches the outside just in time to vomit. Jean appears from his room, but darts back inside and then reappears with a train schedule in his hand. Jean (Excited): Can you possibly think of staying here now? (118–119)

As the Markers note, this is similar to the interpretation offered by Sjöberg, and far more explicitly violent than most others. The blood on her leg connotes her virginity, or menstruation, but the bleeding scar on her cheek suggests only violence, as does her nausea. The second addition to the stage business comes after Julie calls Jean a thief, and he defends himself arguing that he is in service in the house and therefore should have access to its resources. His mood changes, and he tells Julie how fine she is, far too good for him. ‘I can never make you love me’ (Bergman 1983, 125). Julie replies, ‘Are you so sure?’ Strindberg’s stage directions read, ‘He goes to her and takes her hand … Putting his arm around her waist … He tries to lead her away, but she gently frees herself’ (Robinson 1998, 101). Bergman’s stage directions read: ‘Jean has begun again to make love to Julie. He fondles her breasts, then reaches under- neath her dress and roughly thrusts her hands between her legs. As she struggles, he pulls her savagely from her chair, forces her down backward against the table, and straddles her. With great effort, she finally fights him RAPE ON THE NATURALISTIC STAGE: THE EXAMPLE OF MISS JULIE 61 off and pushes him to the floor’ (Bergman, 125). The violence of this scene suggests Jean’s lack of regard for Julie, and her reduction from employer to sexually available body. His physical engagement with her perhaps reflects the absence of any real understanding between them, whereas her response ‘Are you so sure?’ might express her lack of choice, her need to placate him and keep him engaged with her, and her awareness that the only honourable resolution is marriage. The plot resolution that sees the heroine marry her rapist is a conventional one that reinforces common rape myths that state that love or desire are motivations for rape, and that depict the victim gladly submitting to the rapist when she realizes that she loves and/or desires him in return. It also marks a return to social order. Frederick and Lise-Lone Marker describe Bergman’s approach to directing the play as ‘reading closely. And interpreting in the same way a conductor interprets a score’. The details of Kristin and Jean’s performance that he introduces include Kristin watching in the kitchen during the ballet sequence, aware of what is taking place between Jean and Julie. This gives Kristin a calculating quality that is not evident in Strindberg’s description of her as a ‘slave’. He also has Jean exploit Julie’s sentimental- ity towards the ‘poor children’, hurrying her into his room before she can rethink what is happening. In Bergman’s version, Jean scoops up the money she has taken from her father and puts it into her pocket, so that he can’t be accused of stealing. This gesture marks his concern for his own survival, regardless of Julie. Her growing disillusionment with the ‘reality’ of the world of the servants, who she had previously believed loved and respected her, ‘acts as a constant and insistent counterpoint to her erotic encounter with Jean’ who brutally humiliates her (1983, 33), and this leads to her decision to commit suicide. The Markers comment that Julie takes charge at the very end, and that Bergman almost eliminates the idea of the hypnotic trance. Bergman’s 1985 remounting of this production with a different cast offered a softer representation of Jean in particular. Steene writes that he was softened to make him ‘less of an upstart cad and brutish oaf and more a victim of circumstances, someone who feels a certain degree of sympathy for Julie’ (677). This production toured internationally in 1986 and was reviewed by Charles Champlin for the Los Angeles Times, who reflects that that social class ‘becomes a symbol of all the other divergences, as of faith and family, that love still cannot always conquer (even if the emotion is really love and not a night’s reckless and lusty rapture as in “Miss Julie)”’. His description of the sexual encounter as ‘a night’s reckless and lusty 62 L. FITZPATRICK rapture’ seems strangely at odds with the stage directions given by Bergman in the published version and attests to the softening of the work. Yet even so, this description of the sexual encounter is at odds with the original text, where even a consensual encounter is surely a desperate act. It possibly suggests a resistance to reading rape against a generally sympathetic character like Jean.

Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie Both Patrick Marber’s 2004 After Miss Julie and Yael Farber’s 2012 Mies Julie stage some or all of the sex scene between the two main protagonists. In this, the texts are like the film versions by Figgis (1999) and Ullmann (2014), though the staging does not entirely eradicate the ambiguity of the action. Marber’s play sets the action in July 1945 on the night of Labour’s landslide election victory. In this version, the focus on class is adapted to the changed time period; Miss Julie’s difference from the chauffeur John is in her access to privilege. However, this privilege is far less absolute than it is in Strindberg’s play, and by 1945 the social change that would allow Julie and John to build a life together is already underway. These changes are reflected in the interactions of the three characters and in the less formal language than the original text. The play also reflects the impact of the urgency of wartime on attitudes to sexuality: John and Christine (Kristin) were planning to marry but he then went to war; sexual attitudes are more permissive, so Julie is not shocked that John and Christine sleep together. The arc of the action is the same as the original: John and Julie sit drinking and flirting in the kitchen after Christine has gone to bed. But there is no ambiguity about sex:

[John and Julie] kiss and begin to struggle with each other’s clothes—aggressive, laughing, scared JULIE: Take me to your room. She whispers, intimately. JOHN: What? JULIE: Just take me to your room. The banging on the doors and windows increases. John and Miss Julie exit hurriedly. (2004, 150)

Christine enters, and realizes what has happened, and is distraught. Later, at dawn, Julie enters ‘hair down, smeared make-up, tired’ and there RAPE ON THE NATURALISTIC STAGE: THE EXAMPLE OF MISS JULIE 63 is ‘a small patch of blood on her dress’ (151). But she shows no distress, and in other departures from the original text ‘They kiss, tenderly’ and Julie looks happy (152). Her threat to ‘scream rape’, therefore, is a blatant falsehood. In Strindberg’s text, Miss Julie’s reference to Jean as ‘a Joseph’ offers the audience a subtle reminder of Sir Matthew Hale’s seventeenth- century opinion that rape ‘is an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho never so innocent’ and the so-called ‘corroboration warning’ that someone should not be found guilty solely on the complainant’s word.6 In Marber’s this subtext becomes explicitly part of the text itself. Julie makes her threat after John’s rejection of her. They have argued, as they realize that they cannot simply escape, and John tells her that he made up the stories about his childhood love for her in order to seduce her. But the dialogue as it unfolds makes it very clear that this sexual encounter has been entirely consensual, and that it is underpinned on Julie’s part by a masochistic impulse. After John verbally abuses her—‘You’d shame a two-bit tart in Piccadilly’—she ‘breaks down’ saying ‘Please no more … I know … I’m bad … I’m a bad girl’. He embraces her, ‘fully of pity and desire’; she says ‘Hurt me again’ and asks him ‘Did you love me? At least in bed?’ (156). In the final scene, she says ‘I wanted you. Because I’d felt your eyes on me forever … because you do my father’s dirty work … because you want revenge …’ (174). After Miss Julie was critically well received and has been staged a number of times in the past decade. Its relevance to contemporary British society is clear: it represents a class-bound society on the brink of reform, while the late 1990s and early twenty-first century showed Socialist poli- cies in retreat under New Labour, and the front benches of the government dominated by independently wealthy, privately educated men. Rising social inequality and the dismantling of the social systems introduced by that 1945 Labour government give the context of the action a contemporary significance. But the main action, the relationship of John and Julie, reiterates gender stereotypes and sexual double standards. John, as a man, is represented as being naturally sexually aggressive, responding to Julie’s offer of sex even with his fiancée in the next room. It also dramatizes the damaging myth that a night of consensual sex can result in a rejected woman lying about rape, and an innocent man destroyed. No comment is offered in the text on this: Julie makes her threat, and John responds by apologizing for the hurt caused to her, but insisting that he is going to be married to Christine. 64 L. FITZPATRICK

Yael Farber’s Mies Julie Michael Meyer writes of Miss Julie that Strindberg’s play was ground- breaking for its ‘boldly realistic treatment of sex’ (1985, 196). ‘Before Strindberg, sex in drama is something in which only married people or wicked people indulge … Miss Julie’s tragedy is that she does not want to make love to Jean; she does not want to sleep with him; she wants—there is no other word for it—to be fucked by him like an animal. When it has happened, she despises herself for having allowed it and him for having done it; but she knows she will want him again; so she sees no alternative but suicide’ (1985, 196–198). Meyer’s analysis, though hardly applicable to all the interpretations of the play, certainly points to one of its enduring fascinations: the tension between Jean and Julie, and the complexity of their sexual encounter and its aftermath. Julie’s response to Jean is complicated and rehearses behaviours that are common to both romantic couples and to victims of abuse. She asks him to tell her he loves her, perhaps as a lover or perhaps in an attempt to appease him and to rewrite the encounter as something in which she had agency. She imagines a future with him, though he also disgusts her. She looks for an honourable way out of her situation, and finding none, kills herself. In Marber’s version, the masochistic longing to be ‘fucked like an animal’ is dramatized in the dialogue. John tells Julie ‘… you’re a servant’s slut … No woman of my class would accost me the way you did last night, no woman of my class would want what you wanted last night; sweating and braying, your face in the pillow, biting your hand to stop yourself screaming the house down’ (155). In Farber’s Mies Julie this masochism is explicitly staged in the repeated sex scenes between Julie and John. The play transports the action to rural, post-Apartheid South Africa where Julie is at home alone with the Xhosa farmhand John, and his mother Christine who was Julie’s nurse. The dialogue has been rewritten but Farber retains the title and the shape of the plot, thereby activating the staging history and audience knowledge of Strindberg’s text. The language that Christine employs—Meneer (Julie’s father), Baas Jan (Julie’s former fiancé) and other Afrikaans titles remind the audience of the recent history of the country and the racial politics that structures the characters’ relationships. Such language, the glossary points out, ‘indicates subservience on the part of the speaker’ (11). There are other indications: the opening sequence shows Christine on her knees scrubbing the floor while Julie paces through, leaving footprints that Christine impassively cleans RAPE ON THE NATURALISTIC STAGE: THE EXAMPLE OF MISS JULIE 65 away (11); Julie returns while John is eating at the table and he immediately stands, and finishes his food standing; Julie’s father is forcing his employees to drive out the squatters who have some right to the land: John describes him as a ‘hard Boer’ (13). Such moments make clear the taboo that Julie breaks by having sex with John, but it also sets up a series of racial relationships based on class as well as skin colour. Julie’s behaviour suggests that she almost literally does not see Christine and John: she acts without awareness of them, and doesn’t respond when Christine speaks to her (14). When she does begin speaking to John she says that her father prefers him to her; that his mother protects her and will punish him if harm befalls her; that she is not like her father, and that he must ensure her safety when out dancing with the servants—though he warns her that he cannot (15–16). The stage directions read, ‘[John] is filled with anger and desire for her’ (21). The overtly sexual flirtation between the two characters is more explicit than in the original text. Julie orders John to kiss her foot. While Strindberg’s Jean eventually does so, in a moment that normally heightens the dramatic tension, Farber’s John ‘slightly enraged’ ‘kneels and reaches for her foot. She slips it away from his grasp. In a flash, he grabs her foot and puts it on his shoulder. He runs his hand up her thigh towards her crotch. He runs his open mouth over the top of her foot. She is stunned. And aroused. He moves away’ (21). The dialogue that follows is similar to Strindberg’s text: John and Julie recount their childhood memories; he speaks of his early love for her, and of his dreams of escape from poverty. Their memories are more brutal than those of Jean and Julie, however, attesting to the violence that typically permeates societies in crisis. John remembers being beaten up by Boer men when he was still a child, and his mother watching unable to help him. He tells Julie that he saw her with her fiancé in the stable yard, but in this text her fiancé beats her:

JOHN: I saw you in the stables with him. JULIE: Spying on us. JOHN: It was too late for me to leave. I saw you go down. Your nose bleeding. On your knees. Crying. But strong. (31–32)

Following this, and again motivated by anger at Julie’s insults, John violently attacks her; she responds sexually, and they have sex on the kitchen table in view of the audience. The stage directions read: 66 L. FITZPATRICK

He shoves her at the table and tears her dress away JULIE: (vulnerable, panicked) What if the others come in? … He pushes her flat onto her back on the kitchen table, tears away his overalls and penetrates her. She cries out … he stumbles away from the table overwhelmed. He cannot stay away. He jumps onto the table. He lies on her and she embraces him. He fucks her hard. She weeps, overcome with emotion … (32–33)

When she wakes the next morning, there is blood on her thighs—this Julie is also a virgin—and she washes herself in the bucket on the floor. But they argue as their anxiety over what to do now grows:

JULIE: What? What do I want? Your stinking poverty? Your desperation? Your rags? He turns to leave. She runs after him. JULIE: (on her knees, her arms around him) Please. Please. He shakes her off. She grabs him. JOHN: What do you want from me? He kisses her violently. She responds. He throws her to the floor, and sits. Say it! What do you want? She crawls to him, weeping, grasping at him. He lifts her to him and kisses her again. He throws her to the ground and stands. He kicks open her legs. You want this? He pulls her to her feet and shoves her—face first—over the table. He pulls her dress up, pushing himself into her brutally from behind. This? You want this? JULIE: (Weeping). Yes! I want it. (39–40)

These violent couplings continue into the second half of the play, even as they argue and try to find a way to escape their situation: Julie demands that he hit her, and when he refuses she beats her own arms and face. Their context is brutally violent: Julie refers to her father beating her mother (a constant reference in all of the versions of Miss Julie), and John tells her that he saw her fiancé ‘forcing himself like an animal into your mouth’ (46). John tells Julie that she will never love him, and when she asks why not he replies, ‘Because love is not possible in this mess’ (42). Farber’s play evokes a post-conflict landscape of traumatic memories, brutality and sexual violence. Within this world, the violent and destructive couplings of John and Julie function in part as a metaphor to convey the impossibility of constructive and loving relationships against such a backdrop. RAPE ON THE NATURALISTIC STAGE: THE EXAMPLE OF MISS JULIE 67

In Mies Julie, Julie makes an explicit threat to ‘scream rape’, which is clearly a more dangerous threat in South Africa than in 1945 England:

JULIE: I am full of your seed. I have evidence. I bled. JOHN: Of course—this is where desire ends. The white daughter crying rape on the black man. So that her father can accept her fucking him. JULIE: You will be in jail by tonight if he does not put a bullet in your head first. JOHN: Remember—your father promised you a bullet in the head too. So here we are: Two kaffirs. Doomed to die. (48)

The play ends in tragedy. Farber incorporates folkloric elements, including the spirit of Christine’s ancestors who haunt the farmhouse, beneath which they are buried. Christine has already tried to dig up the floor and John’s wages are paying off that damage. Julie is haunted by memories that are not hers—memories that are embedded in the land and its history. Her suicide is motivated, not by dishonour, but by the impossibility of any constructive way forward. She has been threatening John with the sickle; she now ‘pushes the sickle between her legs, and thrusts the blade upwards into her womb’ (56). John holds her, weeping. He then puts on the master’s boots and takes the gun in his right hand and the sickle in his left. He tells himself, ‘It’s easy. Just pretend you’re him’ (57). The ending, therefore, is two suicides of lovers destroyed by circumstance. The play was generally very well received by critics and attracted large audiences. Charles Spencer in the Telegraph describes it as ‘the most thrill- ing and explosively sexual production of the play I have ever seen’. He continues, ‘The violent coupling that then takes place on the kitchen table is the most graphic and abandoned I have ever seen in a theatre and there is a further, almost unbearable shock to come … The brutal sex seems to encapsulate all the anger, frustration and violence that still simmer in South Africa …’. In The Guardian Lyn Gardner writes ‘[Miss Julie] has never raged quite so fiercely as she does in this searing and fearless new version by Yael Farber’. Gardner describes the sex scene as ‘a land grab’; ‘The violence is brutal, but what is more brutal is the possibility that in another, less traumatised South Africa, love between John and Julie may have been possible.’ Robert Shore for Metro describes the play as ‘eroti- cally charged’. ‘It’s fascinating that a single sex act can still feel dangerous 125 years after it was first performed.’ The Washington Post review uses the adjective ‘blistering’ and describes the play ‘thundering’ into Lansburgh 68 L. FITZPATRICK

Theatre in ‘a performance so powerful, so unrestrained, so visceral as to rip the bloody roots of power from the earth and hold them dripping above our astonished heads’. It is ‘arguably the most powerful work of theatre Washington audiences have seen/will see in years, decades even’, writes Elizabeth Bruce (online). The few criticisms of the play are of its length, and equally applicable to the source text: the argument between Jean and Julie circles repeatedly over the same ground, and the heightened emotions and melodramatic action pose reception problems for a contemporary audience. Only The New Yorker raises significant problems with the text. Hilton Als, who has himself worked on an adaptation of Miss Julie that examined the potential interplay of class and race, describes this production as ‘a jumping off point for Farber’s chief interest: how black maleness extracts its revenge against female whiteness’. Als describes the play as ‘pornography’, while acknowledging that the script is an important contribution to the Strindberg canon, and a very strong piece of work. But his reading of the central sex scene is worth quoting at length:

… Julie has the upper hand and can control John’s gaze: she’s white, and John still lives with the fear that South Africa has instilled in him, at least historically. His country has degraded blackness and maleness in the past, so what can he know or feel about his future? All he can do for revenge against the shackles of the past is sort of free himself by ravishing Julie. Not once. But twice. Or maybe three times, I can’t remember, since the “shock” value of John rolling down his jumper [overalls] and then tearing at Julie’s top was so blatant a bid for “drama” that its cheapness was the least of my problems. I was more concerned with Farber’s gradual tearing down of Julie, who ends up being a sacrificial, bloody victim-doll that John gets to throw around, whipping up the “steam,” that causes reviewers to call this production steamy when it’s sort of corny and careless and anti-feminist to boot: why should Julie pay for her whiteness? (Online)

Without rejecting the eroticism of the scene, I seek to interrogate its representation of gender and desire. Although Farber uses very little of Strindberg’s text, her play reads like a brutal, sexually explicit account of the tensions that drive the source plot. The assault on Julie—which Als critiques—is indeed like a scene from the pulp fiction pornography of the 1950s, with the woman weeping, crawling, and begging for the phallus which leaves her bleeding. The racial aspect of the work recalls racist tropes of the insatiable African man, rapist of White women, where underlying the hysterical need to protect White women from Black men lurks the fear RAPE ON THE NATURALISTIC STAGE: THE EXAMPLE OF MISS JULIE 69 that the White woman might secretly desire the Black man, or that White men’s rape of Black women might be somehow repaid on the bodies of White women. Race thus becomes another expression of the belief that women are men’s property whether those men are constructed as single individuals, as ethnic groups, as nations, or as races. Farber’s defence of the play’s racial politics may be that she is highlighting international racism rather than repeating racist tropes. In her director’s notes she writes: ‘We hope its truths might speak to you not only of South Africa’s complexity—but also the unaddressed ghosts of any nation waiting to be acknowledged’ (online). This is clearly true, at least in the sense that it is impossible to read the play without recognizing in the eroticism and violence of the work potent and lingering racist stereotypes and racist tropes of gender and sexuality. The South African setting and history only makes that more explicit for an international audience, and makes the social statuses of the characters more realistic and believable. But the South African setting also perhaps allows an international audience to engage safely and vicariously with racial stereotypes that would be more contentious if the action was set in contemporary Europe or America. Meanwhile the eroticism noted by all the critics also activates tropes of female sexual masochism, and of women desiring to be forced. Miss Julie bleeds; she was a virgin; her defloration is violent and brutal, and yet she is depicted as crav- ing more; John’s verbal and physical abuse of her only heightens her desire. Georges Bataille’s text Eroticism, which is explored further in relation to vulnerability, eroticism and affect, examines the relationships between death and the erotic or sexual impulse. He sees death and reproduction as intrinsically linked because both remind us of our discontinuous state and our need to reproduce our discontinuous selves in order to achieve a measure of continuity. Our awareness of our own mortality is an awareness of the inevitable violence of death, and is inextricable from human sexuality. Therefore, he argues, ‘the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation’ (1962, 16). For Bataille, this desire and this violence are expressed in images of the active male and the passive female, the object of masculine desire and energy. The female in Bataille’s study of the erotic in Western culture is stripped and despoiled, possessed by the male. Like other studies of female sexuality and psychology, Bataille asserts that female sexual pleasure is bound up with violence and suffering. Although all these version of Miss Julie raise troubling questions about social and cultural attitudes to sex and consent, Mies Julie is perhaps the 70 L. FITZPATRICK most problematic. The play rehearses a number of common rape myths and makes clear that this is not rape, even as it substitutes violence for passion. The couple have a life-long relationship with each other, and acquaintance rape has often been discounted as not ‘real’ rape; Julie taunts John until he responds to her, trying to prevent him leaving; when he overpowers her ‘she embraces him’; the violent sex ends with passionate and then tender kisses; repeated scenes of sexual violence and humiliation are met with Julie’s tear- ful desire. As Hilton Als points out, these are pornographic tropes, and they rely on this fact for their erotic charge. The dominant male, the woman who resists but is joyfully overwhelmed, the woman revelling in her own humiliation: these are staples of pornography. The sexually dominant Black man, reduced to the beauty of his body, is another common trope from the racist imagination, common in art work from Mapplethorpe to National Geographic to contemporary advertising. Finally, the play uses the myth of the vengeful spurned lover, as Julie makes her threat to accuse John of rape, an accusation that she knows is essentially a death sentence for him. But the problems raised by the staging are not limited to the invocation of various rape myths or tropes. The staging also fetishizes and eroticizes the encounter through this exploitation of the bodies of both Julie and John. The use of rape to signify the violence of colonization is nothing new, and is explored further in the chapter on rape and conflict, and in the representation of the vulnerable body on the stage. But most of these plays do not eroticize the rape, while Farber’s text explicitly does. Julie’s body is exposed to the gaze of the audience, her breasts naked and her skirt pulled up around her waist. John’s body is similarly exposed, his buttocks bared, his shirt torn off. While the male body is rarely the object of the spectatorial gaze, John’s fetishized Black body is objectified as both the epitome of muscular, virile masculinity, and as pure physicality untethered by intellect or culture, while simultaneously abjected as dangerous and alien. The bodies thereby exposed on stage create a pleasurable erotic spectacle mingling elements of an historical taboo in the explicit representation of inter-racial sex. As Mann and Selva point out in their early studies of sex and racism, ‘Probably no two myths have been more pervasive, or divisive, in American society than the myth of the Black male’s prodi- gious anatomical sexual endowment, virility, and capability for marathon sexual activity, and, secondly, the myth of the sexual purity of the white woman’ (1979, 168). These myths are not only American, of course; they also inform the presentation of Julie and John’s relationship in Farber’s version. In recognizing the eroticism of the work the spectator recognizes RAPE ON THE NATURALISTIC STAGE: THE EXAMPLE OF MISS JULIE 71 and responds to cultural and social tropes and images of gender, sexuality and race.

Conclusions More than a century after it was written, Miss Julie still commands the interest of theatre makers and theatre audiences. The multiple adaptations for stage and film attest to the play’s hold on the public imagination and its enduring power. Marber’s adaptation is frequently staged, and Strindberg’s original is produced by both the main houses and independent companies in its many translations and versions. The plot turns on a popular trope of the lovers divided—in this case, by their social class. But it also rehearses questions of class politics and—in Farber’s adaptation—of racial politics as they intersect with the politics of gender and of sexuality; and it rehearses startlingly contemporary concerns about female sexuality, alcohol, and sexual consent. It is not surprising, therefore, that the play remains relevant to the present day. But the central relationship of Julie and Jean is far more concerned with sex than with love. It is a play in which the characters use sex to chase their desires: upward mobility in the case of Jean, annihilation in the case of Julie. In doing so, the play raises but refuses to resolve the question of what happens in Jean’s bedroom. Does Julie consent, or does Jean force himself upon her? Does her earlier behaviour excuse whatever it is he does when they are alone and unseen? Does she in fact consent by flirting, drinking with him, becoming drunk, and by entering his bedroom? These questions are raised in a more functional fashion in contemporary dramatizations that seek to engage the public in debates about sex and consent like the BBC’s 2015 Is This Rape?, or the 1982 ITV episode ‘A Complaint of Rape’ from the Police documentary series. The same questions are raised, implicitly or explicitly, in reviews of Miss Julie like Marilyn Stasio’s, which comments, ‘If Miss Julie doesn’t literally ask to be raped, her high-heeled boots and wanton manner certainly speak the language’ (Variety, 19 May 2005). The naturalistic style of the text makes these questions compelling, because the play presents itself as staging men and women as they really are, with a scientific honesty. By apparently staging life as it really is, the play forecloses questions about the social construction of gender within discourses of violence and victimhood. In the next chapter, which examines representations of rape in women’s writing, other perspectives on consent and on its complex and nuanced nature are raised and explored. 72 L. FITZPATRICK

Notes 1. See, for example, McGregor’s Is it Rape? This study of acquaintance rape notes that ‘many victims of acquaintance rape don’t label their experience as rape at all. They often believe that the law does not protect them against the acts of acquaintances. These fears and beliefs are in fact warranted’ (5). 2. The full quote, often attributed to Shakespeare, is ‘Heav’n has no Rage, live Love to Hatred turn’d / Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d’. It is from William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride, Act 3 scene i. The line is often used to support the suspicion that scorned women falsely accuse men of rape, and it forms part of the title of Peggy Sanday’s study of acquaintance rape. 3. Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie was first filmed and broadcast by the BBC in 1995, and was first published, by Methuen, in 1996. However, the stage premiere at the Donmar Warehouse in London did not take place until 2003. The play is referenced here by the printed copy dating from 2004. 4. Steene (2005) states that the architecture of the typical Swedish big house of the time would have the kitchen separated from the main house by a courtyard. Julie therefore cannot access the safety of her own quarters from her position in the kitchen. 5. See, for example, Joan McGregor (2005), Karen Rich (2014), Alison Healicon (2016). There are multiple studies that examine the problem of women’s credibility, and numerous legal cases that demonstrate the difficulty of prosecuting wealthy, respected, or famous men. Some recent examples include the case of Brock Turner in California in 2016, or the cases against Bill Cosby in the United States and footballer Chad Evans in the United Kingdom. Jennifer Kabat, writing on Lutz Bacher’s film about the Kennedy Smith rape trial in the United States in 1991, makes the point that ‘speaking about rape is always a trap … The vocabulary is limited, and expectations are already shaped by previous descriptions’ (1993, 70). 6. M. Hale, History of the Pleas of the Crown (London, 1971 ed.) 635, cited in J. Taylor, ‘Rape and Women’s Credibility: Problems of Recantation and False Accusations Echoed in the Case of Cathlees Crowell Webb and Gary Dotson’, Harvard Women’s Law Journal 10 (1987): 75.

Bibliography

Films Figgis, Mike (Director). Miss Julie. Film. USA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1999. Sjöberg, Alf. Froken Julie. Film. AB Sandrew-Produktion, 1951. Ullmann, Liv (Director). Miss Julie. Film. Norway: Maipo Film, 2014. RAPE ON THE NATURALISTIC STAGE: THE EXAMPLE OF MISS JULIE 73

Books and Articles BBC. Is This Rape? Television. BBC 3, 2015. Catty, Jocelyn. Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999; 2011. Chaudhuri, Una. ‘Private Parts: Sex, Class, and Stage Space in “Miss Julie”’. Theatre Journal 45:3 (1993): 317–332. Diamond, Elin. Unmaking Mimesis. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Farber, Yael. Mies Julie. London: Oberon, 2012. Hanley, Conor, with Deirdre Healy and Stacey Scriver. Rape & Justice in Ireland. Dublin: Liffey Press, 2009. Healicon, Alison. The Politics of Sexual Violence: Rape, Identity and Feminism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Kabat, Jennifer. ‘Entrapment’. In The Subject of Rape, ed. Monica Chau. New York: Whitney Museum of Modern Art, 1993. Kennedy, Helena. Eve was Framed: Women and British Justice. London: Vintage Books, 1993. Mann, Coramae Richey and Lance H. Selva. ‘The Sexualization of Racism: The Black as Rapist and White Justice’. The Western Journal of Black Studies 3:3 (1979): 168–177. Marber, Patrick. ‘After Miss Julie’. Plays 1. London: Methuen, 2004. Marker, Frederick and Lise-Lone Marker. Ingmar Bergman: A Life in Theater. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Marker, Frederick and Lise-Lone Marker. Ingmar Bergman: A Project for the Theatre. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1983. McGregor, Joan. Is it Rape? Aldershot: Aldgate, 2005. McGuinness, Frank. Miss Julie and The Stronger: Two Plays by August Strindberg and Frank McGuinness. London: Faber & Faber, 2000. Meyer, Michael. Strindberg. New York: Random House, 1985. Petley, Julian. Censorship: A Beginniner’s Guide. London: One World Publications; Kindle Edition, 2012. Rich, Karen. Interviewing Rape Victims: Practice and Policy in an International Context. London: Palgrave Pivot, 2014. Sanday, Peggy R. Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood and Privilege on Campus. New York: New York University Press, 1990. Stasio, Marilyn. ‘Review: Miss Julie’. Variety. 19 May 2005. Available online at http://variety.com/2005/legit/reviews/miss-julie-7-1200525629/. Last accessed 17 September 2017. Steene, Birgitta. Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2005. CHAPTER 3

Women Playwrights: Subverting Representational Strategies

Introduction Rape and sexual violence are commonly represented in women’s dramatic writing, a fact that suggests that the experience of sexual violence, or the threat of it, is a common life-experience for women across cultural and social groups. The authors’ and theatre-makers’ strategies for representing violence tend to reflect their specific cultural circumstances, both in the form of the violence and in the techniques used to write and stage it. In general, however, these writers and directors tend to seek woman-centred representations that place the female character’s experience at the centre of the dramatic conflict, while avoiding certain pitfalls of staging rape— such as eroticizing the violence, or exposing the female body to the scopophilic gaze of the spectators. This chapter examines these strategies, some of which are explicitly feminist while others draw upon a range of conventions of theatrical performance and largely naturalistic or realistic dramaturgy. Even within English-language theatre, very different dramatic strategies emerge from British, Irish, Canadian and American women’s writing about rape. In African-American drama, rape has been contextualized within a history of slavery and its contemporary legacy of racial oppression (Marcus 1992; Gavey 2005): for example, Robbie Macauley draws upon the iconography of the slave auction in her monodrama Sally’s Rape. Stereotypes of the Black rapist and of the sexually available African- American woman haunt many of the plays from this population, alongside

© The Author(s) 2018 75 L. Fitzpatrick, Rape on the Contemporary Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70845-4_3 76 L. FITZPATRICK representations of the brutalizing force of North American racism. Native American and First Nations Canadian playwrights frequently deploy rape as a metaphor for colonization, remaking the body of the woman as metaphor for the suffering of the land.1 In Britain, the enduring legacy of Brechtian theatre practice can be traced through a number of the plays discussed here, which use Brechtian-inspired adaptations of epic theatre and of the Verfremdungseffekt to engage the audience in a critical consideration of the questions raised by the text (Reinelt 1986). There are the gothic families that populate the plays of Irish author Marina Carr, whose tragedies frequently depict moments of sexual threat and violence as part of the material context of her female protagonists’ lives and suicides, and the social microcosms of grief and abuse represented in Canadian Judith Thompson’s work. Lizbeth Goodman argues that ‘[rape and sexual violence] have been part of a developing feminist consciousness in the theatre’, with its concomitant aim of staging and representing women’s lived experience, often achieved by ‘experimenting with the representation of self and gender in a multiplicity of ways’ (1993, 206). This dramatic practice often explores strategies for making sexual violence visible as systemic and symbolic forms of violence that function to reinforce normative conceptions of gender and power and that make possible the smooth operation of political and economic systems (Žižek 2008, 1). These dramatic texts also seek to articulate lived experience of bodily violence, to avoid the eroticization of sexual violence on stage, and to interrogate conventional representations of rape and gender violence in the media and in society.

Feminist Theatre and Performance Feminist theatre and performance in Britain can be seen as emerging at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, though there are of course earlier examples of plays that centre the dramatic conflict around women’s experience such as Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, written when the author was still in her teens. A Taste of Honey was first staged by the Theatre Workshop in 1958, and it represents Jo and her mother Helen and their unconventional life and relationship. The play stages aspects of working-class life that were not normally staged, and can be incorporated into the ‘Kitchen Sink’ realist movement of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as a nascent feminist movement. As the ‘second-wave’ feminist movement gained strength and influence through the 1970s and 1980s, a number of WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 77 playwrights and theatre practitioners began to work on materials and forms that would stage women’s experiences and put female characters at the centre of the action. While companies like Joint Stock nurtured the early work of playwrights like Caryl Churchill, whose work occupies a central position in British and feminist theatre, companies like Red Ladder, Monstrous Regiment, Sphinx, and the Women’s Theatre Group were devising group creation techniques to generate performances. As well as this experimentation with form, the work’s development was shaped by postmodern and feminist conceptions of interpellation, subjectivity and agency. Helene Keyssar notes in her early study of feminist theatre that her initial selection criteria involved work that creates significant roles for women, is concerned with gender roles in society, explores women’s experience, and tends to politicize sexuality (1984, xi). However, as she continued with her research she realized that almost all the plays she encountered ‘diverge significantly from conventional realism’ (xii), and although she does not say so, this divergence seems congruent with the politicization of sexuality and therefore, the interrogation of gender as a cornerstone of a stable identity. Keyssar argues that historically, drama has:

… urged us to know ourselves better, to search our histories and to reveal to ourselves and others who we ‘really’ are … Traditional heroism lies in this process of recognition and unveiling. Even in psychoanalytically oriented feminist plays, however, the self is not seen as stable and hidden but as shifting, alterable, admirably and problematically varied. Nor is the world in which the characters exist reassuringly unified and solid, but fragmented and diverse. (xiv)

Keyssar’s early study identifies many of the key themes and staging strategies that are further explored and theorized by critics writing in the 1990s, who build on her realization of crucial differences in feminist dramatists’ representation of the world and the self. Jill Dolan (1987), Elin Diamond (1989, 1997), Janelle Reinelt (1994) and Elaine Aston (1999, 2000, 2003) amongst others, set forth the feminist case against theatrical realism and explore the work of female playwrights who break the conventions of naturalistic representation. As discussed in the previous chapter, which explored some of the difficulties of naturalistic representations of rape using the example of Miss Julie, one basic assumption of feminist criticism is that all representation is ideological. Dolan and Diamond, both of whom draw on Herbert Blau, identify the problem with naturalistic 78 L. FITZPATRICK representation as follows: ‘Since dominant cultural meanings [including those about gender] both constitute and are reconstituted by representation, deconstructing performance from a feminist perspective entails uncovering the ideological determinants within which performance works … By canonizing certain texts and their meanings, and mystifying the origins of their authority, dominant cultural ideology appears in representation as naturalized and seemingly nonideological’ (Diamond 1989, 41). Early British feminist work by agit-prop companies like Red Ladder and Women’s Theatre Group, as well as Monstrous Regiment Theatre Company, were explicitly socialist in their politics. Monstrous Regiment— the name was an ironic reference to John Knox’s 1558 polemic against female monarchs—was in existence from 1975 to 1993, when it lost its Arts Council funding. It aimed to commission and produce new work that had strong, central female roles, and nurtured a number of significant playwrights, actors and directors. The playwrights employed by the company included Caryl Churchill, David Edgar with Susan Todd, Gillian Hanna, Bryony Lavery and Wendy Kesselman amongst others, resulting in work that engaged a range of aesthetic approaches to explore aspects of women’s history, sexual politics and women’s everyday lives. Red Ladder’s work tends to focus on issues of gender politics rooted in daily life. The company use song, placards and short illustrative scenes to present an argument to their audience, and the Women’s Theatre Group use song and similar short scenes that briefly stage arguments to engage the audience in debate. Both are non-illusionistic: the theatrical performance is stripped back in a rejection of naturalism. The pieces are devised by the group, and are designed to be easy to tour and perform in non-theatre venues. To this end, the characterization is sketchily realistic: the characters are types, but are given some individuality to encourage audience engagement, and they speak the various arguments current at the time about issues of equal play, women and work, and female sexuality.2 The Women’s Theatre Group production My Mother Said I Never Should was first performed in 1975, touring to schools and youth centres. It addresses questions of female stereotyping, sexuality, teenage pregnancy and abortion. The piece was filmed in 1976 for use as a teaching resource in schools. The two main characters are Terri and Wendy, both about 15, and their friend Diane who is 22 and a hairdresser. The play opens with the stork bringing twin babies, played by adult performers. The girl is alert and inquiring, the boy merely sucks his thumb; but the girl is quickly identified as Daddy’s angel and the boy is going to be ‘A new head of the WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 79

family’ (120), with the girl relegated to a position based on appearance rather than ability. The second scene opens with Terri and Wendy introducing themselves to the audience. The play exposes the double standard that allows boys to be sexually active while proscribing sexual activity for girls, who are expected to suppress their own sexual desires while also policing and controlling boys. By placing the responsibility for boys’ behaviour onto the girls, the play echoes the blaming of rape victims for not controlling the assailant, while also humorously drawing attention to the primacy accorded to male sexual pleasure. The action of the play sees Wendy having sex with a boy at a party, and she reports afterwards that: ‘it’s quite quick really … he said he liked it’, and later, ‘you can’t get pregnant the first time!’ (127–128). Yet the uncritical argument for the sexual liberation of girls—so clearly pre-AIDS and remote from recent scandals of paedophilia and child sexual abuse—reads uncomfortably against revelations of the abuse of teenage girls by celebrities during the 1970s and 1980s. Wendy’s first sexual experience is anonymous, the boy says ‘lovely things’ to her beforehand but then seems to disappear, and when she fears she is pregnant she is on her own. The doctor offers her contraceptives for the future, putting her on the Pill, but offers no relationship advice and there is no discussion of consent, or of any method of contraception that might not place the burden on Wendy and her still immature body. Mica Nava, one of the original cast, comments in the introduction that ‘We made [the protagonist] fifteen because we … wanted to question the legal anomaly which makes the age of consent sixteen and assumes that teenagers are too young to have sex because they are too young to have children. Our objective was to provide information and encourage girls to see themselves as active agents capable of making real choices in their lives’ (115). Though the work does not address or represent sexual violence, it is nota- ble for the way its attempt to assert a feminist response to the repression of female sexuality ends in the reinscription of patriarchal conceptions of sexual liberation. Its value, however, lies in its attempt to promote open discussion in school settings, and to direct the conversation towards girls, allowing them space to speak. In the introduction to the text, Nava notes that there was some (male) opposition: ‘one teacher walked out with his whole class in the middle of a performance; at a youth club the performance was sabotaged by boys swinging Tarzan-fashion from ropes’ (116). These events are suggestive of the marginalization of girls’ experience in most theatrical performance at the time, particularly in front of a mixed gender audience; Nava notes that in one case the performance led to a 80 L. FITZPATRICK workshop for boys on challenging sexist behaviours (117). Nonetheless, the naivety of the sexual politics in My Mother Said resonates sadly in later plays like Sarah Daniels’s Masterpieces (1983) and Beside Herself (1990), both of which address sexual violence against women and children, and its minimization by patriarchal power structures that protect powerful male abusers and deny the very possibility of child sexual abuse.

The Rape Script The playwrights discussed here engage in experimentation with form in attempts to engage the audience with particular experiences and perspectives. Drawing upon Sharon Marcus’s and Carine Mardorossian’s competing analyses of rape as a culturally and socially constructed narrative, within which both victim and aggressor perform traditional gender roles, these texts render up vignettes of male–female interactions and the power relationships that are often invisible beneath them. The analysis of the dialogue considers ways in which the female characters, through their speech or silence, appear to submit to the assault; minimize the event afterwards; or struggle and often fail to communicate the experience in language to the other dramatic characters. A secondary aim is to examine the process Marcus calls ‘scripting’, exploring how the female character’s behaviour in response to the threat, or experience, of sexual violence both conforms to, and challenges, normative gender relations. She writes, ‘Masculine power and feminine powerlessness neither simply precede nor cause rape; rather, rape is one of culture’s many modes of feminizing women … A rape act thus imposes as well as presupposes misogynist inequalities; rape is not only scripted—it scripts’ (1992, 391). This argument echoes Susan Brownmiller’s famous statement that rape ‘is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear’ (1975, 15) (italics in original). The chapter attempts to identify the tensions between the staging of rape from a female and/or feminist perspective, the demands of dramatic form and meaning-making in performance, and the dominant social discourses around rape that shape the reception of the work. Further, by giving voice to the woman’s physical disgust and revulsion, women dramatists frequently subvert the phal- locentric nature of this form of violence to mock and abject the rapist’s penis, denying it status as an overwhelming weapon, and thereby reclaim- ing some of the victim’s agency and sense of bodily integrity. The female characters in these plays by women tend to at least survive the rape, WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 81

subverting the canonical tragedies that sacrifice the rape victim to the cause of honour as well as the comedies that marry them to their tormentors. The examples discussed here are chosen from a wide body of work, much of which includes staging of sexual threat in forms of street harassment and unwelcome touch, as part of the ordinary background of women’s lives.3 Stella Feehily’s Duck (2003) has its two young protagonists repel potential rapists with a broken bottle, and Clare McIntyre’s Low Level Panic (1988, published 2017) includes scenes where two young men humiliate and grope a young woman on the street, as she reacts with shame and embarrassment. Very many plays by women include passing references to sexual or domestic violence that the protagonist, or someone known to him or her, has endured. The plays selected for this discussion are Franca Rame’s one-woman show The Rape (1978); Eve Lewis’s 1986 play Ficky Stingers; Sarah Daniels’s Masterpieces (1983) and Beside Herself (1990); Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Grace of Mary Traverse (1985) and The Love of the Nightingale (1988), and Marina Carr’s On Raftery’s Hill (2000) (the dates refer to the year of stage premiere). This selection includes Rame’s monodrama which, though originally written in Italian, has been translated and performed around the world. It exemplifies the problems of transforming material from bodily experience to language, and the problem of ‘truth’. The plays examine family relationships as the location of sexual violence (Carr, Daniels, Wertenbaker); explore the concept of the ‘rape culture’ (Masterpieces); and investigate strategies for staging women’s experience of sexual violence using techniques as varied as splitting the testifying subject (Daniels, Lewis), and using puppets to stage rape (Wertenbaker). All the plays in their different ways explore the implications of the female body on stage. Carr, Daniels, Rame and Wertenbaker are significant women playwrights and theatre-makers of the past forty years; their work is critically engaged and internationally recognized and is produced around the world. Lewis’s Ficky Stingers has been chosen because it too has been regularly staged, often in student productions, and because it has been the focus of considerable debate (Rabey 1991; Brewer 1999). It is also unusual, in that it stages the rape in view of the audience; it is the only one of these texts to do so. An overview of this work that emerges with the second wave of the women’s movement allows for the situation of more recent work against a tradition of women writing about gender violence, and also demonstrates how the same issues recur over time, albeit slightly differently socially framed and situated. 82 L. FITZPATRICK

Performance as Witnessing: Franca Rame’s The Rape Lauren Love and Joanna Townsend-Robinson, amongst others, identify hysterical performance (Love 2002; Townsend-Robinson 2003) as a means of using gesture to undermine dramatic dialogue, so foregrounding for the spectators the relationship between gesture and voice. This opens possibilities for spectators to identify:

multiple and contradictory meanings in the performance which cut across and against each other, without either word or body being privileged as bearers of meaning … hysteria generates a multiplicity of complex meanings, resisting reduction into dominant structures and narratives, so a hysterical performance practice must leave its audience unsettled, suspended between different, contested meanings. (Townsend-Robinson 2003, 535–536)

If hysterical performance constructs a challenging sense of multiple narratives and meanings, it also makes it more difficult to think about the body, particularly the female body, as the bearer of meaning. Love, reflecting on her work as a feminist actor, poses the question: ‘If the female body can as Butler proposes only be intelligible through regulatory schemas (Butler 1993, 286), how is it possible to perform female subjectivity without reinforcing patriarchal discourses that deny that subjectivity?’ (Love 2002, 277). Butler argues that the materiality of the body is ‘constructed through a ritualized repetition of norms’ and acknowledges the potential ‘trap of cultural determinism’ that her argument opens (Butler 1993, 3). Similarly, Sue-Ellen Case writes that ‘social conventions about the female gender will be encoded in all signs for women. Inscribed in body language, signs of gender can determine blocking of a scene, by assigning bolder movements to men and more restricted movements to women, or by creating poses and positions that exploit the role of women as sexual objects’ (1988, 117–118). These scholars prompt Love to explore her own relation to naturalistic representation. She argues that by using techniques that counter both conventional gender signs, and the convention that the text and the actor’s performance work in unison to create a single meaning, feminist theatre practitioners can challenge and provoke audiences to rethink gender relations inscribed in the drama. Creating further layers of complexity, the transformation of material for dramatic performance also demands editing and shaping of the story into WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 83 an engaging plot. This potentially includes the creation of suspense or other emotional reactions in the audience, and a range of interpretive decisions made by the performers and director. This has implications for the concept of women’s writing on rape as a form of witnessing, since the testimony of the victim as well as fictional and dramatic versions of it inevitably engage with hegemonic patriarchal discourses of sexuality and gender relations, both in their construction by the author and in their reception by the theatre audience. This is true even of texts that are based on real events in the author’s life, as Franca Rame’s dramatic monologue The Rape (Lo Stupro) illustrates. Rame’s monologue recounts her experience of being kidnapped, tortured and gang-raped in Italy in 1973, in what she believed to be a political attack organized by the police in retali- ation for the left-wing political theatre work she and her husband, Dario Fo, were engaged in. Her introduction to the text states that ‘The piece which I am going to perform now comes from a personal account which was printed in Quotidiano Donna [Women’s Daily]. We have put the account into a theatrical form, while completely respecting its content’ (Rame, online). The piece was performed live and (on at least one occasion in 1987) on Italian television channel Rai Uno. For the initial analysis I will begin with Rame’s own 1987 performance. The monologue takes approximately ten minutes to perform and begins with Rame describing becoming conscious while being restrained on the floor of a van—having apparently been stunned by her kidnappers. She describes the sensory clues: the radio playing, feeling someone’s knee planted on her back, the same person twisting her arms tightly behind her back. The audience’s sense of the character’s confusion is communicated through this description of coming to consciousness and realizing that something is wrong: ‘I’ve completely lost my grip on what’s happening to me. I’m so terrified that I feel I’m about to lose my mind, my voice … I can’t speak’ (Rame, online). As the attack begins to take shape, her writing focuses on the body and on what the body knows: her fear as she feels her captor bracing to hold her still before she is burned with cigarettes and cut with a knife, for example. She says:

Something is about to happen. I sense it. The one who’s holding me from behind tenses all his muscles … I can feel them, where he’s holding me. He hasn’t tightened his grip, only tensed his muscles, as if getting ready to hold me tighter. (Online) 84 L. FITZPATRICK

The piece has the quality of a common nightmare or a horror film, describing the fright and disorientation of awaking from a deep or drugged sleep to find inexplicable events in motion. Rame recounts how her attackers burned her with cigarettes, cut her with a razor, cut open her clothes, pulled down her trousers. The man sitting behind her kept her immobile by pinning her legs apart with his legs, and holding her arms behind her back. Eventually she tells them she has a heart condition and they believe her, and throw her out of the van into the park. Rame’s sparse, tense text identifies physical sensations: terror, confusion and dreadful pain, and then the injured body trying to move, to find its way to safety; the humiliation of this defilement and the grim realization that there is no point in reporting the crime to the police. ‘I feel sick … because of the feeling that somebody’s spat into my brain a million times … and because of the sperm that I feel spilling out of me’ (online). The text alone is harrowing to read but Rame’s performance as seen on Rai Uno uses simple staging strategies that heighten the affective power of the words and communicate Rame’s terror—even to a spectator who does not fully understand the Italian text. Rame, clothed in black, sits on a plain black chair, spotlit from above, the lights casting shadows behind her at 45° angles to each other, so that the real body is centred between two shadows. She sits very still and stiff, her arms tensed by her sides as if restrained, her neck held at a tense and uncomfortable-looking angle, her body unmoving apart from small movements of her head. Her voice becomes more frantic as she describes the cigarettes and the burning of her breasts. As the attack continues, she communicates physical suffering through her shallow breath, the strain of her voice, and—describing her release—her arms closed tentatively around her injured torso, her stiff, wincing attempts to move communicating the pain between her legs. Through the movements of her covered body, Rame’s embodiment of pain and injury manages to express the violence and harm done to her without exposure of her body and therefore without any potentially titillating display. The problem of signifying rape mimetically—the difficulty of distinguishing it from sex—is thereby avoided. Her movements as she narrates the rape do not attempt a mimetic representation, impassively speaking the words of her attackers as they order her, ‘Move, bitch. Fuck me’ (online). Instead her frozen body and strained voice, and the physical details ‘Blood is running down my ears, from my cheeks’ (online), keep the spectator’s focus on the violence of rape. Rame’s text makes clear that WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 85 rape is a sexual act only in its mechanics, using the mechanics of sex to humiliate and degrade. This affect communicates primarily from body to body: Rame’s description of blood running down her ears can awaken a physical memory in the listener who recalls the feeling of liquid running into his or her ears (of course not blood necessarily, but tears perhaps, or water). The spectator need not have had Rame’s experience to flinch when she says, ‘They crush a lighted cigarette onto my neck, just so as to stub it out’ (online). The words as they issue from Rame’s tensed body do more than tell the spectator a story from the past—they engage the spectator in an affective response which is more than simply a disconnected feeling of pity for Rame’s suffering, but which is an embodied response to her performance: a shared flinching at the pain of the burns, a shared discomfort at liquid dripping into the ears, a shared sense of disgust at the rapists’ ‘sperm that I feel spilling out of me’ (online). Elaine Scarry describes the subjective nature of pain, its containment within the suffering individual and the difficulties of communicating pain accurately to others. The function of its communication is intended to draw the listener or reader into an identification with the body in pain, to motivate action to ease or remove it. But pain is isolating and unshareable (though we can know of it we cannot feel it for each other) and is resistant to language: she writes, ‘Physical pain does not simply actively resist language’ but ‘actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned … physical pain—unlike any other state of consciousness—has no referential content. It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language’ (1985, 5). She notes that descriptions of pain can be imaginary, and suf- ferers use images to suggest particular kinds of pain (15). And finally, Scarry links pain (its infliction and/or one’s indifference to the pain felt by the other) to power: the power to inflict pain, and the power to ignore it, to be unmoved by the suffering of another being. Rame’s monologue does not attempt to capture the bodily experience of violation with explicit detail: she describes the actions inflicted upon her body with minimal expression of emotion and without screaming or other inarticulate expressions of pain. The suffering is communicated in her seeming withdrawal from engagement, her retreat into her body and into the rigid control of her posture and her voice. In her physical posture she communicates the self-control required not to scream and not to despair, 86 L. FITZPATRICK and offers the spectator a glimpse into the chasm of this experience. But the impossibility of expressing everything in language is captured in the frequent pauses and in the ways that the unadorned description foregrounds the inadequacy of words. Rame’s text evokes a woman’s experience of rape, thereby situating the listener/spectator in sympathy with her rather than allowing an identification or sympathy with the perpetrators. The elision of the body is part of her strategy, but a comparison with some monodramas by Irish playwright Conor McPherson highlights differences in his male characters’ reported experiences. Five of McPherson’s early works recount a rape or the sexual abuse of a child: Rum and Vodka (1992), The Good Thief (1994), This Lime Tree Bower (1995), The Weir (1997) and Come On Over (2001); the act is not performed on stage, and in all but one of these plays (The Weir, where it is really a passing reference) it is part of a solo performance. This Lime Tree Bower is composed of three overlapping monologues by three characters: seventeen-year-old Joe, his older brother Frank, and their sister’s boyfriend Ray. Joe witnesses his classmate Damien, whom he idolizes, raping a girl in a graveyard after a night at a bar. He narrates how they leave the bar with a thin, drunken girl who is ‘getting off with’ (kissing) Damien and who wants them to walk her home to the Grange ‘where all the knackers lived’ (1995, 109). As they pass the graveyard, Damien takes the near-unconscious girl in there and a few minutes later Joe follows:

I saw something moving on the grave. I nearly shit myself because I thought it was something crawling out of the grave. But it was worse. Damien and his trousers down and the girl’s legs were on either side of him, like they were broken. Her neck was on the low rail around the grave and her head hung over the gravel. Damien was pushing into her like he wanted to put her in the ground. I ran straight back to my bike and cycled home. I said goodnight and was sick in the bathroom. I wondered if the girl knew what was happening to her. I wanted to hop on my bike and go back […] I wanted Damien to tell me that the girl had a great time and he saw her home. I didn’t want to hear anything else. (109–110) WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 87

The spectator witnesses the event through the boy’s frightened monologue, which positions the spectator in sympathy with him and with his traumatic experience. Joe understands the event as something that has happened to him, but he is frightened by the violence of the action (‘pushing into her like he wanted to put her in the ground’) and unsure how to interpret the scene. He is concerned for the girl, and hopes that Damien will reassure him that everything is fine. And his physical response is ambivalent: on the one hand, he vomits which suggests the abjection of what he has witnessed and his body’s shock and need to expel the experience; on the other hand he is excited by what he saw. ‘The horrible thing was that what I saw made me sick to my stomach, but at the same time it was really turning me on’ (110). Thus Joe’s response to the rape coincides with Rame’s at the point of disgust, yet he is still titillated and intrigued by it. He tries to confide in Frank, but Frank doesn’t understand what he is telling him and Joe lacks the language to explain the event as rape. Instead, Frank understands it as a story about ‘some eejit from his school having it off with a knacker from the Grange … I couldn’t see the big deal’ (119). The story thus becomes one of a loss of innocence, enacted upon the body of a young girl who is unseen and unheard; her rare speech is reported through the male characters. In the absence of mimetic representation the violence is expressed through language, suggested in the connotations of the words used. Referring to the unnamed girl Joe uses the word ‘broken’, the proximity of the adjective to the nouns ‘legs’ and ‘neck’ suggesting injury, the comfortless atmosphere suggested by the harsh consonant sounds in graves and gravel, and the violence suggested in the phrase ‘pushing into her like he wanted to put her in the ground’ (110). While the play maintains a critical attitude towards sexual violence it also subtly reiterates stereotypes of gender and a tendency for female characters to exist only in relation to male protagonists. The raped girl is represented through Joe’s words and functions to illustrate his loss of innocence and the brutality of Damien; she is dismissed by Frank as a ‘knacker from the Grange’ and is only recalled again at the close of the play when Joe tells us ‘I can still see the girl’ (124). Both playwrights refuse a potentially pleasurable visual display of the body, and both express disgust at the act of rape. But the evocation of disgust is a particularly striking element in Rame’s performance and text, and this disgust is granted a detailed expression and is written not only to record her response, but to evoke an embodied understanding in the spectator. It is significant because disgust is a recurring element in women’s 88 L. FITZPATRICK writing of rape, and various strategies are employed to express its visceral quality. The characters express their revulsion at the forced bodily contact with the rapist, and use imagery in language to evoke it in the spectator/ reader as well. Rame’s monologue expresses her humiliation at the degrading nature of the assault, but her disgust is aimed towards the rapists rather than being turned inwards towards her own body. This is true also of plays discussed below, particularly Ficky Stingers and The Love of the Nightingale. Sorrel’s obsessive bathing following the rape in On Raftery’s Hill may be normatively read as an attempt to cleanse herself, and as an imperative to wash away the lingering, disgusting presence of the rapist on her body. Such a reading rejects the historical interpretation of rape as an act that is morally the woman’s responsibility and that therefore soils her by shaming her; Rame is repulsed by the bodies of her attackers but she retains her integrity and agency. Sara Ahmed’s discussion of disgust is only partially applicable to the expression of revulsion found in Rame’s monologue, but it does identify certain key points—the first of which is that unwelcome proximity to something/someone is normally an element in the disgust reaction. Disgust normally involves recoil, it is performative, and is bound up in power relations. Ahmed and others consider disgust, however, only as a reaction of the powerful to the abjected. But in the representation of rape, I would suggest, the power relationship is more complex. The capacity to feel disgust is not limited to the attacker, who might be seen as holding the power; it is also potentially an expression of the victim’s sense of outrage and injustice at being the subject of the violence, and a path to regain a sense of autonomy and agency through the abjection of the rapist. Ahmed articulates disgust as ‘sticky’, meaning that contact with that which is disgusting will be experienced as leaving a residue or trace; as contaminating. Rame’s description of the rape as spitting into her brain ‘a million times’, or the ‘sperm falling out of me’ evokes contact with the bodily fluids of others which are normally encountered only in intimate and consensual relationships, ideally in the context of care and affection. Certainly this unwilling contact renders the fluids as abject. Ahmed argues, ‘Disgust is clearly dependent upon contact … That contact is felt as an unpleasant intensity … the proximity of the object to the body is felt as offensive. The object must have got close enough to make us feel disgusted. As a result, while disgust takes over the body, it also takes over the object that apparently gave rise to it’ (2004, 85). She quotes Paul Rozin, ‘Disgust is manifested as a distancing from some object, event or WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 89 situation, and can be characterized as a rejection’ (Rozin et al. 1993, 577; qtd Ahmed 2004, 85). Dramaturgical and performance strategies that maintain the audience’s sympathetic focus on the woman’s experience tend to attempt a phenomenological or morphological response to the violence of rape, often avoiding realistic or naturalistic re-enactment entirely. The exposure of the body to the gaze of the audience, the moans or cries of the female performer, or physical movements intended to represent rape are all readable as expressive of sexual pleasure on the part of both characters, or may stage male sexual pleasure while offering the female body as passive spectacle. The signifiers are unstable, and are under pressure from deeply embedded social and cultural beliefs about female masochism, rape fantasies, pornographic depictions of male and female sexuality and the pleasure of spectacle. Rame’s tight, tired, strained voice in performance suggests nothing erotic: it is suggestive of utter exhaustion. Likewise her covered, rigid body offers the spectator nowhere to project images of pleasure. Finally, by the late 1980s when this was performed on television Rame was an elegant mature woman, and her body was not the same as the body of the left-wing activist of the early 1970s; the political environment was more stable and her status in Italian theatre and internationally was more assured. These are significant factors in measuring Rame’s credibility as a witness to such a shocking assault: her age and persona further alienate the rape from interpretation as an act of sexual desire, therefore making her less likely to be judged culpable. In putting the account into theatrical form Rame edits and shapes a physical and psychological lived event to capture experience in language. This necessarily involves a process of editing and structuring to create a coherent narrative from a series of experiential impressions. Clearly, in reforming ‘actual’ experience into an aesthetic product, the possibility of more than one expression of the same experience is unavoidable, since the story is reframed and reshaped into a dramatic plot. The incoherent and chaotic nature of violence must be shaped and reduced into the coherence of a repeatable and stable narrative that can be delivered clearly but with emotion by the witness/performer. But the body of the witness/performer is also visible and is also a bearer of meaning. Rame’s physical still- ness and tension makes it more difficult to think of her body as the bearer of meaning. It perhaps makes it possible for her performance to avoid ‘reinforcing patriarchal discourses that deny subjectivity’, to quote Love (2002, 277). Fixed and covered, clothed in black against a dark backdrop, 90 L. FITZPATRICK

Rame’s body almost disappears; beyond the spotlight on her face the body fades into the darkness. When she parts her legs as she describes the rape, her body remains covered by black trousers; no skin is visible. Presenting only her tense, pained face to the audience, Rame evades the construction of women as bodies to be looked at and maintains the audience’s focus on her speaking face. Butler’s work in Violence, Mourning, Politics returns to the construction of subjectivity in relation to the Other, to explore the ways in which grief might challenge the notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control. Rame’s performance, I would suggest, expresses grief rather than rage at her experience: grief for her suffering; grief for the person she had been, the one who had not experienced such violence at the hands of compatriots; and grief for her society, in which women bringing rape accusations were subjected to intimate and degrading questions (Rame’s text quotes some of these as a prologue) and in which such barbarity is a weapon of the state. The prologue poses the following questions based on contemporaneous prosecutions for rape:

DOCTOR: Tell me, Miss—I’m sorry, are you married?—during the inci- dent, did you only feel disgust, or did you also feel a certain pleasure … an unconscious satisfaction …? POLICEMAN: Didn’t you feel flattered that so many men, four in all, I believe, felt such a powerful desire for you, felt such a HARD passion? JUDGE: Did you remain passive throughout, or did you, at a certain point, participate? DOCTOR: Did you feel yourself involved? Sexually aroused? PROSECUTING LAWYER: Did you feel yourself becoming moist? JUDGE: Did you not think that your groans, which were undoubtedly due to your suffering, could have been misinterpreted as expressions of pleasure? POLICEMAN: Did you experience sexual gratification? DOCTOR: Did you experience orgasm? LAWYER: If so, how many times? (Rame, Online)

Rame’s own monologue ends:

Almost without noticing it, I find myself in front of a police station. I lean against the side of a building opposite. I stare across at it, for a good while. I think of what I would have to face if I went in. WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 91

I can hear their questions. I can see their faces … I can see them laughing … I think for a moment or two. Then I decide. I’m going home. I’ll report it tomorrow. [Blackout]. (Rame, Online)

Butler argues that our narratives of ourselves falter and break down by our relation to the Other, our vulnerability and the ways in which our subjectivity is inevitably entangled with the Other (2004, 23). In her essay ‘Precarious Life’, she raises Levinas’s question of the face. Levinas writes, ‘The face […] is the other before death, looking through and exposing death. Secondly, the face is the other who asks me not to let him die alone’ (Levinas 1986, 23; qtd Butler 2004, 131). The spot-lit focus on Rame’s face in her performance attempts this affective connection, foregrounding Rame’s vulnerability as a human subject (not as a woman, whose vulnerability is in the body, minimizing her subjectivity). The faltering in her narrative, the moments that are not containable in language, here attest to our vulnerability to others, our reliance on each other for our security. Working from Robbie McCauley’s praxis, I would suggest that this faltering of narrative is not only the inadequacy of language to capture embodied experience but is also a positive function of language. The boundaries of language also bind the uncontainable into containable, comprehensible fragments that allow for dialogue, and connection. In an interview with Vicky Patraka, Robbie McAuley says ‘I think the mind and body have to work together in order to create the movement of political theatre. When I say movement, I mean going from something blocked and unclear to something open and clearer so we can move to change things … oppression stays on you unless you dialogue about it’ (Patraka and McCauley 1993, 26). While Rame explains her decision not to report the rape because she realizes that she will be further humiliated by the police and judiciary at the trial, other playwrights’ work illustrates Sharon Marcus’s argument that social and cultural attitudes impede women’s ability to resist and respond to male violence. This is demonstrated in the interactions of the Man and Woman in Eve Lewis’s Ficky Stingers. First staged in London at the Royal Court in 1986, and produced by Irish feminist company Glasshouse Productions in 1990 in Dublin, the play dramatizes the rape of a young woman and examines her response, and that of her female friends, 92 L. FITZPATRICK to what has happened to her. The play is performed by four actors, three female and one male. The characters are not named, but listed as Woman, Woman 1 and Woman 2, and Man, with the Man named in the script as Terry or Tel. Out drinking on a Friday night, the Woman meets Terry, a man that she and her friends know. She goes back to the house where he lives with his parents, and goes to his room to listen to music. He rapes her. She neither fights him physically nor calls for help. Afterwards, she hears about other women’s unhappy sexual experiences with him—which they do not name as rape either—and sees him drag his teenage date into an alley; despite hearing her screaming she does not intervene. The play ends in the pub once more, where Terry gives her a copy of the music they listened to in his room, and tells a joke that suggests his indifference to his victims. Although Terry is central to the plot of Ficky Stingers, Eve Lewis notes, ‘it is not a play about Terry. The events all take place within the narrative of the Woman and Terry is given no real justification for his behaviour. To make him the focus would distort the whole purpose of the piece’ (1987, 126). Reflecting on his experience of playing Terry, David Ian Rabey writes about the audience’s response to the character in post-production talks. The play was produced in a double-bill with Harold Pinter’s One For The Road, but the audience found Terry even more loathsome as a character than Pinter’s torturer Nicholas. He concludes that the emphasis on the Woman’s experience means that the audience is ‘bonded firmly in sym- pathies with the Woman and against Tel’ (1991, 266). He argues that Ficky Stingers manages to invite its audience to ‘discover what Augusto Boal … terms a “precondition for action”—action in this case involving the resisting of the Man’ (1991, 266). The Woman’s failure to resist not only the Man’s assault, but also his subsequent representation of it and his continuing abusive behaviour dramatizes the conflict between female lived experience and patriarchal discourses of gender and sex. In the rape scene, she repeatedly avoids conflict, kissing him even though she does not want to. She does not scream, though she threatens to, and though she knows that his parents will come in if she does. However, by splitting the character into three, Lewis give the audience access to the Woman’s internal monologue as well as her dialogue with Terry. The three voices, speaking sometimes in unison and sometimes singly, convey a sense of the character’s confusion and disbelief at what is happening, the pain and violence of the rape, and her struggle with social imperatives on women to be compliant and non-confrontational. WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 93

In a reversal of the norms of gender representation, the audience have privileged access to the Woman’s experience, while the man is silent, reduced to a sweaty and malodorous body; despite the fragmentation of her speaking voice, it is her perception that dominates the rape scene. This splitting of the character is also a feminist strategy that resembles hysterical performance in its deconstruction of the relationship between word and gesture, and the deliberate creation of multiple meanings through the different perspectives on the woman’s experience presented by the three actors. This play has been criticized for its representation of the female characters as submitting to the role of victim, and failing to resist or to unite against Tel (Brewer 1999). Its representation of female sexuality is limited to a grim, joyless heterosexuality in which men demand sex and women grit their teeth and comply. None of the female characters suggest that sex could be pleasurable. However, as a response to the rape script, this strategy of splitting the character can offer a sense of the individual subject’s response to a particular situation. The performance of the woman’s role by three actors allows the rape to be mimetically represented on one part of the stage while being simultaneously narrated and commented upon, so that the audience are never allowed unmediated access to it, and their awareness of the woman’s subjective response is maintained. Gesture and movement are interpreted diegetically in a direct address to the audience, which occasionally breaks down. When the Woman tries to leave, the Man blocks the door, forces kisses upon her, and shoves her on the bed. The Woman says: ‘He leans forward and pushes his whole weight down on me. I have no choice but to … (they fall back onto the bed)’ (Lewis 1987, 120). With this, Lewis calls attention to the inexpressibility of the moment, as words give way to mimetic action. She allows the silence in the representation to express a problem that cannot be expressed in language: the silence of the woman in the moment of the attack, who could call for help yet does not. However, the sudden breaking of the sentence on the phrase ‘I have no choice but to [fall]’ also foregrounds the act of falling and its connotations of surrender, becoming close to Brechtian gestus: as the woman’s body asserts that there is no other choice, the audience are com- pelled to ask why, and to identify possible alternatives. Later in the scene, as the attack continues, the Woman threatens to scream, to which the Man replies, ‘Don’t be stupid’ (120). The Woman comments, ‘And I realise that if I scream his parents will come in … and then what can I do? They’ll probably …’ Again the sentence breaks off, but her other comments 94 L. FITZPATRICK

provide some insights to her unfinished thought: ‘Am I in the wrong?’ she asks; and slightly later: ‘In the back of my mind is a feeling of guilt that I might offend him.’ But to this she adds another perspective that shapes her response to Terry’s actions: ‘And I suppose you just think he wouldn’t dare’ (120). Her resistance now takes the form of closing her eyes tightly and doing nothing, but ‘He’s in no hurry. He’s got nowhere to go tomorrow and he’s not tired. It is slow. Easing, inch by inch, his body into my clothes’ (121). In contrast to the Woman, who is disoriented by the Man’s sudden change from friendly bloke to rapist, and who doubts her own experience, his actions unfold coherently and determinedly. He brings the woman to his room, forces her to kiss him, attempts to orally rape her and finally rapes her, whereupon he tells her ‘No one’ll believe you’ and shows her out (121). He represents the rape to his friends as a seduction, a conquest—one of them asks her, ‘Seen, erm … Tel this morning? (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, saynomore)’ (122). The Woman, however, cannot express what has been done to her: she is mute, and the bodily traces of violence are treated as invisible by her community. Other women respond by blaming her, and her mother ‘sees my bruises but says nothing. She disapproves’ (122). Her friend tells her that going to Terry’s room was ‘a dumbarsed thing to do’, and persistently refuses to criticize him, even when he attacks his teenage girlfriend in front of them (124). The audience are repeatedly prompted to question the women’s responses, and to ask why they are so sure that ‘You can’t do anything’ (124). In the last scene in a moment of gestic criticism the Woman again provokes the question. The Man approaches her in the pub and tells her to sit down and ‘I sit back down. Like I always do. Like we always do. Sit. Sit and take it. Sit back down’ (125). Lewis’s play is an angry piece of work by a young dramatist, essentially a piece of agit-prop that provokes its audience to frustration with the female characters and their refusal of agency. Mary Brewer argues that it ‘approximates closely the language of feminist sexual-conservatism’, reducing the feminine to a physical object for consumption (Tel uses food imagery when speaking of women) and ‘generalizing male sexuality as inherently rapacious’ (1999, 110–111). Brewer is also concerned by the limited options the play offers women who have been raped: silence, passive acceptance, or madness (112) and by its failure to offer any positive images of female sexuality. Brewer’s concerns are expressed in some reviews of the Irish premiere of the work in 1991 by Glasshouse WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 95

Productions, though not from any feminist perspective. ‘While the (female) Evening Press critic described the piece as “cathartic … and dou- bly painful because we witness it every day of our lives”, Gerry Colgan’s review for the Irish Times described it as “loaded” and “clearly a kind of propaganda”, “Brothers, I think this is one for the Sisters”’ (1991; qtd Williams et al. 2001, 137). Caroline Williams of Glasshouse Productions commented that this effectively halved their potential audience, as well as identifying rape as a subject of concern only to women. In an essay that reflects upon the company’s contribution to the Irish stage, actor Siân Quill and director Katy Hayes comment on the challenge the topic presented to the young company. Hayes writes, ‘how do you show a rape on stage that captures the horror, but is theatrically convincing?’ (2001, 135–136). However, although Lewis’s text is an expression of women’s rage turned inwards against themselves and is valuable for its exploration of staging strategies that disrupt heteronormative narratives of rape, Colgan is perhaps correct that it offers no place from which a male spectator might engage with the performance, as Rabey also comments above. His criticism of the piece suggests his frustration as an audience member, though a less charitable reading would add that as a male spectator and critic of Irish theatre he is accustomed to holding a privileged position. More problematically, the text offers a very limited position from which the female spectator can engage. The Woman’s voicelessness in Ficky Stingers, the way in which language breaks down, functions differently to the breaking down of the voice and narrative in The Rape. Ficky Stingers attempts to investigate the social and cultural imperatives underlying the Woman’s apparent consent or compliance, her failure to actively resist Tel’s aggression. While Rame’s performance comes to the end of language as a positive strategy for containment and the creation of affect, Ficky Stingers comes to the end of language because the female characters actually have no words to express their experience. The Woman is not able to explain why she doesn’t scream for help, or doesn’t clearly refuse Tel’s advances, or doesn’t try to protect his new girlfriend. Her sentences dwindle away to silence or questions, and the spectator is left to draw the conclusion that she does not resist because she cannot imagine a world in which resistance is productive, or a version of herself capable of it. She literally has no words to claim her right to bodily integrity. Therefore, while the language in Rame’s play is inadequate because of the enormity of an experience in which the protagonist recognizes her vulnerability and the fact of her own mortality, in Lewis’s play 96 L. FITZPATRICK language’s limitation is evidence of the symbolic as well as systemic nature of sexual violence. It is perhaps here that Hayes finds the ‘theatrically convincing’, though non-realistic, aspect of the work. This difference is important because women’s voicelessness is a recurring trope in women’s dramatic writing and performance. It dramatizes the absence of language to discuss women’s desire, pleasure, even women’s bodies;4 this silence expresses the medicalization of women’s bodies, sexualities and reproductive functions, and the alienation of women from their bodies in a patriarchal culture.

Mad Women: Sexual Violence in the Work of Caryl Churchill and Sarah Daniels Caryl Churchill’s work does not centre around moments of sexual violence, but rather weaves it into the background of her female characters’ lives and experiences. Her 1976 play Vinegar Tom, developed in collaboration with Monstrous Regiment, dramatizes casual misogyny and relates contemporary attitudes to women to the historical attitudes that inflamed the witch trials of the 1600s. The play is set in a small rural community during that time. It has an episodic structure, following the stories of a number of local women as their everyday lives unfold, and the action is interrupted by contemporary songs and by a final music-hall double act featuring the historic witch-hunters Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger. Kramer and Sprenger authored the 1486 Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), which aimed to refute all arguments against the existence of witches, and to give magistrates methods for identifying and trying witches. In a brief note at the end of the text, Churchill clarifies that ‘It’s important that Kramer and Sprenger are played by women. Originally they were played by Chris Bowler and Mary McCusker … as Edwardian music hall gents … and some of the opening rhymes and jokes are theirs. The rest of the scene is genuine Kramer and Sprenger’ from Malleus Maleficarum. She also notes that ‘the songs, which are contemporary, should if possible be sung by actors in modern dress. They are not part of the action and not sung by the characters in the scenes before them’ (1982, 40). By using the witch trials as the centre of the plot, Churchill draws contemporary analogies with the attitudes to women expressed by the male characters, and sometimes expressed by the women themselves. Margery’s husband Jack calls her a ‘lazy slut’ when the milk won’t churn into butter. WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 97

She blames their elderly female neighbour Joan, as stopping the butter forming is one sign of a witch. Susan is pregnant for the fifth or sixth time in just a few years, and fears that this time she will die. She understands that her suffering is God’s will: ‘They do say the pain is what’s sent to a woman for her sins. I complained last time after churching, and he said … I must think how woman tempts man, and how she pays God with her pain having the baby’ (Churchill 1982, 22). She is grateful that her husband doesn’t beat her, though he does want her to bear child after child. The wealthier teenage girl Betty is imprisoned by her family and bled by the doctor because she does not want to marry. The doctor diagnoses hysteria to be cured by bleeding and blistering, so that she will soon be well enough to be married (24), and Ellen the ‘cunning woman’ or healer advises her to marry to keep herself safe from the witch-hunters. The witch-hunter Packer arrests Susan, her friend Alice, Ellen, and Joan; and Ellen and Joan are subsequently hanged. The women are identified as witches because they have a mark on their bodies that does not bleed when pricked, and this is said to be the nipple where they suckle their familiar: this is taken directly from Malleus Maleficarum. The pricking is carried out by the witch-hunter and his elderly female assistant Goody, and is written to convey humiliation rather than torture (40). Monstrous Regiment used stage blood in their production (42) to gruesome effect. The scene has clear sexual undertones as the women’s bodies are uncov- ered and their body hair shaved; the witch-hunter sometimes looks if the woman is young and attractive. The play weaves a context of gender violence into the background while it dramatizes the limitations on the lives of women, including the wealthy Betty; and it represents a world where women can find very little protection from domestic violence and forced sex and childbearing. Their oppression is justified on the grounds of their sinfulness and their dangerous powers: the farmer Jack believes that his penis has been bewitched by Alice, for whom he feels an illicit desire, and the helpless Joan is believed guilty of all kinds of wrong-doing. The healer Ellen is accused of providing women with means of preventing conception, abortifacients, and herbal pain relief in labour. Thus all the accused women transgress against the patriarchal family unit, and against biblical writings on the proper role of women. Transgression against the patriarchal family is historically one of the signs of mental illness in women, whether that is labelled madness or hysteria or any one of a number of other psychological conditions, both real and imaginary. In Vinegar Tom all the women who rebel—however 98 L. FITZPATRICK mildly—are identified as witches except the wealthy Betty who is treated as a medical case. This persists into the present, as explored in Daniels’s plays Head Rot Holiday, The Madness of Esme and Shaz, Masterpieces and Beside Herself (discussed below). Churchill’s other work similarly situates the female characters in situations where their gender makes them vulnerable to violence and abuse, though she never presents them as helpless victims. Although some, like Nijo in Top Girls, accept their own victimization and internalize male definitions of their function and identity as the price of the appearance of agency, there is always another female voice to challenge them. Nijo describes how, at the age of fourteen, she was given to the Japanese Emperor as a concubine: ‘… when the time came I did nothing but cry. My thin gowns were badly ripped’ (2001, 2–3). Marlene asks, ‘Are you saying he raped you?’ and Nijo responds ‘No, of course not, Marlene, I belonged to him, it was what I was brought up for from a baby. I soon found that I was sad if he stayed away’ (3). Marlene speaks for the audience, expressing shock at this treatment of a child; Nijo’s testimony is thereby recognized, given weight, and commented upon. Emotional reliance by the abused on the abuser is dramatized in greater detail in Marina Carr’s On Raftery’s Hill, in the submission of Dinah to an incestuous relationship with her father. In Churchill’s work, rape, which is often mentioned only in passing (as in Soft Cops and Serious Money), functions as an indication of the violent context of the everyday world, and as a method of expressing callous disregard for life and well-being. It is rarely the central focus of the drama. However, Abortive, Churchill’s 1971 play first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 that year, centres around the impact of a rape on the lives of a married couple. The playwright’s approach is typically complex and her focus is not on the immediate violence of the act, but on its aftermath. When the play opens Roz and Colin are in bed. It is three weeks since Roz, pregnant as a result of rape, had an abortion. The tense opening dialogue between the couple centres on Roz’s reluctance to have sex, though she reassures Colin that she is not going to be ‘permanently frigid’. He worries that she will stop loving him; he has difficulty accepting that the rape was, in fact, rape. This difficulty—which Roz shares, to some extent— seems to emerge from the couple’s familiarity with the rapist Billy, who shared their home for a period of time. Yet Roz’s closing monologue, of bad dreams in which she heard an explosion and ‘I know it had killed me. Everything was unsteady and far away and I must have been falling slowly to the ground’ (36) suggests the traumatic impact of the experience. WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 99

Churchill’s play is a gentler representation of mistrust following rape than examples like Judith Thompson’s Lion in the Streets, where the male character reduces his fiancée to tears and pleading in the face of his insistence that she retell what happened in humiliating detail, and his accusations that she is responsible. The closing moments of the scene are Edward’s accusation: ‘You are the snake … Because the snake tempts others to sin’ and he bullies Sherry into repeating ‘I am the snake’ (Thompson 2003, 313). Churchill’s play examines this same issue, where the rape myth of the stranger monster rapist lurking in a darkened alleyway encounters the lived reality that most women are raped by people they know and trust; and for their male partners, the realization that the rapist may be a man that they know, and like. In Abortive, Colin pursues Roz with questions in a dialogue that the characters have clearly already repeated over and over. He says, ‘But at the end you didn’t struggle’, and she responds ‘You know how things can be’ (Churchill 1990, 30). He seeks reassurance that Billy is not ‘some sort of ideal lover’ (30) and Roz assures him that he is not. But the dialogue is largely unemotional, controlled; she responds as if his questions are reasonable, and only finally shows distress by getting up and going alone outside to stand in the rain. Churchill’s text suggests the vast gap between the experiences and understanding of men and women, in the aftermath of rape. Colin’s self- absorbed fears for his relationship and his inability to recognize a rape by someone known to the victim, his fear of being replaced by the ‘real’ man who can overcome Roz’s resistance when Colin cannot, speak to his inability to understand her experience and to the powerful draw of popular cultural myths about rape. In Thompson’s Lion in the Streets Edward expresses the same fears more explicitly:

EDWARD: And he grabbed you. SHERRY: By the arm! EDWARD: He was all man. SHERRY: Oh no! No! … He smashed my head against the fire wall, Ed. EDWARD: You dream about that, don’t you Sherry? SHERRY: And he told me he was going to kill me. EDWARD: His voice. MASTERFUL. (2003, 311–312)

Sherry submits to Edward’s version of her rape, accepting responsibility as the one who tempted the man. Roz can’t find the language to express what happened: ‘It was as good as rape’, she says, when Colin says ‘It wasn’t rape’ (31), and she can’t explain why she didn’t struggle. Eve 100 L. FITZPATRICK

Lewis’s Woman is similarly unable to explain her inability to struggle or scream, her sentence ending in ellipses: ‘if I scream his parents will come in … and then what can I do? They’ll probably …’ (120). Female playwrights repeatedly examine the breaking down of language and the struggle to express the experience of rape, through the inarticulacy of their characters. Sarah Daniels’s work explores the silencing of women’s testimonies of sexual abuse, the collusive silence of powerful male characters, the work- ings of the system that obscures and denies that this violence occurs, and women’s rage at their experiences of casual misogyny. Daniels’s female characters tend to be more unrestrainedly rebellious and therefore ‘mad’ than Churchill’s, and like Churchill she dramatizes the network of beliefs and prejudices that identify non-conforming women as bad, or mad, or failures as women. One of her early plays, Masterpieces, is an episodic drama in seventeen scenes that weaves together the stories of three women and their marriages. It was first performed at the Royal Exchange in Manchester in 1983, directed by Jules Wright. It transferred later the same year to the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, moving to the main auditorium in January 1984. Set in London at the time of writing (1982–1983), the play was controversial from its premiere. It centres on three couples: Clive and Jennifer, their daughter Rowena and her husband Trevor, and Ron and Yvonne who are contemporaries of Rowena. All the actors, except the one playing Rowena, play multiple roles and this strategy allows for the characters to be linked together through the audience’s recognition of the shared acting body. The technique alienates the naturalistic actor–character identification so that the audience are made conscious of the characters as roles that are performed, available to question and critique. Daniels writes that it was ‘[u]nashamedly an issue-based play’ motivated by her reading of Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography and attending a meeting of Women Against Violence Against Women. She comments that the characters lack the depth and complexity of much of her other work, because she wanted the issues to be clear and unambiguous. The play opens in a restaurant, where Jennifer and Trevor, and Ron and Yvonne are dancing, Rowena is sitting at the table, and the actor playing Baron-Peddler-Consumer / Clive / Policeman / Teacher / Man in Tube Station / Judge is speaking the prologue. The Baron-Peddler-Consumer prologue is about the sex industry from the perspective of the Baron who has made a great deal of money from porn, the Peddler who manages the sex shop, and the consumer. The tone of the prologue is that sex shops/ WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 101 pornography are part of a normal healthy approach to sex, particularly for men but also for women, and do not hurt anyone. This is not Daniels’s argument: the play explicitly links pornography to violence, across the spectrum from disrespectful speech to rape and murder. Daniels draws these connections through the strategy of multi-roling and the structure of the plot. While one timeline traces the relationships between the couples, another interwoven series of events shows the court case against Rowena for the murder of a man—Charles Stone. This is shown in brief moments in scenes of reportage set outside the courtroom, and in three scenes at her trial. The play ends with Rowena recounting the synopsis of the infamous 1976 movie Snuff which purported to show the actual murder of a woman during sex, and which has since been discredited as a fake. Snuff films, reasonably regarded as incredible in the 1970s, become far more credible when anyone can log on to an openly advertised website to watch real-time online enactments of ‘consensual’ sexual torture, or post video footage of rape or sexual assault on social media, without even considering what material is available on the dark web. Daniels’s play was written at a time when feminist opposition to pornography was growing. Masterpieces emerges from the anti-pornography debate, and portrays the industry as male-dominated both among producers and consumers, with women as the raw material in the production process. The eighth scene includes three monologues by women speaking of their experiences in the porn industry, which are based on fact. The play was controversial and remains problematic for its rather polarized representation of the sexes; but it is interesting to read alongside the Women’s Theatre Group production My Mother Said …, discussed above. The play offers an interrogation of the representation of women’s liberation as incorporating sexual liberation by investigating the premises upon which such liberation is offered. Following the Baron-Peddler-Consumer monologues spoken by the actor playing Clive, the group reassemble at the table and Ron and Clive start telling rape jokes. Trevor doesn’t find this as funny as Clive and Ron though he doesn’t protest. Jennifer laughs disconcertingly loudly before undermining them with a joke about male sexual incompetence and a chat about her post-menopausal women’s horticulture group. ‘We infil- trate exhibitions with our outrageous arrangements’ she tells them. These are not ‘suggestive cacti’, as Ron suggests, but far more subver- sively these arrangements draw attention to women’s reproductive organs and to the menopause. The ageing female body, which is culturally 102 L. FITZPATRICK abjected, is celebrated by Jennifer’s group in the form of ‘a lovely dried number set in an oasis’ with her diaphragm as the base; mustard and cress growing in an empty pill packet and ‘delightful little cultures—like ferns—[growing] on a sanitary towel’ (Daniels 1991, 175). Jennifer thereby offers her group’s collective rebellion against the misogyny of the men’s jokes, while foregrounding the objectification of younger, fer- tile women’s bodies for male pleasure alone, and the men’s assumption that the phallus (‘suggestive cacti’) must be at the centre of sexual innu- endo. Clive and Ron both tell jokes about women welcoming rape and colluding with it, and they draw Trevor in eventually by pressuring him to tell a joke of his own. This section concludes with Ron’s riddle ‘What’s your idea of an ideal date? She screws until four o’clock in the morning, then turns into a pizza’ (167) emphasizing the woman as something to be literally consumed. These jokes are then linked to the porn industry and to gender violence by Yvonne and Ron’s discussion with their friends of Yvonne’s unhappiness at work. The boys are misbehaving in the class, using soft pornography to undermine the authority of their female teachers and classmates. She describes boys in the classroom holding up pictures in front of the class and comparing the teacher to the image in the magazine. The scene then cuts to the courtroom and ends with Yvonne in the witness box describing her early life and escape from her social class. Yvonne is the most assured of the women. She does not smile appeas- ingly in response to the jokes, unlike Rowena who laughs hesitantly. It is she who asks ‘How many men does it take to tile a bathroom? (Pause) Three but you have to slice them thinly’ (169)—the others do not respond. The second scene is set in the courtroom and the third in the classroom. Thus the jokes at the dining table are juxtaposed with the attitudes of the young male students to their classmates and the as yet unexplained courtroom scene. Yvonne meets the mother of one of her pupils, a boy who has been imprisoned for the rape of a female student. He has been acclaimed a ‘cult hero’ by the other boys, while the girl is forced to change school. Yvonne was the only teacher willing to listen to her, and was the one who encouraged her to bring charges. Both the headmaster and the boy’s lawyer argue that the girl ‘had only been raped but unharmed’ (180). Ironically, their attitude that the rape is a minor matter does not prevent them from blaming his mother. She tells Yvonne that ‘those psychiatrists spent more time with me than they did with him. Where did I go wrong? […] ‘A normal healthy boy rapes a girl. Was I too prudish? Too open? Too WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 103 domineering?’ (181). The rape is then directly linked to pornography when the mother produces a bag full of ‘girlie’ magazines dating back to 1978, and presumably taken from the boy’s father. The mother comments that her husband has a drawer full of them, and sees nothing wrong with them. The dialogue between the two female characters is punctuated by off-stage teachers’ rebukes to unseen boys: ‘Jamison, you disgusting brute, get out of here and report to the headmaster first thing in the morning’ (180) and so on. While Daniels’s play directly links porn to rape and arguably does so rather simplistically, it also dramatizes the socialization of boys to misbehave and to regard women as objects in order to assert their masculinity. This raises questions for the audience about pornography and patriarchy. Is pornography merely an expression of patriarchy, objectifying rather than celebrating human sexuality and viewing sexually active women as aberrant or degraded, in order to reiterate heteronormative family structures? Rape arguably functions to reinscribe these same structures by emphasizing female vulnerability and need for (male) protection. The play includes two rapes, neither of which is staged: the boy’s rape of the schoolgirl, and Ron’s rape of his new employee Hilary (played by the actress who plays Yvonne). The rape of the girl is discussed only in her absence, but Daniels stages a workplace interaction between Hilary and Ron. Ron, the stage directions state, is merely being ‘friendly’: i.e. he does not grope her, neither are his words ‘loaded with lust’ (209), but his persistence is discomfiting. He proposes a drink at lunchtime and she politely refuses, saying she doesn’t drink at lunchtime. He suggests a soft drink and she refuses again; he suggests an after-work drink and she says she has to get her son. ‘Well tomorrow lunchtime it is then’, he says, over her protests; she says ‘It’s really very kind but I have to do me shopping lunch- times’. He tells her he always takes new members of staff to lunch, so she apologizes for being unable to go. He then asks about her commute and offers to drive her home ‘I go that way most evenings. I can drop you off’ (210). The dialogue makes Hilary’s hesitation apparent but suggests that Ron is annoying rather than dangerous. But a few days later, Rowena makes a social work call on Hilary’s home and Hilary tells her angrily, ‘I’ll give you three guesses what he expected in return [for the job]’ (225). Rowena confronts Ron at her home, where he and his wife and having dinner, saying ‘How dare you rape that woman’, but Ron is defiant: ‘I was one of her clients, and do you mind, there was no force involved’ (220). The play piles detail upon detail of banal, everyday misogyny—Clive watches a porn film called Violate the Bitch; the couples’ arguments frequently 104 L. FITZPATRICK descend into misogynistic abuse; the men’s jokes and the prevalence of soft pornography in film and print format seem to saturate the society. The last scene has Rowena at her trial for the murder of a random man whom she has pushed under a Tube train. She tries to explain how her rage became uncon- trollable, so that this man’s vulgar remarks to her became unendurable. She ends with the description of the filmSnuff , recounting the horrors that it shows. The policewoman responds, ‘I’ve seen photos, hundreds of photos of little girls, young women, middle-aged women, old women … with torn genitals, ripped vaginas, mutilated beyond recognition. I try not to think about it’ (230). Daniels leaves the audience with these images that clearly differentiate rape and sexual violence from consensual sex. While the men’s jokes confuse the two, the women’s accounts foreground the violence of sexual assault and the injuries it can cause. The policewoman’s descriptions of what she has seen are familiar from the descriptions of injuries sustained by women in wartime rape camps and in other war situations where women are left without civil protection: the damage sustained by the characters in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined, for example. But Daniels’s play situates itself in middle- class English family life, amid the 1980s social indicators of dinner parties, secure professional jobs, and holidays abroad. The characters’ experiences of sexual abuse are therefore unexpected; the play defamiliarizes standard jokes and social attitudes of the time to make their social gestus visible to the contemporary audience. Daniels’s play Beside Herself opens with a prologue in ‘A dream. A supermarket’ (1994, 97) where Eve, Jezebel and Mrs Lot (Lilith is coming later) are gathered to have their hair done. Delilah is their hairdresser. The scene is reminiscent of the dinner party in Top Girls, which brings together women from different cultures and different historical periods; in this case, the biblical women comment upon the practice of blaming women for the evils of the world. The hairdressing is happening in the supermarket where other biblical figures also deliver seminars: Mrs Noah is speaking on ‘How to survive a barbecue in a storm’ (97) which has overshadowed Eve’s tutorial on ‘The burden of guilt and two thousand years of misrepresentation’ (97). New Testament female characters gather in a different part of the supermarket. This opening scene places the historical figures in a contemporary space that is strongly associated with women’s household chores, and it includes a contemporary scene (repeated towards the close of the play) in which a young mother struggles with her small son. The historical characters share tales of misogyny: the blame placed upon them for their husbands’ failings, and the biblical tale of Lot WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 105 offering his virgin daughters to ‘a mob of pimps and rapists’ (101). The latter is a reference to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, where Lot offers shelter to two strangers who are angels in disguise. The men of Sodom surround his house, demanding that the men be given to them, but Lot refuses. Instead, he says, ‘Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof’ (Genesis 19:8). This prologue links the contemporary women to reviled women of the Old Testament, and it also sets up the attitudes of many of the contemporary characters to rape and sexual abuse. Women’s experiences of sexual violence, and the silencing of their speech about these experiences, are recurring themes in Daniels’s work. This episodic play is structured into two halves, with sixteen scenes in total (four in the first half and twelve in the second), and likeMasterpieces it makes use of multi-roling to link characters to each other, and to provoke critical engagement by the audience. It centres on the actions of medical personnel, social workers, and residents in St Dympna’s care home, and dramatizes contemporaneous attitudes to mental illness and family breakdown. One of the central characters, Evelyn, is accompanied by her alter-ego Eve (who watches and comments on her actions). Evelyn is the wife of an MP and it is in this capacity that she is involved with St Dympna’s. The first scene has her visiting her widowed father George. Later, it is revealed that he is an eminent doctor. In this opening scene, his relationship with Evelyn seems strained: she fusses around the kitchen without really engaging with him, while he tries to persuade her to sit and take tea: ‘What I’d really like is for you to sit down and talk to me’, he says; but Evelyn ‘continues with putting the shopping away’ and Eve ‘kicks the fridge’. As the dialogue continues, George mentions that his granddaugh- ter Joanna has written to him and Evelyn’s response is slightly odd, ‘(coldly) She didn’t mention it’ (109). George says that Joanna has promised to visit him in the summer holidays and Evelyn insists she is too young to travel alone, and eventually says that she will bring her. Throughout this exchange Eve’s ‘concentration is now strongly focused on George’ (110). These lines take on greater significance towards the end of the play, when Evelyn accuses her father of rape. The second scene introduces the characters associated with St Dympna’s, including the homophobic and hypocritical vicar Teddy, social workers Greg and Nicola, community worker Lil and house manager Shirley, and 106 L. FITZPATRICK the medical consultant Roy (whose name translates as king and who asserts himself as the highest-status person in the room). The management committee—including Evelyn—have gathered to discuss who should be admitted to St Dympna’s. The discussion of patients gives Roy a platform for his misogynistic belittling of female patients with comments like, ‘If it gets past four o’clock on the day [female patients] are admitted and they still haven’t asked for a cup of tea—they’re depressed’ (126). Teddy laughs, but the others do not; Evelyn says ‘Suppose they don’t like tea’. The next case is the tragic one of Dawn, whose child was taken from her in error but has now been adopted and so cannot be returned to her. Roy comments, ‘she probably didn’t help matters much by physically attacking her Probation Officer. Doesn’t like men. Apparently she was sexually messed about with as a child’, and Greg adds ‘it is suspected that the father of the child could have been her own father’ (127). Roy scoffs dismissively at Nicola’s nervous intervention that a large proportion of female psychiatric patients were sexually abused and that ‘a quarter of the female population’ suffered some kind of sexual abuse. ‘In all my years of experience I could count on one hand the number of patients who’ve admitted that to me. And they were naughty precocious girls who certainly had no doubts about their attractiveness to men’ he tells her (131). Eve responds anxiously, seeking to distract Evelyn with puzzles and plans to redecorate at home. When Nicola argues back with Roy, he tells her that her words are ‘grossly inaccurate. If not libellous’ (127). Challenged, Roy turns his attention to Dawn’s mother ‘gadding about relinquishing her responsibilities or turning a blind eye’; he continues, ‘It can often be a complex liaison of some duration, indicative of a caring relationship (To Nicola coldly.) Children do have a sexuality you know’ (133). The arguments put forward by Roy and echoed by Greg were common at the time of writing, and although no longer regarded as socially acceptable they still underpin some assumptions about domestic forms of violence. The idea that girls who are groomed and sexually abused are complicit in the abuse has been repeatedly seen in high profile legal cases in this century, as has the minimization of the damage done to victims.5 While Roy’s position moves between denying that abuse is common to blaming the abused girls or their mothers, Greg’s sympathy with the abuser is couched in the language of family therapy. ‘I don’t feel blame per se is a very healthy approach to rebuilding lives’, he says (134). ‘Fathers I’ve seen, show considerable remorse’. Nicola argues that this is not surprising, when confronted with an authority figure, and Greg reluctantly WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 107 agrees that that may be possible but maintains that abuse ‘is the product of a dysfunctional family where the man is looking for affection and nurturing, albeit inappropriately, and therefore the whole family, starting with the mother, need re-educating into their appropriate roles’ so that ‘everyone takes responsibility’ (134). ‘But then that surely only reinforces the girl’s feeling of shame, self-disgust and guilt’, Nicola argues; and Roy replies ‘Which brings us back to why she felt like that in the first place’ (134–135). In this circular argument the end point is always the woman to blame. The play returns to an issue addressed in Masterpieces: that women who do not conform to male desires are mad, or bad. A number of female characters in the play reveal glimpses of their experiences of sexual abuse and refer briefly and allusively to their shame and isolation, and their reluctance to make their experience known to others. Local resident Gaynor explains, in a soliloquy, that she found the isolation of being a housewife and mother quite overwhelming. She insisted on going out one night a week, and her brother who was a student stayed with the two small children. She found out at Christmas from her elder daughter, now grown up with a child of her own, that her brother had sexually abused them. Her daughter refused to bring her child to her uncle’s house, but otherwise did not want any ‘fuss’ (161). Gaynor’s response is to ask why she didn’t say no: the daughter replies ‘Saying no to a grown man makes no difference unless you’re trying to make me feel I said no in the wrong way’ (160). Gaynor says, ‘I blame myself. I shouldn’t have been so selfish wanting to go out but I was desperate. I must have been a little crazy in those days. He was my own brother’ (161). The brother has children of his own—a chilling thought—but Gaynor doesn’t intervene and her daughter asks her not to say anything. Gaynor’s story illustrates the extent to which women absorb the attitude that they are responsible. At no point does Gaynor express blame or loathing for her brother. Yet her daughter has clearly internalized the guilt and shame Nicola names. She says, ‘I don’t want any fuss, I don’t want them looking at me thinking—whatever they will be thinking. I don’t want anyone to know’ (161). Nicola has also experienced sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather. She believes her mother knows and is complicit, but in the scenes between Nicola’s parents the stepfather presents himself as loving, and disappointed by Nicola’s behaviour. This relationship moves towards a resolution at the end of the play, when Nicola visits her mother and the two women leave the house together, leaving the stepfather inside. 108 L. FITZPATRICK

In the final scenes of the play, Eve/Evelyn discloses her abuse to Nicola, who believes her. Evelyn is now the carer for her father and has split herself into two so that her alter-ego Eve can say the things that she can’t find words for. Evelyn points out that the warnings are always about strangers: ‘strange men live in twilight worlds, haunt open spaces. They do not have homes, families, children. They are not the men you marry … because if they were, there would be words to say, “Don’t be alone with your father—he’s … he’s …”’ (180). This expresses the problem summarized by Susan Ehrlich, that rape victims are judged as blameless if the rapists are socially outcast, and heinous if they are respectable (2001, 28). Evelyn’s father is an important oncologist and Roy describes him as ‘a great man’ (135). In scene 10, Evelyn challenges her father who eventually admits that her memories are accurate and that he did abuse her as a child.

EVELYN: I remember being raped by you. GEORGE: (shocked) Evelyn! What on earth made you say a thing like that? (183)

When denial is no longer possible, George argues that it was not his fault: he had no idea how to show love; he was motivated by love. He says that Evelyn is mad. She refutes his allegations, pointing out that he was a grown man, that he planned the rapes, and that he executed them despite her screams and desperate attempts to resist. In this process of speaking, she recovers her agency and reunites the two parts of herself: Eve and Evelyn wipe each other clean as a means of expressing their unification (185–186). The next scene refers to Evelyn’s resignation from the management committee, perhaps reflecting her decision to stop trying to please others and to take care of herself. However, in the figure of George, Daniels sketches a character who is not one-dimensional: he comments critically about the attitudes of his time towards the education of girls, and speaks of his own commitment to equality of education for his children. His rape of his daughter is one facet of an otherwise fond father and successful doctor. Beside Herself uses an episodic, self-consciously theatrical structure to dramatize sexual violence as a common female experience. The episodic structure in Daniels’s play allows her to tell multiple stories from different perspectives: Lil and Gaynor speak as mothers of abused daughters; Nicola and Evelyn speak as victims of abuse; George and Tony speak as abusers; while Greg and Roy speak as the health and social care professionals who WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 109 use scientific methods to regurgitate ancient tropes about women and sin. In the next section, Marina Carr’s country cottage drama binds the conventional Irish rural family drama to an explicit exploration of incestuous violence.

Gothic Irish Families: On Raftery’s Hill Marina Carr is the most acclaimed Irish woman playwright of her generation and her work is widely performed internationally. Most of her plays explore the darker aspects of maternity and female subjecthood, and she returns to the trope of the Midlands repeatedly in her early plays both in the rhythms of her characters’ speech and in her evocation of a shifting, watery landscape which is central to her aesthetic. But On Raftery’s Hill stands apart from Carr’s other plays; while apparently less complex than her finest work, it is a strange ugly folktale of trolls and ogres and an existential meditation on what it means to be human. In contrast to Rame’s witnessing monodramatic performance and Lewis’s splitting of her central protagonist to achieve a kind of Verfremdungseffekt, Carr’s 2000 play On Raftery’s Hill is a two-act, seemingly naturalistic drama set entirely in a rural kitchen in the Irish Midlands. Eamonn Jordan describes it as ‘determined to assault the conventions of the pastoral’ (2010, 30). The pastoral form, in Irish theatre, has historically been associated with the peasant play and with representations of authentic Irishness as rural, pious, unsophisticated and innocent. In staging, these plays tend to be set in country cottages away from the town or village. The home of the Raftery family is outside the village that lies in the valley below it, and few of the villagers venture across the fields to visit. Red Raftery, a widowed farmer, lives in the house with his mother Shalome, his daughters Dinah and Sorrel, and his son Ded. Sorrel is engaged to Dara Mood, and the only other visitor is eccentric Isaac who brings news with him from the village. The plot centres around Red’s sexual abuse of his daughters, while hinting that he is also a product and a victim of incest. All of these dramatists, in representing rape, primarily use signifiers of power, violence and pain rather than realistic depictions of sexual or physical contact between characters; and Lewis and Carr both explore articulacy and inarticulacy and the relationship of language to power and control. The female characters in On Raftery’s Hill are all powerless to resist the rapist’s narrative, and that narrative is explicitly linked to patriarchal power and privilege. 110 L. FITZPATRICK

In the conventional Irish set of the country kitchen, Raftery’s family is introduced as the grim antithesis to the conventional rural family of Irish drama. Red’s wife is long since dead. Grandmother Shalome is senile and is always trying to go ‘home’ to her ‘Daddy’; Ded is terrorized by his father, ‘beaten to the scut’ (Carr 2009, 8) and reduced to living in the cow-shed with the animals; Dinah was first raped by Red when she was twelve, and Sorrel is her daughter by her father; Sorrel—the only one who doesn’t fear Red—is raped by him at the end of Act 1. Red himself is likely the product of an incestuous relationship between his mother and her father: Shalome’s repeated attempts to escape from the Hill to Kinnegar, to her ‘daddy’, her statement that she never had sex with her husband, and her remarks on Red’s resemblance to his grandfather all suggest this genealogy of violence. Red tortures the livestock, slashing the cows’ udders and leaving the animals’ bodies to rot on the hillside; Isaac says ‘You’ll turn this beautiful farm into an abattoir’ (2009, 15). His long-term sexual relationship with Dinah has become a kind of unhappy marriage and Dinah has long since resigned herself to the inevitability of it all, though it remains a source of shame. She says of her father and herself: ‘So we do ud from time to time … we want ud to stop. Ud’s just like children playin in a field ah some awful game before rules was made’ (57–58). The rape of Sorrel and her resulting induction into the family secrets concludes with her troubling decision to break off her engagement to Dara Mood and stay on the Hill with her father and siblings. Sorrel appears to offer two reasons for this: the first, that she won’t live a lie with Dara yet cannot possibly reveal the truth; and the second, that she recognizes her kinship to this monstrous collective, telling her sister, ‘Spare me your Legion a’ Mary canter. We’re a band a gorillas swingin from the trees’ (58). The play ends with this exchange between Sorrel and her father:

RED: (To Sorrel) I hope you knocked some sense inta young Mood. SORREL: Oh I sourted him ouh Daddy, don’t you worry, I sourted him ouh for ever more. Music from Ded’s fiddle, and fade. (59)

This ending presents obvious problems for a feminist reading, suggesting as it does the inescapability of genealogy and biology—a motif in Carr’s work—and Sorrel’s submission to her father’s violence, presented in the guise of a free act. Clare Wallace has described it and some of Carr’s other work as tending towards ‘grim patriarchal tragedy’ (2000, 87). WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 111

Aesthetically the play also presents problems: it is clearly a naturalistic drama in many respects, and it has been described as a psychologically realistic response to traumatic and long-term incestuous abuse (Jordan 2010, 86–88). And yet this captures only some aspects of the work, as Jordan notes. Rather as Carr’s earlier play, By the Bog of Cats … offered a subversive response to Aristotle’s prescription for tragedy, On Raftery’s Hill subverts the conventions of the naturalistic well-made play while still appearing to preserve them. Read as an allegory, it becomes a parable of the fallen world. Red’s rape of Sorrel in On Raftery’s Hill is not actually staged; the preceding scene establishes what is about to happen and proceeds to blackout and the interval. What is enacted is a long sequence of angry exchanges between Sorrel and Red that takes place late at night, when Red overhears his daughter’s conversation with her fiancé about taking over his farm in the future. The sense of threat develops quite abruptly out of what seems like an ordinary family row when Sorrel attempts to pass Red to leave the room, and he blocks her path. He rebukes her for not gutting the hares he caught earlier in the day. When Sorrel replies ‘I don’t know how to gut a hare’, Red seizes control of the moment: ‘Donten ya? Alrigh, I’ll show ya how to gut a hare’ (34). The stage directions read: ‘Grabs her suddenly and holds her in a vice grip. Sorrel struggles pointlessly against the strength of him’ (34). The scene continues with Red implacably cutting off her clothes with a knife, narrating how to skin and gut the hare while Sorrel screams for help to Dinah, Ded, and her grandmother. Red tells her ‘Dinah won’t come and ya think Ded’s comin? (a mad laugh) And Granny’s noh comin. And your precious Dara Mood can’t help ya now.’ Like Woman in Ficky Stingers, Sorrel loses speech: ‘Her voice has betrayed her. We hear the odd animal moan or shriek’ (35). Meanwhile, Red is so much in control that he even pauses and ‘looks in satisfaction at his work’. He then ‘(… pushes her across the table, cuts the straps of her slip.) Now, this is how ya gut a hare. (Stabs knife in table. Blackout.) (35). The decision to go to blackout was taken in later drafts of the play. The first draft6 has the rape performed on the stage in view of the audience. In this first draft Red is more violent in his behaviour from the beginning, and Sorrel’s fiancé Dara is already uncomfortable with his attitude towards his daughters. Dara tells Sorrel ‘Don’ liche men who talches abouh their daughters in such a sexual way’ (27). The ending is also foreshadowed when Shalome tells Dara that he will make some woman happy, but not Sorrel Raftery (41). In this draft, Sorrel goes into the house alone after an 112 L. FITZPATRICK outdoor conversation with Dara. Red is drunk and picks an argument with her, going behind her where she sits and pulling her hair. She hits out backwards, and accidentally hits him in the face, and quickly apologizes. Red ‘wallops her across the face’ (45). The scene unfolds rapidly:

RED: No fuchin’ bitch ever wallops me antha face an’ gets away wudud! SORREL: You fuchen touch me aginan ah’ll scrame tha house down! RED: Ya won’t ya yennin’ cunt ya an’ aven if ya do no wan’ll chome. SORREL: (Roars) Dinah! DINAH! DED! Chome quich! DINAH! GRANNY! GRANNY! DINAH! DINAH! (As she screams Red pushes her across the table, she belts him. He belts her back.) RED: Shuh fuchin up or ah’ll kill ya! (Sorrel goes silent. He pulls her knickers off, opens his trousers and lunges into her. Dinah appears as this is going on she stands there watching, he comes, gets off her, buttons up, pulls down her skirt.) RED: now go an’ tell yar Dara Mood abouh thah if ya dare. Fuchen’ tramp! Y’ave bin hankerin’ ater ud a long time, well now ya know. You open yar fuchen mouh an’ tha nex’ time ah’ll kill ya! Ah sweer! (LIGHTS DOWN). End of Act 1. (Unpublished, 45–46)

This early draft of the play makes explicit some of what is implicit in the final published version. Red’s final speech in the final version accuses Sorrel of ‘prancin’ around like the Virgin Mary’, which suggests a self- conscious purity that irks him. The threat not to tell is never voiced in the final version, though Red fears she might: Dinah reassures him she won’t, that Sorrel is a ‘double Raftery’ and so is well versed in secrecy. However, the earlier draft is more explicit in representing how abuse of this kind persists, and why victims stay. Red uses two threats to silence Sorrel. Firstly, he says ‘now go an’ tell yar Dara Mood abouh thah if ya dare’, implying that Dara will reject her when he knows. He reinforces this by calling her a tramp and telling her she has wanted this for a while. Since Sorrel loves Dara and he is her only means of escape from the family home, she is likely to be reluctant to reveal something that might make him reject her. It also establishes what Red’s counter-narrative will be: that Sorrel seduced him, that the sex was consensual (albeit still taboo and a criminal offence). Quite aside from questions of guilt, innocence or complicity, Red’s repellent and taboo act infects Sorrel with disgust and horror. As Sara Ahmed argues, affect is ‘sticky’. Disgust—which is performative—is related to shameful behaviour, or behaviour which is abjected by the WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 113 community. These are ‘sticky’ affects: shame and disgust ‘stick’ to their object and threaten those in contact with him or her (2004, 103). Secondly, Red threatens to kill Sorrel if she tells. ‘The next time’, he says, making clear that he may choose to rape her again and that attempts to escape him will only make the violence worse. By putting the rape on stage, performed so brutally and in view of Dinah, this text also reinforces for the reader/spectator the helpless complicity of other members of the family. Coupled with Red’s explicitly depicted brutality, this first draft portrays the family as terrorized into submission. The final version is more complex and nuanced. It establishes Red’s kindness to his small daughters, Sorrel’s initial fondness for him, and the unhappily consensual nature of his relationship with his elder daughter. By showing Red as sometimes kind, sometimes caring, Carr creates a more credible dynamic in which his children endure his violence in the hope that when he is calmer he will show them affection. The decision to make the rape inevitable but not to put it on stage resolves a number of difficulties which include the question of creating a titillating display of the woman’s body, but that also include broader questions about the reception of violence and the particular problems of staging rape. Very often in performance, the evocation of a sense of suspense and fear of what might happen is more effective in moving the audience’s emotions than the visible enactment of violence. The spectator’s capacity to imagine the violence allows the full range of possible horror to exist momentarily for him or her, where the imagination creates the real harm inflicted on the vulnerable body of torn skin, blood and pain; the performance will only ever indicate such violence. The performance of the rape on stage would also inevitably provoke judgements about its accuracy or credibility in performance, with all of the difficulties for audience reception that involves in finding the balance between a scene that is sufficiently disturbing without pushing the audience so far that they respond with laughter. Rape is problematic to perform because of its invisibility: the act of penetration cannot be performed on stage and, if performed, cannot in any case be visible in the way that is possible in film. Even if penetration can be made visible it is not the act of penetration but the giving of consent that separates sex from rape. Compare the rape scenes in Baise-Moi, a film that employed actors from the pornography industry to stage actual sex acts: the rape scenes in this film included close-ups of penetration, but the violence of rape is not enacted. Noe’s 2003 filmIrreversible , in contrast, includes a rape scene that shows almost nothing of the actors’ bodies, yet 114 L. FITZPATRICK is so cruel and unrelenting that many critics regarded it as almost unwatch- able. Film can also conjure the special effects required to make the violence as ‘realistic’ or cruel as required. Live performance needs violence to be stylized, and the more heightened the violence, normally, the greater the stylization. Acts which cannot be performed upon the body of the living actor, or which would not be acceptable to most theatre audiences, can be performed through dance (the gang rape in The Judas Tree; the implied rape in Giselle by Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre) or using objects (the blow-up doll in DV8’s Enter Achilles; or the loaf of bread representing the baby in T’shepang). In these examples, the aesthetic beauty of the dance in contrast to the cruelty of the violence, or the proximity of the object to its signified, are deeply affective and evoke the horror and physical harm of such an assault. For example, the ‘wilding’ attack on the rubber doll at the end of Enter Achilles could never be performed upon the body of a living actor, but its performance on the object of the doll vividly communicates the possibility of such violence by a mob, and the vulnerability of the human body to cruelty and destruction. In the broadly naturalistic On Raftery’s Hill, Carr’s strategy of proceed- ing to blackout avoids judgements on verisimilitude and its associated problems, choosing instead to invoke and exploit the audience’s imagination, while the second act includes references to Sorrel’s injuries—‘There’s marks on her as hasn’t healed in three weeks’, Dinah says (45)—that validate the spectator’s worst imaginings. Two elements in the scene affirm the patriarchal origins of Red’s power: his active silencing of Sorrel—his control of the dialogue and thereby his control of the scene; and that his knife is a pocket knife, one he has used earlier on stage to clean his nails. If it were not specified it would be easy to imagine that he is using a far more threatening object, such as a hunting knife, as a phallic substitute. The small knife emphasizes that Red’s power resides mainly in his words, in language, in his capacity to weave a narrative that defines and delimits the roles and opportunities of everyone in the family. His monologue does not offer Sorrel any opportunity for articulate verbal resistance, and he reduces her—via this ‘rape script’ of intimidation and power—to the helpless animal he describes: ‘We hear the odd animal moan or shriek’ (35). As the scene continues, Sorrel increasingly capitulates to Red’s narrative of his actions, which reasserts his dominance over her as physically stronger male, as father in the patriarchal family, and as human being over dumb animal. The dialogue scripts this dehumanization while the characters’ actions embody it, so that Sorrel’s systematic disempowerment and reduction to a WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 115 piece of meat is metaphorically represented in the physical stripping of her clothes, reducing her to a silent, and silenced, body. The other characters’ failure to respond to her screams testifies to Red’s control of his environment, and to his effective dehumanization of the other family members who have become incapable of empathetic action. On a reading of the script and of the performance, the rape reflects— deliberately or otherwise—normative ideas about gender, gendered bodies and gender relations. The stage direction reads that Red grabs [Sorrel] suddenly and holds her in a vice grip. Sorrel struggles pointlessly against the strength of him. Given that Red is using his other hand to cut Sorrel’s clothes off, this requires him to immobilize her with one hand while apparently standing upright, and raises questions about the desperation with which Sorrel fights him. A convincing performance therefore demands a particular kind of casting in which Red is significantly larger than Sorrel, materializing femaleness as physically weak and helpless. In fact, her submission to Red’s violence fits within commonly-held ideas about rape, an act that is represented ambivalently in scholarly volumes on female psychology and sexuality, in religious systems of belief, in visual art, in the courts, in film, pulp fiction, romantic magazines and novels, popular music, soft- and hard-core pornography which is readily available online, and contemporary popular forms of entertainment like gaming. These all offer representations of rape as a kind of forceful seduction to which the woman submits when she realizes she has no alternative, and in which she finds a kind of masochistic pleasure. Such narratives are so familiar to all of us that they become part of a cultural landscape. It is the incestuous quality that Carr gives to the rape that makes it so repugnant. If Sorrel’s rapist was her fiancé, would a conclusion in which they were reunited be so far beyond conventional plot or narrative? The premiere production by Druid Theatre Company stages the rape as brutal, rapidly escalating violence that Sorrel cannot effectively resist. In the set and costuming, this production expresses the despair of the family’s situation and of the two sisters. The set is very dark: dark flagstones, dark walls, a single bulb over a dark table, benches by the table and a dark armchair by an unlit fire. A staircase curves into the unlit upstairs from upstage left. The house appears almost derelict. In this space, Sorrel shines: the lights come up on her crouching childishly beneath the unshaded light bulb with her legs folded beneath her, carefully putting on make-up and brushing her hair in preparation for Dara’s visit. She appears very much a teenager, self-absorbed and relatively carefree even in this grim setting. 116 L. FITZPATRICK

She pays only a moment’s attention to her grandmother or her brother Ded, and lets Dinah rush around after them while she remains immersed in her own activities. Her dress is light in colour and pretty and her feet are bare. Dinah in contrast looks older than her years; her hair is pulled back into a loose ponytail and she is wearing a long dress and a shapeless man’s cardigan. Shalome appears like an ancient child in a long white nightgown with socks on her feet and her white hair wild about her head; and Red’s costume is that of a farmer in a tweed jacket, trousers tucked into muddy wellingtons, in from the fields with his gun. Sorrel’s innocence is expressed in her costume and in her movements, at this early stage of the play. When Dara enters she hangs around near him as he talks to the men, standing behind him with her knee resting on the bench beside him. She takes out her hairbrush and tidies her hair, paces back and forth half-listening to the men but clearly impatient to be away with Dara. When he tells the news about Sarah Brophy she reacts with shock and sympathy, then stands quietly holding her drink, concerned, as if perhaps something is vaguely troubling her, something vaguely familiar in the news of Brophy’s assault on his daughter. Dara’s physical protectiveness towards her is quite evident in the proxemics of the scene. In contrast, Red and Dinah are clearly not in a normal father–daughter relationship. Again, it is the physical movements of the actors that communicate this so clearly. Red calls for Dinah to come downstairs to him. He begins by half-crawling up the stairs, then goes up a few steps still calling her, then returns to the kitchen and sits by the fire with his whiskey. After brief scenes with Ded and with Shalome, Red is left alone again on stage. Dinah enters in her nightdress. She takes a whiskey, and sits smok- ing at the table at the opposite end to her father. It is a scene, and an arrangement, more suggestive of a long-married husband and wife than a father and daughter, though it is difficult to say why. Perhaps it is that they sit and talk to each other without looking at each other, each facing out towards the audience. Perhaps it is the sense that Dinah is preaching, or nagging, in between puffs of her cigarette. Then she turns towards him laughing and it is almost wifely again, as she waves the cigarette at him and laughs, swinging her leg, and the silences develop between them again. The lift of her head, the movement of the body, doesn’t suggest a daughter but a wife or a lover of long standing. In the performance, Sorrel enters pensive, smiling, hears her father and speaks to him as he stands on the stairs. In the gloom and against the dark WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 117 set he seems almost to hover above her, cleaning his nails with his knife. It is a small pocket knife; there is nothing particularly threatening about it. Sorrel tries to pass him on the stairs. The scene suddenly changes: he leans in to speak to her, then catches her by the hair at the back of her head and drags her to the table. He pulls her cardigan off first. He pins her against the table, cutting at her clothes. They struggle and he pulls her around by her hair to get the dress off her, then shoves her back against the table and stands in close between her legs. He lies down over her to cut off the slip, while she screams and they struggle. The slamming the knife into the table is a violent gesture. The scene is less than two minutes long in duration. It is easy to imagine that the character doesn’t know what is going to happen until it does; that she screams but no one comes, and that she is horrified or paralyzed and disbelieving as he cuts away her slip. Although this casting does reiterate normative gender stereotypes in the relative size of the actors, this is not the only locus of Red’s power. The suddenness of the violence shocks, and the rapid manipulation of Sorrel’s body as she is swung and jerked and pushed is disorientating and makes clear that it would be difficult to physically resist. The scene goes to blackout and to the interval, and when the lights come up again, a bowed figure once more sits beneath the light bulb, at the table. It is Sorrel, but very much changed. She now resembles Dinah, her hair pulled back from her face, plain and downcast, wearing a long skirt and a huge baggy jumper many sizes too big for her. She is no longer carefree and youthful but beaten and defeated. Her change in costume communicates her desire to hide her physical body and to make herself as undesirable as possible, as if that will protect her from further assault. Her final rejection of Dara in this production is clearly motivated by her realization that she cannot escape what has happened to her. This is communicated visually as well as by the script. For example, Dinah enters from upstairs carrying Sorrel’s wedding dress. She lays the dress on the table where Sorrel was raped, smoothing it out and positioning it so that it lies along the length of the table. It is impossible not to see the dress as Sorrel’s body, vulnerable and violated, laid out by her mother for her father to rape her. In a later scene with Dara and her father, where Red throws the papers for her dowry onto the same table, Sorrel snatches them up and runs upstairs. This leaves Red and Dara alone on stage, both standing under the light, Red positioned like some evil spirit whispering in Dara’s ear. When Sorrel re-enters in her huge, baggy clothes, her physicality again suggests that she is beaten and defeated. 118 L. FITZPATRICK

The performance ends with the characters arranged into a tableau. Sitting at the table and drinking whiskey, Dinah tries to persuade Sorrel to escape while she can. Her gestures are emphatic while Sorrel sits completely still. Dinah hugs and rocks her. Next Red enters, bringing Shalome in Sorrel’s wedding dress, covered in mud. Shalome sits on the bench next to Sorrel, both facing outward towards the audience. Dinah sits on the stairs, and Red sits on his armchair by the fire, on opposite sides of the stage. This is the final image: all the characters face front. Red sits still in his chair holding his shotgun; Shalome sits in the wedding dress beside Sorrel, neither of them moving, and Dinah is barely visible on the edge of the stairs. Sorrel speaks the final lines confirming that she has sent Dara Mood away. Nobody moves. This final sequence lasts about two minutes until the stage gradually fades to black. Critical commentary on this play has been mixed, but with some attention paid to the psychological impact of incestuous abuse and the realism with which Carr represents the ambivalence of the characters towards their father, and their confusion about their relationships with him and with each other (Jordan 2010, 86–90). The play’s close focus on the family unit, its domestic setting, the detailing of the social context, the clear implication that the characters are formed by their genetic heritage as well as their early experiences, and the plot that centres on the revelation of a family secret and ends with the resolution of the problem, all suggest that this is a work of naturalism. The rural setting, the farmer’s kitchen, Red’s obsession with his land, and the constitution of the extended family with the grandmother present and the mother long since dead are all familiar conventions of Irish naturalistic drama. The feminist objections that can be raised against its portrayal of gender and of sexual violence are those of the feminist critique of realism: the seeming inevitability of the action does not provoke the audience to question the structures that support Red’s power over his family, so the interpersonal or subjective violence is vilified but the systemic violence underlying it remains undetectable; the silencing of Sorrel obliterates her as a subject and heightens her objectification, and her body is put on display in a way that Red’s is not, thereby reiterating conventions of gender on stage. Nonetheless, the work unsettles conventional expectations both of naturalism as an aesthetic and of local forms. It sets up the convention of the country kitchen only to reveal it as a site of torture and entrapment; the farm that would conventionally be worked by Red and his son is a hill littered with the decaying corpses of mutilated animals. The grandmother is senile and spiteful, not kindly or wise; and WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 119 the father is an ogre who devours his own children. The village is not much different, with the visitors bringing tales of Brophy’s rape of his daughter, her madness on the birth of a stillborn child, and Brophy’s remorse and suicide. Isaac, the family friend, is an eccentric whose passion for his cat Rosie provides comic relief: ‘She’s Padgkins Disease, same as the Elephant Man had, her bones just kapes growin, eventually all her bones’ll be on the outside, kinda like a birdcage’. The cat turns Isaac out of his bed, taking all of it for herself; ‘she’s like a prima donna ouha the opere- hha, wailin and flailin on the bed. Nothin would do for her last nigh only hop me ouh on the fluur and her wud the whole bed to herself’ (18). The heightened, harsh poetic language which is characteristic of Carr’s work is not naturalistic, nor are the eccentricities of characters like Isaac and Shalome. These suggest not naturalism but a dark fairy-tale, a story of hobgoblins, or to quote Dinah a horror story of ‘children playin in a field ah some awful game before rules was made’ (2009, 57–58). Though apparently naturalistic, the play uses the grotesque as a device to blur the distinction between the human characters and animals: not only the gutting of the hare, but Ded’s life in the cowshed amongst the animals, Dinah giving birth there, Isaac’s cat/wife, Shalome’s story of being taken up into the trees by the gorilla as a child in India (12), and Sorrel’s comment towards the end of the play that they are like ‘a band a gorillas swinging from the trees’ (58). These images speak to the abuse suffered by the characters at the hands of their parents and protectors, with Isaac’s tale of bul- lying by his cat functioning as comic to provide relief. Sorrel’s final resignation to her fate as a Raftery might signify the impossibility of resistance, pointing to Red’s violence as systemic and symbolic rather than interpersonal (like the Woman in Ficky Stingers who also finds resistance futile and impossible). Her decision certainly implies that she is choosing or accepting a sexual relationship with her father. But this again is to privilege a naturalistic reading of the text. An alternative privileging of the grotesque reads On Raftery’s Hill as a monstrous fairy-tale, and as an image of the ‘fallen world’ as a kind of existential hell. There is no escape from the Raftery household because it comes to stand for all the world; the abuses that the characters inflict upon each other in their circle of hell assure us both that hell is other people, and that there is no exit. The characters’ semi-animal, semi-human state speaks to their inability to forge any real compassionate relationship. Meanwhile, a feminist reading of the realistic elements working from Patricia Schroeder’s study of feminist realism, can identify in the play the telling of stories that are often 120 L. FITZPATRICK suppressed: the complexities of familial abuse, the confusion of the abused child who tolerates the abuse because he or she needs the parents’ love and the protection they offer against other predators. Jordan discusses the context for this and other recent Irish work at some length, identifying key social and historical moments it responds to: ‘Since the mid-1980s especially, people have been shocked by stories in the public domain of abuse against children and vulnerable adults. Neglect, victimization, starvation, emotional violation, sexual assault and other horrors of all sorts, including torture, burning, cutting, fingernail extraction and sadism unsettled many’ (2010, 83). Court cases during the 1980s and 1990s first reported on child sexual abuse and domestic violence, which were previously hidden family crimes, and the 1999 Irish documentary States of Fear first revealed to full public gaze the systematic abuse suffered by children in religious- run institutions and the shocking complicity of the Roman Catholic Church in covering up the abuse and protecting the abusers.7 Carr writes out of this moment, creating a text that captures both the foulness of the violence perpetrated by Red against his children, against Red by his mother, and against his mother by his grandfather on the one hand, and the human complexity of responses to this abuse on the other. Thematically, On Raftery’s Hill has similarities with Shelagh Stephenson’s Five Kinds of Silence, which premiered as a radio play on BBC 4 in 1996. Stephenson won the Writers Guild Award for Best Original Radio Play (1996), the Mental Health Media Award for Best Radio Play (1996), and the Society of Authors Sony Radio Awards for Best Radio Play (1997). It was adapted for the stage in May 2000 and performed at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith to lukewarm reviews. The play is clearly intended to portray the psychological complexity that binds the abused to their abuser, and to address the recurring question of why women remain with sexually and physically violent men. While early responses to the publicizing of domestic violence drew explanations based on women’s innate masochism (as reflected in Daniels’s plays), Stephenson traces the learned helplessness of Mary and her daughters Susan and Janet to their gradual induction into Billy’s world. A more aesthetically realistic set of characters than the members of the Raftery family, they tentatively express their inability to conceive of any effective resistance to their father Billy’s violence. The play centres on the three women, who have just murdered Billy. It is structured as a series of flashbacks in which Billy recounts key scenes from his childhood with his violent mother. The abuse he suffered WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 121 is not presented as a reason or direct motivation for his own violent actions, which are all about control of his surroundings, but they do provide some sense of his development from child to adult. Mary recounts the early loss of her mother, her neglect at the hands of her father, and her recognition when she saw Billy that he was the one for her (he recounts the same experience). He is not violent until they are married; then she is trapped into living by his detailed and violently enforced regulations, and brings her daughters into that world. The play explores the women’s inability to resist or to leave, until Billy is hospitalized and their experience of daily life without him is such a relief that they cannot allow him to take control again. When he returns home his daughters shoot him. Billy’s violence is narrated and described—in flashbacks, in the interrogation scenes between the women and the police, in the women’s interactions with their psychiatrist and in their own soliloquies. The violence is frightening and horrifying. He says ‘Oh, home, the smells I love … and the two I love the most, the two smells that fill the room like a siren. One of them is fear: burning tyres, vinegar, piss. And the other one is the smell of blood, matted in Mary’s hair. I gave her a good kicking before I went out’ (2013, online). Mary recounts how they met: ‘I love you, he said. Practically straight away. I believed him. I was twenty. I knew nothing … And now he’ll never leave. It’ll never be over, it’ll never end. Every time I look in the mirror he’s there. Scars … here is where he broke my fingers, my nose, my wrist’ (online). The violence is described in simple and banal terms that suggest the women’s acceptance of it, and this heightens its impact: it is represented as destroying their capacity for agency and for self-realization far beyond the infliction of physical pain. The revelations of the women are elaborated and set against Billy’s memories and self- justifications as he details the terror he inflicted on his family, while insisting that he loved them. But the character demonstrates enough insight to recognize the pleasure he finds in exercising this power, as he reflects on killing the neighbour’s cat for the pleasure of it, and violently assaulting women he describes as ‘tarts’. ‘There’s a look I like to see, fear is it, face twists, mouth pleads’ (online). When he first meets Mary he feels ‘It’s better than killing the cat. Although, somehow, that’s muddled in with it too’ (online). The women’s entrapment is increased by the refusal of those close to them to offer help. Mary tried to leave once: ‘I went to my father’s. Took the girls and ran. My father said: You made your bed. Now lie in it. Marriage is a sacrament. Marriage is for life’ (online). The reference to the 122 L. FITZPATRICK sacrament suggests that the character is Roman Catholic, a religion which does not allow divorce and that historically has encouraged women to return to violent husbands and seek to reform them through submission. Billy follows them and tells Mary he is sorry, and she returns home. ‘When we got in the door he broke my ribs. Jumped on them. I never went out again. He said if I did he’d find us and kill us’ (online). With no apparent avenue of escape the three women cannot really imagine effective resistance. This helplessness continues even when Billy announces to his older daughter, when she is twelve or thirteen, that he will now have sex with her. ‘He said, Susan, you know I have sex with your mother, well, now I want it with you too’ (online). She has no possible escape: her mother cannot help, and she must wait until (a few weeks later) he sends her mother and sister out and then rapes her. ‘Did you tell your mother?’ the solicitor asks Susan, who replies ‘Yes … There was nothing she could do’ (Stephenson online). The women’s complete submission to Billy is part of the trap that their abuser carefully structures around them. They pose for happy holiday pictures, the bruises invisible under their swimming costumes, longing—as one of them describes—to pull off their clothes and shout out for someone to see or to help. Yet, as Susan comments, ‘Sometimes he kissed us in the street, not a father’s kiss. People were nearby, people we knew, and nobody said a word. No one said nothing … But they knew, they saw. All that silence. Five kinds of silence’ (Stephenson online). Susan’s ambivalent response to the repeated rapes is captured in a frag- ment of her conversation with the therapist and her diary: she dreams about her father, that he is having sex with her, and that she is enjoying it. She writes, ‘I know I’m your daughter and that’s what makes it so special, and secret. You look so sad and I will make everything better for you … You’re the only lover I’ve ever had. I pull you down towards me. I wake up. I’m sick over the side of the bed. How could you do this to me, Dad? How could you do this?’ (Stephenson online). While the representational strategies are markedly different, Susan’s description is not unlike Dinah’s statements about her father, that he ‘knew how to gladden a child’s heart’, and that they continue having sex occasionally but they want it to stop: ‘Ud’s just like children playin in a field ah some awful game before rules was made’ (Carr 2009, 58). The play reviews were variable. The Variety review describes it as ‘sopo- rific’ and dependent on the idea of child abuse being unspeakable. Matt Wolf writes, ‘not for the first time, one feels that child abuse has sup- planted the Holocaust as the emotive theatrical issue de nos jours, as if WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 123 merely to state the unsayable were in and of itself drama’ (June 2000, online). The review raises an important question: whether plays like this deny women agency, or represent women as eternal victims of male violence. Even the end of the play, which sees the women released without custodial sentence to a house of their own, in which they immediately build a store cupboard like the one their father insisted upon, suggests the impossibility of meaningful escape. Yet despite the failure to escape completely, the women in Five Kinds of Silence do enact some measure of resistance. Most obviously, Mary and her daughters kill Billy. Their recov- ered capacity to take action to order their own world and preserve themselves is a measure of their rejection of passive victimhood. Though they are scarred—as Mary says—they at least are relieved of the fear that Billy loves to smell in the house. In contrast, the Raftery family remain entirely trapped in the family home, unable to free themselves from their brutal genealogy. Carr’s play’s use of grotesque characterization heightens the monstrous quality of the family as a whole and the fairy-tale elements of the story, but does not advance any sense of the characters’ agency. Other modes of resistance to rape scripts in women’s writing include the refusal to represent the phallus as a weapon, or as impressive or overwhelming in any way. Carr’s indexical representation of the phallus as a pocket knife echoes with Lewis’s character’s discussion of the phallus in Ficky Stingers, where she likens it to ‘octopus-eye gristle. Like a cold raw knuckle in your mouth. Like warm cheese in polythene sweating, in my mouth’ (Lewis 1987, 121). This description of the penis renders it disgusting and ludicrous; the language denies the power and glamour of the phallus as weapon. The rape in Ficky Stingers concludes, ‘It’s surprising really, he just rams it in, pulls it out and comes all over me … He soiled me. He soiled my clothes. He soiled me’ (121). The Woman expresses her revulsion in the reiteration of ‘soiled’, and phrases like ‘rammed’, ‘pulls it out’, ‘comes all over me’, which distances her from the action so that she appears as a disgusted observer. In spite of Terry’s physical dominance, the Woman’s mockery of his penis allows her to demonstrate a shred of resistance and autonomy. The Woman’s disgust is echoed by the character of Philomele in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale, a text that also makes use of the grotesque to stage a feminist understanding of rape; and The Grace of Mary Traverse mocks the rapist Lord Gordon’s attempt to liken his penis to a sword. Wertenbaker draws on the genre conventions of restoration comedy for The Grace of Mary Traverse, which was first staged in the Royal Court 124 L. FITZPATRICK

Theatre in London in 1985. The play is set in the 1780s against the backdrop of the Gordon Riots, but as Wertenbaker states in her note to the text it is not an historical play. Most of the characters are fictional, and the representation of historical events does not attempt accuracy. The central figure is the eponymous Mary Traverse, a wealthy young woman in London, who opens the play addressing an empty chair while her father hovers in the background. She is being trained in the arts of womanly conversation, which involves the concealment of her considerable knowledge and the focus and drawing out of her interlocutor. ‘To be agreeable, a young woman must make the other person say interesting things’ her father tells her (1996, 68), describing her later in the scene as his ‘bright- est adornment’ (70). These early scenes parody the advice given to young ladies of the time on appropriate behaviour, and Wertenbaker explores the suppression of personality that proper feminine behaviour required (and perhaps still requires). She has Mary try to walk without leaving any foot- print, and to move silently without breathing. The servant Mrs Temptwell drily comments, ‘Your mother was good at [not breathing] … Said it thickened the waist. She died of not breathing in the end, poor thing … But she looked ever so beautiful in her coffin and [your father] couldn’t stop looking at her. Death suits women’ (72–73). Mrs Temptwell is a Mephistophelian figure who observes the suppression of Mary’s intelligence and her restricted life with ironic detachment, and who awakens her curiosity with information about the wider world. Her conversation arouses Mary’s desire to venture out of doors on foot, disguised so as to protect her honour. The two women leave the house secretly and go to Cheapside so that Mary can see ordinary life—which she finds repulsive and horrifying. In Cheapside she encounters Lord Gordon, a real historical figure, who attempts to rape her and then does rape a young, innocent working-class girl named Sophie, who is on stage in search of her aunt. The rape scene begins with Lord Gordon, having noticed Mrs Temptwell and Mary out on foot (so assuming that Mary is a woman from the lower social classes), clearing his throat to attract her attention, but Mary has never been on the public street before and she does not recognize his gesture. In fact, before she enters he clears his throat in proximity to Sophie, but she is absorbed in her search and walks off stage. Mary thus seems to be the second woman to reject his expression of interest, and he reacts with anger or frustration: ‘No. This is intol- erable. You can’t go without noticing me. My name is George Gordon. Lord Gordon.’ When Mary still moves to leave, he says ‘How dare WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 125 someone like you ignore me. You!’ (77–78). Gordon’s sexual aggression therefore is aroused by his perception of being sexually rejected and thus humiliated by two socially inferior women. Returning to Marcus’s concept of the ‘rape script’, Lord Gordon opens the script but Mary fails to respond as he expects. However, when he challenges her, her fear reactivates the ‘script’ and he immediately takes pleasure in this: ‘I don’t want you to be frightened. Wait. Yes. Are you very frightened?’ When she replies, ‘Not very’, he is offended again, drawing his sword so that now she does react with fear. But Sophie enters, and her self-sacrificing substitution of her own body for Mary’s leads to the staging an off-stage rape that is narrated and commented upon by Mary and Mrs Temptwell. Mrs Temptwell watches and does nothing to protect the girls; she remarks that ‘Virtue, like ancestors, is a luxury of the rich’ (80). Lord Gordon, and his friend Mr Manners who joins him, are unconcerned about the raped girl, who moves ‘painfully’, and Mary sees blood on the ground. Gordon’s dismissive attitude—‘they’re just women’ (80) speaks to the lack of respect for lower-class women and the casual nature of their economic and sexual exploitation. Mary’s attempt to gain knowledge of the world leads inexorably to sexual danger and the threat of violence, and to an awareness of her bodily vulnerability within the discourses of her society. Her father disowns her, tells Lord Gordon that she is dead. Mrs Temptwell becomes her pimp (though Mary describes her as a ‘duenna’), and she also prostitutes the passive and long-suffering Sophie who is a kind of Sadean Justine figure. Mary’s philosophical conversations with her father towards the end of the play are an exploration of language and its deficiencies, as she tries to unpick the relationships between discourse, reality and convention. These dialogues foreground the ways in which the discourses in circulation at a given time construct social and individual identities, as well as the freedom to express particular ideas or to pursue particular lines of action. Sexual violence becomes part of Mary’s learning about the world and the construction of her gender within it; but the ending is hopeful, with Mary, Little Mary, Sophie, her father and Mrs Temptwell all living peacefully in the country. The Love of the Nightingale recounts the story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses of the rape of Philomele by her brother-in-law Tereus, King of Thrace. In Ovid, Tereus is married to Philomele’s sister Procne, an Athenian princess, whom he has taken back to Thrace with him. There she bears him a son, Itys. After a time she asks for her sister to join her, so Tereus returns to Athens to fetch her. On the journey home he falls in love with her and 126 L. FITZPATRICK rapes her. To silence her and prevent her from accusing him he cuts out her tongue and abandons her on an island, telling everyone that she is dead. But Philomele survives and weaves a cloth telling the story of what happened to her. Escaping her captivity, she reveals to her sister what happened, and they avenge her by killing Itys and serving his body to Tereus in a feast.8 Wertenbaker’s version was first produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1988 and was directed by Garry Hynes, who also directed On Raftery’s Hill. The play remains true to its source, with the exception that Philomele tells her story by means of puppets, which is a more theatrical solution than the woven cloth. The play ‘intricately layers myth, feminism and politics’ (Roth 2009, 43) as Wertenbaker’s Philomele confronts Tereus with a loathing and revulsion that is expressed in mockery of his penis and of his manliness, rather than a denunciation of his dishonourable behaviour. While Ovid’s Philomele accuses him of treason and declares her intention to denounce him regardless of her own disgrace, Wertenbaker’s says: ‘when I saw you in your nakedness I couldn’t help laughing because you were so shriveled, so ridiculous and not the way it is on statues … a man who could screech such quick and ugly pleasure, a man of jelly beneath his hard skin’ (1996, 336–337). She condemns him as ‘puny’, ‘a man of tiny spirit and shriveled courage’ (336–337). She also accuses him in a speech that realizes her own innocence and his culpability: ‘I was the cause, wasn’t I? Was I? I said something. What did I do?’ She lists what it could have been: her walk, the song she sang, the way she wore her hair: ‘It was the beach. I ought not to have been there. I ought not to have been anywhere. I ought not to have been … at all … then there would be no cause.’ Finally she concludes, ‘It was your act. It was you. I caused nothing’ (335). The scene issues a challenge to contemporary attitudes to rape that blame the victim for her appearance, actions, or occupation of a physical space, which Philomele summarizes and concludes as, ‘I ought not to have been … at all’. Philomele’s refusal to submit to the dominant narratives of disgrace and dishonour results in further violence and mutilation—Tereus cuts out her tongue—but her determination to denounce her assailant leads her to create puppets to bring to the festival of the Bacchae, where she performs the rape for her sister and the women of Thrace. This refusal to be silenced and the struggle to speak recurs in women’s dramatizations of rape: Rame’s performance is a speech which defies her attackers and political opponents, proving that she is not shamed or silenced by their violence; Sorrel in On Raftery’s Hill tells her family what happened, WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 127 though they refuse to help her; her decision not to tell Dara does not seem motivated by shame but rather by a submission to genealogical fate. Female characters’ speech may be distorted or thwarted or disbe- lieved, but with the exception of the Woman in Ficky Stingers they all struggle towards agency and subjectivity through this witnessing to their experience. Along the way, they encounter hostility from other women as well as from men. Sorrel’s sister-mother tells her to ‘make up’ with her father, minimizing the violence that has been inflicted as if it is a family squabble. Philomele’s Nurse Niobe advises her to submit, saying: ‘get him to provide for you. They don’t like us much afterwards, you know. Now he might still feel something. We must eat. Smile. Beg.’ Philomele reacts angrily and Niobe adds, ‘You’re nothing now. Another victim. Grovel. Like the rest of us’ (334). Like the female characters in Ficky Stingers, the enslaved Niobe and the utterly trapped Dinah see no alternatives to the status quo. They cannot imagine a different way, another response. And like Sorrel, Philomele finds herself isolated with a rapist who is in control of his environment. He is the warrior king, protected by his troops in his homeland, where she is foreign; he is physically stronger, and he interprets all her protests as consent and his desire as the will of the gods:

TEREUS: Love me. PHILOMELE: No. TEREUS: Then my love will be for both. I will love you and love myself for you. Philomele, I will have you. … PHILOMELE: Let me mourn. TEREUS: Your darkness and your sadness make you all the more beautiful. PHILOMELE: I have to consent. TEREUS: It would be better, but no, you do not have to. Does the god ask permission? PHILOMELE: Help. Help me. Someone. Niobe! TEREUS: So you are afraid. I know fear well. Fear is consent. You see the god and you accept. (328)

Tereus’s refusal to hear and his unwavering sense of his own righteous- ness mean that Philomele’s lack of consent becomes irrelevant. His invocation of divine and natural justice leaves no space for her to speak from, and no subject position for her adopt. The rape then takes place off stage, 128 L. FITZPATRICK but it is audible to the audience. It is audible to Niobe, who speaks of Philomele screaming and relates her experience of rape by the conquering Athenian soldiers who massacred the men and took the women as slaves. When it is over, she moves to comfort Philomele: ‘A cool cloth. On her cheeks first. That’s where it hurts most. The shame’ (330). It is the shame that Niobe feels so acutely, and that Philomele absolutely refuses to feel. In Philomele’s speech to Tereus after the rape, there is a logical, almost legalistic exploration of each possible explanation before she arrives at the only logical conclusion: that Tereus bears responsibility for his own actions. Her determination to avenge herself does not waver from that point onwards. Philomele’s re-enactment of the rape and mutilation with puppets is performed on the feast of the Bacchae in front of an audience of Thracian women and her sister Procne. The stage directions describe the scene: at first, Philomele enacts the rape to ridicule it: ‘The rape scene is re-enacted in a gross and comic way … The crowd laughs. Philomele then stages a very brutal illustration of the cutting of the female doll’s tongue. Blood cloth on the floor. The crowd is very silent’ (342). It is significant that the rape is received as comical by the on-stage audience, and it is the other violence that shocks and silences them; the puppet show exposes a problem with the staging of rape, which is that it can easily become a representation of a sexual act with the question of consent obscured, and the more realistic the attempts at representation the more problematic the representation becomes for the spectator. On the other hand, the violence of the mutilation is unambiguous. In the puppet show, what was terrifying and painful becomes grotesque and comic before it silences the audience with its brutality. As Roth argues, this scene recalls the use of theatre as a forum for the dispossessed to act out their experiences of abuse, ‘thereby evoking therapeutic and/ or testimonial use of dolls to show, and release, “unspeakable” incest and sexual abuses’ (Roth 2009, 55). The conclusion of Philomele’s show means that for her audience, the narrative is now shaped and given a logical structure, becoming more clearly a means of bearing witness than a moment’s entertainment. The experience is transformed into an aesthetic product. Finally, the puppet show adds a happy ending in which the Procne doll recognizes her sister, and comes to take her away. As soon as the puppets enact the reconciliation, Procne emerges from the crowd to claim Philomele (342). In staging rather than speaking her story, Philomele is able to rewrite the supposedly inevitable plot of the rape script and the WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 129 resulting recognition leads her to kinship as a line of escape from victimhood. Wertenbaker does not put the rape on stage, but it is represented twice: the first time aurally in Philomele’s off-stage screams which punctuate Nurse Niobe’s monologue about her own rape at the hands of Athenian soldiers when she was taken as a slave (330), and the second time by puppets in an enactment that alienates the bodies of the protagonists to allow for a focus only on specific aspects of the event. The strategy of putting the rape into a contiguous off-stage space that allows for aural signifiers potentially creates an affective response in the audience. The screams, like the blackout in On Raftery’s Hill, invite the spectators to imagine what is happening. Meanwhile Niobe’s monologue contextualizes sexual violence as systemic in a war-like culture where women can easily be reduced to objects of trade and symbols of triumph and defeat. The issue of the pre- carity of women’s citizenship is represented here, as is the question of honour in war. Philomele physically cannot speak, unlike the Woman, or Sorrel and Dinah, who are all physically capable of naming the violence done to them, but find it difficult or impossible to articulate their experience and to have their speech valued and accepted. In contrast, her means of expression—mimetic enactment of the violence—is believed immediately. Words can be slippery, and the attempt to transform the bodily experience of rape into meaningful speech may be hindered by hegemonic discourses that define and limit what can be said and understood. But the mimetic reproduction of action using puppets allows the audience to see for themselves what happened with the immediacy of witnesses to a scene. The distancing effect of using puppets rather than human bodies shifts the focus from the body in performance to the action performed, and the perspective represented in performance is Philomele’s own, since it is of her own construction. Denied language, she finds a more immediate and effective mode of bearing witness and reclaims her own artistic power at the same time. While Wertenbaker has Philomele perform rape during a play within a play, other plays try to represent rape within the drama using metonymy and metaphor to convey its brutality and cruelty. These plays all represent rape by signifying pain—through blood, screams, inarticulate sound, knives, and verbal description. Red’s pocket knife stabbing the knife into the table communicates the pain and shock of penetration, so that although the audience does not see the rape performed, it is represented for them through the semiotic substitution of the knife and table for the bodies of 130 L. FITZPATRICK

Red and Sorrel. In a similar way, the Woman in Ficky Stingers foregrounds the physical bodily experience of the attack by asking the spectators ‘Do you know what it feels like to have a rolled up newspaper jammed down your throat? A chair leg rammed up your arse? It hurts. It hurts like fuck’ (1987, 121). By substituting everyday domestic objects for the phallus—a pocket knife, a chair leg, a newspaper—and choosing examples of penetration that could only be painful, and that implicate a male body as much as a female, these scenes communicate pain, shock and outrage. The elimination of the sexual aspect of rape, through this substitution of other objects for the phallus and of other orifices for the vagina, also removes potential underlying resonances of the pleasurable sexual penetration of the female body, thereby encouraging the spectators to identify with the victim rather than, vicariously, with the perpetrator. This minimizes the potential for representations of rape to be received as titillating or erotic, which is an issue for dramatists and theatre practitioners in a cultural context where explicit representations of sexual violence are eroticized in pornography (Dworkin 1988; Segal 1997).

Conclusions In the work of Wertenbaker, Carr and Lewis a range of strategies for representing rape emerge, some—though not all—of which can be read as challenging the ‘rape script’. Ficky Stingers may be read as challenging the script, as it emphasizes the woman’s subjective experience and prompts the audience to question the characters’ behaviours at different points in the drama. Wertenbaker’s off-stage representation in Love of the Nightingale and Philomele’s determination to express her experience, even after Tereus cuts out her tongue, also offer a challenge to normative constructions of gender and received notions of women’s victim status. Carr’s work arguably dramatizes sexual violence to create a kind of hopeless patriarchal tragedy, from which the women have no escape (since the same crimes are reported from the village). However like the other playwrights, her representation of the physical pain of rape disrupts its eroticization, and her female characters’ submission to their rapist-father’s script dramatizes the forces that can create monsters and keep their victims compliant. The difficulties of representing rape that these plays highlight are the problem of shaping physical, lived experience into a narrative that is heavily influenced by social and cultural discourses in both its construction for the theatre, and its reception in performance. Women’s representations of WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 131 rape tend to emphasize the pain and violence of the crime, rather than its proximity to intercourse; and they seek strategies that preserve a sense of female agency that counters the physical violation of the rape. This presents a choice initially of what to signify, as well as choosing a strategy to communicate that information visually and acoustically. Given the problems of realism both as a feminist dramaturgical and performance aesthetic and as a strategy for representing rape, simple mimetic representation in which the act is represented by its simulation is usually avoided. Realistic mimesis may titillate, facilitate the objectification of the woman’s body, or be received in keeping with hegemonic discourses of active male desire and female sexual passivity. Rape is therefore often signified in these plays through the presence of blood, acoustic cues, or the penetration of an object that is either symbolically or actually proximate to the woman— such as the table in On Raftery’s Hill. The performance of rape on stage raises challenges for feminist scholarship, in particular the question of the relationship between truth and representation noted in Marcus’s essay. The shaping of the plot, or even of testimony as in the case of Rame, for production and consumption by a theatre audience involves choices of what to show and tell and the editing and shaping of the material to make it explicable. The existence of multiple possible representations of the same event is, therefore, unavoidable. But truth is not necessarily singular. These plays may be read as bearing witness to women’s experiences of rape, in their emphasis on power and force, brutality and shock. They may be tools to engage audiences actively with the issue so that they are moved to create change, as Rabey argues Ficky Stingers does. The representation of rape may be most subversive when it does not destroy the victim, as Wertenbaker’s Philomele resists despair, mounts a spirited defence of her freedom from blame, and even finds a method of self-expression to overcome Tereus’s brutal attempts to silence her. In each case, the choices of what to show and what to tell shape the reception of the performance and challenge the hegemonic patriarchal discourses of rape and female sexuality.

Notes 1. One of the best-known and most controversial examples of this is Tomson Highway’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, in which a First Nations woman is raped with a crucifix. While the expression of colonial oppression is very clear and apparent in that image, many within the First Nations 132 L. FITZPATRICK

community objected to the use, yet again, of women’s bodies and experiences as metaphor. See for example Susan Billingham, ‘The Configurations of Gender in Tomson Highway’s Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing’. Modern Drama 46:3 (2003): 358–380; Alan Filewod, ‘Receiving Aboriginality: Tomson Highway and the Crisis of Cultural Authenticity’. Theatre Journal 46:3 (1994): 363–373; Jennifer Preston, ‘Weesageechak Begins to Dance: Native Earth Performing Arts Inc’. TDR 36:1 (1992): 135–159; Marie Annharte Baker, ‘Angry Enough to Spit, but with Dry Lips It Hurts More than You Know’. Canadian Theatre Review 68 (1991): 88–89. 2. For these companies, the aesthetic of group creation (as well as their feminist politics) likely mitigated against their publication, as the work has no single author’s name attached to it and the texts were written to be adapt- able for different audiences and spaces during the run of performance. However, three are published in Michelene Wandor’s Strike While the Iron is Hot including the title play by Red Ladder, and The Women’s Theatre Group educational play for young audiences, My Mother Said I Never Should. Although the mode of representation and the simplicity of the arguments, and some of the characterization and dialogue, date the work, many of the issues persist as part of the fabric of women’s lives: the characters debate the merits of married women working outside the home, men contributing the childrearing and housework, and equal pay for equal work (Strike While the Iron is Hot, 1974). Equal pay is still some distance away for many women; but the male character’s blunt refusal to do ‘women’s work’ is startling for a contemporary reader, and the loving but unequal domestic relationships would be written as abusive in a contemporary play, suggesting that second- wave feminism had a very considerable effect on social attitudes and behaviours. 3. This is a perennial problem. Laura Bates’s blog everydaysexism.com allows women to record everyday experiences of street harassment. Bates has recently published a book by the same title that explores the banal and ordinary harassment of women in public spaces and public life. See https:// everydaysexism.com. 4. The female characters’ inability to discuss their experience in Ficky Stingers is reminiscent of an exchange in Christina Reid’s Tea in a China Cup, a Northern Irish play about the experiences of women over three generations in a Protestant, Unionist family. In one humorous but poignant scene, the central character’s mother attempts to explain menstruation: ‘It happens once a month … you know where you go to the toilet … down there’, and following this with the confusing warning not to let boys ‘do anything that’s not nice’ (1989, 28–29). Although Reid’s mother and daughter share an affectionate relationship and the play is not concerned with sexual violence, WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 133

the secrecy, the lack of a familiar language to discuss female biology, and the anxiety about sexuality and sin disempower the female characters and render them semi-articulate. 5. A recent example that illustrates this attitude is the Rochdale case in England, where girls in their early teens were groomed, sexually abused, and prostituted by a group of men. The men supplied the girls with soft drugs and alcohol. Because the girls came from troubled backgrounds, police and social workers ignored evidence of abuse over a period of years. The Serious Case Review carried out after a court case in which the men were convicted and imprisoned, found that ‘Action that was taken was often focused on addressing the immediate presenting concerns such as offending behaviour, drugs and alcohol misuse and sexual activity, rather than identifying and addressing the underlying reasons why the young person were presenting as they were. Their behaviour was often justified or excused as “their choice” and as “adolescent behaviour”, and was not considered to be a reaction to longer term deeper issues or current abusive relationships’ (Boxall and Wonnacott 2013, online). 6. Thanks to the Druid archive at the National University of Ireland, Galway for access to early drafts of On Raftery’s Hill. 7. For an exploration and analysis of performance work that responds to these revelations, see Emilie Pine, The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 8. This comes from the translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 422–674.

Bibliography

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Books and Articles Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Aston, Elaine. Feminist Theatre Practice. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Aston, Elaine. Feminist Views on the English Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 134 L. FITZPATRICK

Aston, Elaine and Janelle Reinelt. The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Boxall, Brian and Jane Wonnacott. Serious Case Review: Case 26. Torbay: Torbay Safeguarding Children Board, 2013. Brewer, Mary F. Race, Sex and Gender in Contemporary Women’s Theatre. Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 1999. Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will. London: Penguin, 1975. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. London: Verso, 2004. Carr, Marina. ‘On Raftery’s Hill’. Marina Carr: Plays 2. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. Case, Sue-Ellen. Feminism and Theatre. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. Churchill, Caryl. ‘Vinegar Tom’. In Plays by Women, ed. Michelene Wandor. London: Methuen, 1982. Churchill, Caryl. ‘Abortive’. In Churchill Shorts. London: Nick Hern Books, 1990. Churchill, Caryl. Top Girls. London: Methuen, 2001. Daniels, Sarah. ‘Masterpieces’. In Plays: One. London: Methuen, 1991. Daniels, Sarah. ‘“Beside Herself”, “Head Rot Holiday”, “The Madness of Esme and Shaz”’. In Plays: 2. London: Methuen, 1994. Diamond, Elin. ‘Mimesis, Mimicry, and the “True-Real”’. Modern Drama 32:1 (1989): 58–72. Diamond, Elin. Unmaking Mimesis. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Dolan, Jill. ‘The Dynamics of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Pornography and Performance’. Theatre Journal 39:2 (1987): 156–174. Dworkin, Andrea. Letters from a War Zone. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1988; New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1993. Ehrlich, Susan. Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Feehily, Stella. Duck. London: Nick Hern Books, 2003. Gavey, Nicola. Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Goodman, Lizbeth. Contemporary Feminist Theatres. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Jordan, Eamonn. Dissident Dramaturgies: Contemporary Irish Theatre. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2010. Keyssar, Helene. Feminist Theatre. London: Macmillan, 1984. Levinas, Emmanuel and Richard Kearney. ‘Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas’. In Face to Face with Levinas. Albany: SUNY Press, 1986. Lewis, Eve. ‘Ficky Stingers’. In Plays by Women, Vol. 6, Selected and Introduced by Mary Remnant. London: Methuen New Theatrescripts, 1987: 115–127. WOMEN PLAYWRIGHTS: SUBVERTING REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES 135

Love, Lauren. ‘Resisting the “Organic”: A Feminist Actor’s Approach’. In Acting (Re)Considered, 2nd Edition. Ed. Phillip Zarrilli. London and New York: Routledge, 2002: 277–290. Marcus, Sharon. ‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention’. In Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and J. W. Scott. London and New York: Routledge, 1992: 385–403. McIntyre, Clare. Low Level Panic. London: Nick Hern Books, 2017. Patraka, Vicki and Robbie McCauley. ‘Robbie McCauley: Obsessing in Public. An Interview’. TDR 37:2 (1993): 25–55. Rabey, David Ian. ‘Violation and Implication: One for the Road and Ficky Stingers’. In Violence in Drama. ed. James Redmond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991: 261–267. Reinelt, Janelle. ‘Beyond Brecht: Britain’s New Feminist Drama’. Theatre Journal 38:2 (1986): 154–163. Reinelt, Janelle. After Brecht: British Epic Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Roth, Maya E. ‘The Philomela Myth as Postcolonial Feminist Theatre’. In Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works. ed. Sharon Friedman. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company, 2009: 42–60. Rozin, Paul, Jonathan Haidt and Clark McCauley. ‘Disgust’. In Handbook of Emotions. eds. M. Lewis and J. Haviland. New York: Guilford, 1993. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Segal, Lynn. ‘Pornography and Violence’. In Gender Violence, ed. Laura L. O’Toole and Jessica R. Schiffman. New York and London: New York University Press, 1997: 414–422. Thompson, Judith. ‘Lion in the Streets’. In Judith Thompson: Late Twentieth Century Plays 1980–2000. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2003. Townsend-Robinson, Joanna. ‘Expressing the Unspoken: Hysterical Performance as Radical Theatre’. Women’s Studies 32:5 (2003): 533–557. Wallace, Claire. ‘“A Crossroads Between Worlds”: Marina Carr and the Use of “Tragedy”’. Litteraria Pragensia 10:20 (2000): 76–89. Wertenbaker, Timberlake. ‘The Love of the Nightingale’ and ‘The Grace of Mary Traverse’. In Timberlake Wertenbaker: Plays 1, London: Faber & Faber, 1996. Williams, Caroline, Katy Hayes, Sian Quill and Clare Dowling. ‘People in Glasshouses: An Anecdotal History of an Independent Theatre Company’. In Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens. ed. Dermot Bolger. Dublin: New Island Books, 2001: 132–147. Žižek, Slavoj. Violence. London: Profile Books, 2008. CHAPTER 4

The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield: Rape and Conflict

‘The group rape perpetrated by the conquerors is a metonymic celebration of territorial acquisition’, Spivak writes in her seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988, 303). The construction of rape and sexual violence within the dramatic text commonly uses normative conceptions of gender and imperial, postcolonial or nationalist narratives to naturalize the representation of sexual violence or to use it as a metaphor for defeat and devastation. This is true across times and cultures and reflects an ‘actual world’ situation where women and girls become part of the spoils of war to be claimed by the victors. The claiming of the enemy’s women as part of the spoils of war has a long history, but it is only in this century that it has been declared a war crime. Recent evidence shows that rape and forced prostitution were prosecuted as war crimes in Europe following World War II in the late 1940s,1 though most sources cite the ruling following pressure from the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR). The ICTR was the first international court to convict someone of rape as a crime of genocide in 1998. As the United Nations website points out, ‘Rape committed during war is often intended to terrorize the population, break up families, destroy communities, and, in some instances, change the ethnic make-up of the next generation. Sometimes it is also used to deliberately infect women with HIV or render women from the targeted community incapable of bearing children’ (online). The ubiquity of rape in wartime means that it is used in a range of art works including paintings and plays to depict tragic histories and to tell of war and its horrors. However, it may also function to normalize war

© The Author(s) 2018 137 L. Fitzpatrick, Rape on the Contemporary Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70845-4_4 138 L. FITZPATRICK and conflict and in particular to normalize the imperial dominance of one ethnic group over another, as was common in the narratives of European conquest and colonization. More recently, rape has been deployed as a metaphor by colonized or marginalized peoples to represent the devastation of their culture and their way of living. In both cases, rape is deployed as a metaphor or as an allegory for forms of oppression other than gendered oppression. Diane Wolfthal argues that historically in fine art images of rape in the context of war were usually sympathetic to the victim. These are generally secular rather than religious images, created over a broad span of centuries from Ancient Greece to the present day. She analyses a fifth century BCE painted vase that depicts the rape of Cassandra and the sacking of Troy, reading Priam’s grief and defeat in front of ‘an altar that is stained with his grandson’s blood’, while on the reverse Ajax, his sword protruding ‘from his genital region in a phallic manner’ grasps Cassandra by her hair (1999, 61). She is shown resisting him, naked, her breasts and genitals revealed as she clings to a statue of Athene for protection. This image of female nudity, especially of a high-status woman, would have been shocking to viewers and strongly suggests that the image is meant as tragic. Wolfthal notes that it is interpreted variously to mark Cassandra as ‘a source of erotic pleasure, as vulnerable, and as heroic’ (61), but she quotes from Eva Keuls and Susan Guettel Cole to argue that the scene as a whole should be understood as anti-heroic (62). ‘Depictions of Cassandra are not constructed as a pursuit but rather as an assault … the artist does not sanitize the rape, but rather makes clear its horror’ (62). In theatrical representation, Euripides’ The Trojan Women recounts the history of defeated Troy from the perspective of the widowed Hecuba and Andromache. The play exists in multiple versions, testifying to the enduring power of the myth of Helen and the repeated tragedy of war and its devastation of the innocent and the vulnerable. As a model of this kind of text, Euripides’ tragedy focuses on the women’s distress, humiliation and lamentations as they wait to be assigned to a Argive owner: Cassandra to Agamemnon, Andromache to Achilles’ son, and Hecuba to Odysseus. Stripped of agency, vulnerable in their city’s defeat, the women have no control over their futures. The stage directions embedded in the text reveal the physical expression of Hecuba’s despair: the Chorus (of Trojan women) calls out: ‘Ye guardians of the grey-haired Hecuba, see how your mistress is sinking speechless to the ground! Take hold of her! will ye let her fall, ye worthless slaves? lift up again, from where it lies, her silvered THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 139 head’ (online). The Chorus also lament their own fate: ‘Sing me, Muse, a tale of Troy, a funeral dirge in strains unheard as yet, with tears the while; for now will I uplift for Troy a piteous chant, telling how I met my doom and fell a wretched captive to the Argives’ (online). Hecuba’s sons have been killed, her daughter Cassandra is claimed by Agamemnon, and her other daughter Polyxena has been sacrificed to the dead body of Achilles. As she grieves for her children, Andromache argues that Polyxena is more fortunate in death than she is in life; but Hecuba urges her on to save her son Astyanax, saying ‘Oh cease, my darling child, to speak of Hector’s fate; no tears of thine can save him; honour thy present lord, offering thy sweet nature as the bait to win him.’ Astyanax of course is doomed: the child is thrown to his death from the battlements. Andromache’s despair at her impending rape/forced marriage is expressed in her recounting of her efforts to be a good wife to Hector: her chaste behaviour, her modesty, her good sense in dealing with her husband; ironically her good name has made her desirable to Achilles’ son Neoptolemus who claims her as a spoil of war. Finally, she is torn from her dead child to travel home with Neoptolemus, so Talthybius brings the child’s body to Hecuba on Hector’s shield, for her to bury him as best she can. The cruelty of the victors in their systematic destruction of the women’s homes, lives and love is communicated in the dialogue and in the characters’ movements, specified in the dialogue, that perform their grief and despair. Rape (named as slavery, but with the clear indication that the women have been assigned to new husbands as wives or concubines) is clearly depicted as a fate that is degrading to the noblewoman, which she rightly dreads and seeks to escape. In Euripides’ text (in George Murray’s 1905 translation), the harrowing scenes of grief—the elderly Hecuba falling to the ground in despair; Andromache clutching her son to her breast; Cassandra’s whirling madness—emphasize the vulnerability of the defeated women in the ruined city, and their helplessness now against the victors. Hecuba attempts to keep the women calm, urging them to find ways to cope with their situation and to make new lives for themselves in their new homeland. But the play addresses the devastation of war for the survivors, and the despair of the defeated. It is clear that some women are understood to be more dishonoured by this process than others; the aristocratic women (Hecuba, Andromache, Cassandra) are the main focus of the dialogue and of the dramatic action. Their tragic fall is the greatest. The text stresses their chastity: Cassandra is a dedicated virgin and Andromache a chaste wife. 140 L. FITZPATRICK

Hecuba is old, and therefore no longer likely to be claimed as a wife but instead to be taken as a slave. For the Chorus, their grief and fear is pal- pable in their appeals to Hecuba as their ‘mother’ for comfort and reassurance. The many versions of The Trojan Women include two Irish adaptations by Brendan Kennelly and Marina Carr. Kennelly’s version was first performed at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin in June 1993, and was produced in 2016 at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Its text seeks to express the women’s resilience and their capacity to endure; in his introduction he describes the Irish colloquial use of the word ‘Trojan’ to describe a woman who endures through every adversity. Carr’s adaptation Hecuba, produced in 2015 by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre, explores Hecuba as a queen, and as a woman who struggles to retain her dignity in the face of the horrors that are heaped upon her. The play ends with Hecuba’s concise analysis of the whole Trojan War: that it was never a war fought for Helen, because ‘Helen does not exist. You made her up.’. Helen was merely a pretext for genocide and for the macho excitement of war and pillage. This chapter stays with this idea, to explore the staging of war on the bodies of women: the representation of war and its consequences in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined, Visniec Matei’s The Body of a Woman as Battlefield in the Bosnian War, and Sonja Linden’s I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady from Rwanda. All these plays address the particular horror of mass rape in wartime: of genocidal rape. The chapter then moves on to an exploration of a different kind of war: the domestic war that was fought over a thirty-year period in Northern Ireland.

Genocidal Rape: Tales from Africa and Europe Lynn Nottage’s Ruined was commissioned by the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and is based on the testimonies of a number of Congolese women, some of whom are named in the acknowledgements. The play was directed by Kate Whoriskey and co-produced with the Manhattan Theatre Club; it premiered in Chicago in November 2008 and opened in New York City the following February. Its European premiere was at the Almeida in London in 2010 where it was directed by Indhu Rubasingham. In her introduction to the published play, Whoriskey describes the research process in refugee camps across the Congolese border in Uganda. Whoriskey uses the phrase, ‘stripping women of their wombs’, which is picked up by THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 141

Ketu Katrak in her scholarship. Whoriskey says, ‘I realized that [rape] was not just a tool to humiliate the women or to degrade the opposing side’s masculinity, it was a way to strip women of their wombs. All but one of the women interviewed were raped by multiple men. The physical damage incurred was so great that they were left without the ability to produce children’ (2009, x–xi). Reflecting on the work, Whoriskey comments that wealthy countries can distance themselves from the horror of war through their use of long-range weaponry ‘By contrast, in the Congo, the mixture of poverty and war is a lethal combination. Due to a lack of money, the human body becomes the weapon, the teenage boy the terror, and a woman’s womb “the battleground”’ (xi). The idea for the play had begun as an adaptation of Mother Courage set in the Congo, but as the research continued Nottage and Whoriskey began to set aside the idea of a Brechtian structure and sought ‘a structure that was true to our experiences in Uganda’ (xi). The play opens in Mama’s brothel, where Christian the travelling sales- man is flirting with Mama and enjoying a cold Fanta. He has brought her two more girls: Salima a plain stocky young peasant woman, and Sophie who is very pretty; they barter over a price. The structure of the opening scene allows the audience to recognize firstly that they are in a bar; secondly that Christian is supplying the bar, and only gradually that he is supplying the brothel with girls. The two women are sent off stage and then the dialogue clarifies that they know they are to work in a brothel (dreadfully, other girls have not known); Salima was held as a concubine for months by the troops and her village won’t take her back, and Sophie is ‘ruined’ (12). Christian explains, ‘Look, the militia did ungodly things to the child, took her with … a bayonet and then left her for dead’ (13). The region will be full of miners soon because the area is rich in coltan (a metallic ore used in almost all electronic devices), and Sophie can sing and draw them into the brothel even though she cannot work there. The dialogue reveals that she is Christian’s niece, but she can’t stay at home as she will bring ‘shame, dishonour to the family’ (15). He tells Sophie she’s ‘lucky to have such a good uncle. A lot of men would have left you for dead’ (19). Mama finally agrees to take her. She gives her a glass of the local liquor telling her, ‘It’ll help the pain down below. I know it hurts, because it smells like the rot of meat. So wash good.’ She also comments, ‘you’re very pretty. I can see how that caused you problems’ (17). The play includes scenes of controlled violence in which the soldiers go drinking and carousing at Mama’s, dancing with the girls—Salima is a 142 L. FITZPATRICK good dancer—and listening to Sophie’s singing. The text only occasionally draws explicit attention to the trauma and tension of women who have been gang-raped by soldiers, being obliged to dance, flirt, drink with and sleep with soldiers, albeit in the reasonably protected space of the brothel. By allowing those moments of fear to play before the spectators, the play engages the audience imaginatively with that sense of dread and with empathy for the women who have nowhere else to go; yet by rationing the fear to glimpses it allows for the complexity of the situation to emerge. Whoriskey explains that this was part of their aim with the work: ‘… Lynn spoke with a Rwandan about life after the genocide. He said to her, “We must fight to sustain the complexity.” This phrase became a mantra for creating the piece. We did not want to focus solely on the damage but also on the hope’ (xii). The rape victims are forced to work as prostitutes, but this means they can eat, there is sometimes affection between them and a customer, and there is room for hope that their lives will improve. The alternative is to be cast out of their homes and villages and returned to the site of their earlier abuse. Salima succinctly summarizes her husband’s rejection of her: ‘He was too proud to bear my shame … but not proud enough to protect me from it’ (70). In her analysis of this play in performance and Navarasa Dance Theatre’s Encounter, Ketu Katrak uses the theoretical frame of Jill Dolan’s utopian performative (2001) with Michel Foucault’s biopower and power politics (1998, 1977), to speak of active witnessing in the theatre. Katrak recognizes the process of sustaining the emotional complexity of the work to allow room for hope and for audience responses beyond horror and despair, and argues that this creates theatrical experiences of pain ‘not sentimental or apolitical in nature’, which offers ‘transformative possibilities’ (2014, 35). The structure of the plot leaves audiences hopeful, she argues, because Mama can admit to her suitor Christian that she is ruined, and he accepts her and blames her suffering on the actions of men: ‘I think we, and I speak as a man, can do better’ (2009, 101). The last scene on stage is of them dancing. Other causes for hope include Mama’s kindness towards Sophie, and her extraordinarily generous impulse to give her dia- monds away to pay for Sophie’s reconstructive operation, which indicates the persistence of empathy and love in extreme situations. This hopeful response from the audience is dependent on a number of factors, including an identification with the real experience behind the dramatic work, at least on some level or to some extent. Katrak mentions that she ‘heard women in the audience sobbing audibly when words recounting rape and THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 143 mutilation triggered their empathy for the actor on stage and possibly also painful personal memories’, an experience I shared at a performance of Yael Farber’s Nirbhaya at the Women of the World Festival in London in March 2014. It is noticeable that in both cases it appears to be women who cry, who most intensely identify or empathize with the material of the performance and suffering of the characters. Secondly, I find it interesting that Katrak says the empathy is with the actor rather than with the character, though here she may be signalling those performances where the actor is performing her own experience. Ruined is also based on women’s testimony, and the published text names some of those women and includes photographic portraits of them. Thus the violence in the text is identified as real, documented actions which have been mediated to us through the fiction of the dramatic performance. Reviews of Ruined at its American and British premieres identify it as a powerfully affecting piece of theatre. Ben Brantley’s review in the New York Times describes it as:

a comfortable, old-fashioned drama about an uncomfortable of-the-moment subject. Ms. Nottage … hooks her audience with promises of a conventionally structured, purposefully plotted play, stocked with sympathetic characters and informative topical detail … Yet a raw and genuine agony pulses within and finally bursts through this sturdy framework, giving “Ruined” an impact that lingers beyond its well-shaped, sentimental ending … precisely because of its artistic caution, “Ruined” is likely to reach audiences averse to more adventurous, confrontational theater. And people who might ordinarily look away from horror stories of distant wars may well find themselves bound in empathy to the unthinkably abused women that Ms. Nottage and the excellent actresses here have shaped with such care and warmth. (10 February 2009)

Brantley’s review also offers an important detail about the performance of Sophie, ‘who walks with the stiff, wide-legged gait of someone who feels pain with every step she takes’. Sophie’s gait is mentioned only in the reviews of this first production directed by Whoriskey, and it is not built into the stage directions. But it is potentially a powerfully affecting aspect of the performance of the work, because this physical representation of pain and hurt communicates without and beyond the power of language. The early revelations in the dialogue between Christian and Mama of the rape with a bayonet are given visible, tangible consequences in Sophie’s painful gait. The audience are thus confronted with the bodily result of 144 L. FITZPATRICK violence they did not witness on the stage, and, significantly, her painful movement persists over the course of the full performance so that the process of enduring the pain, its permanence in her body and in her life, is emphasized. By making visible the embodied consequences of the sexual violence perpetrated upon Sophie, Nottage affectively communicates her ongoing suffering to the spectators. In this way, she seeks to arouse their empathy and also, perhaps, their capacity for active response. Of the texts discussed here, the horrors suffered by Nottage’s character are by far the greatest, if it is possible or useful to rank grief and suffering. The descriptions of the rape of Sophie and of Salima resonate with other texts that document extremes of dehumanization, like Gil-Cha Hur’s Coming and Going at Sundown which deals with the rape of Korean women by Japanese soldiers during World War II. One of the documented murders in this short play describes the rape, torture and beheading of a young woman who complained about their treatment; her flesh was then boiled and the others were forced to eat it. Like Ruined, Gil-Cha Hur’s text documents a total lack of empathy for the humanity of the victim. This absence of empathy demonstrates a division of the world into a vulnerable ‘Other’ who can be destroyed, and an all-conquering subject who may inflict any suffering that the imagination can devise. It also demonstrates the failure of recognition, to see oneself in the other. By staging this absence of empathy using strategies that communicate the character’s suffering, Nottage and her collaborators engage the sympathy and empathy of the audience who now bear witness to this suffering, and who may—as Katrak argues—be motivated to act in response. Writing of the Balkan War, Matei Visniec explains his motive for writing The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War was to try to understand what had happened in the Balkans, and how nationalistic fer- vour ‘transforms normal people into brutes, ordinary people into savages’ (2000, 14). He wrote the play while he was artist-in-residence in Avignon in 1996, and it was performed across Europe and in Canada. It premiered in London at the Young Vic Studio in 2000, directed by Alison Sinclair who also translated the text. Set in a NATO hospital in Germany near Lake Constance, the drama is structured as a dialogue in thirty scenes between two women: American psychologist Kate, and her patient Dorra. At first, Dorra doesn’t speak. She speaks for the first time alone on stage in scene 6, and speaks to Kate for the first time in scene 13. These early scenes depict Kate’s attempts to engage Dorra in the therapy sessions, and THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 145 reading aloud from her diary and her diagnostic notes. Dorra is explicitly identified as the victim of rape in scene 7, but this is foreshadowed by Kate’s meditative soliloquies on rape in wartime. The dialogue in the early scenes contrasts her fluent, philosophical musings on the brutality of the war with Dorra’s embodied, fragmented expression of its physical trauma; but gradually Dorra finds a voice of her own. This voice sometimes play- fully mimics the ‘Balkan male’, presenting national stereotypes and exploring prejudice. This play, more explicitly than Ruined, seeks to examine the role of nationalism in war. In scene 13, Dorra reports to Kate that she was raped by five men but she doesn’t know their ethnicity because ‘in Bosnia, everyone speaks Serbo-Croat’ and she repeats that Kate must report that they could have been Muslims, Croats or Serbs (28). Despite this, the spectators must suspect that the rapists knew Dorra’s ethnicity, or thought they did. As Kate has already explained, ‘The new Balkan fighter rapes his ethnic enemy’s women to strike the fatal blow at his ethnic enemy. The body of a woman becomes a battlefield in its own right’ (23). Her speech functions to relay information to the audience, including the fact that half the women interviewed knew the men who had raped them. A large number of women who had married men from other ethnic groups were raped by men from their own ethnicity as a punishment for entering a mixed marriage (23). This same phenomenon is represented in the Northern Irish play Threshold (discussed below), when one of the Protestant women is raped by a group of men from her own community because she has been dating a Catholic. Kate notes that the rapes aren’t committed out of ‘some savage pleasure’, but are ‘a form of military strategy aimed at demoralising the enemy’ (23)—and, I would add, a method of terrorism that polices the women in the men’s own community, setting limits on their social and public behaviour. The plot revolves around Dorra’s pregnancy, which is a result of rape, and Kate’s insistence that she should not have an abortion. Eventually Dorra decides to have the baby and gives birth to a son. These events are spoken, not performed, and are sometimes in the form of snippets of dialogue, sometimes excerpts from letters and diaries, and sometimes monologues. The play does not attempt a detailed naturalistic representation: there is never any indication of how Dorra ends up in a hospital on the German–Swiss border, for example, and Kate’s reaction to Dorra’s pregnancy and her traumatic experience of clearing mass graves in Sbrenica suggests that she is at least as ill as her patient. Instead the play explores 146 L. FITZPATRICK the horror of the Balkan war through vividly constructed verbal imagery. Kate describes Dorra’s womb as a ‘mass grave … When I think of your belly, I see a pit of corpses, dried up, swollen, or rotting … And in the mass of corpses, there’s something moving …This child is a survivor Dorra’ (58). Later, Dorra explains the moment she decided to have the baby, in a letter to Kate:

I went out to walk by the lake … a notice nailed to a tree caught my eye. I went to take a closer look and this is what I read: “We would like to inform you that this tree is dead. It will be cut down week commencing April 2nd. In its place, for the pleasure of all visitors to this park, a sapling will be planted” … I read this once, twice, then several times more. And that’s when I decided to keep my baby. (61)

As in The Marriage, discussed below, Dorra transforms the pain and violence of the rape into new life and new possibilities. In this final communication with Kate she is applying for immigration papers to what was once called the ‘New World’ of Canada or Australia. She is leaving behind the Europe of national stereotypes and international tensions, as comically summarized in her drunken duologue with Kate (36–45), and the grim history of mass graves and genocidal civil war. She looks forward to a new life in a new world. Sonja Linden focuses her attention on the experience of people seeking asylum in the United Kingdom in her play I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady From Rwanda. It was commissioned by Ice and Fire Theatre Company, and was written while she was writer-in-residence at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. Ice and Fire, founded by Linden in 2003, initially focused on dramatizing the plight of refugees and asylum seekers but has diversified over the years to address a range of human-rights focused issues. It has also developed strands like Actors for Human Rights, founded in 2006. The company’s work emphasizes sharing the experiences and stories of refugees and of displaced people, using actors to speak their words in performance. This play was first performed in 2002, as part of Oxford Africa Week, and its London premiere took place the following summer at the Finborough Theatre. It is structured as a series of dialogues between Juliette, a young Rwandan woman who has survived the genocide that destroyed her family, and Simon, an English writer, whose job is to teach people to write English. They meet at a refugee centre in 1999 (five years THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 147 after the massacre), where Juliette is struggling to write down her story. The play is written in English with some use of Kinyarwanda, Juliette’s first language. Linden notes that the play was inspired by the real life experiences of refugees that she met through her work at the Medical Foundation; but in writing the play she aims to call attention to the continuation of genocide as well as to the experiences of those in the asylum system in Europe. In her introduction to the published script she comments on the length of her title and people’s reactions to it:

Whenever I’ve been challenged in this way, I’ve been reminded of the response of another author of another work on Rwanda: Philip Gourevitch, called his book We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families … here the quote was taken from real life—the desperate cry for help from seven pastors in charge of two thousand terrified Tutsis taking shelter in a church compound. The help was not forthcoming. For Gourevitch, impatience with his title seemed symptomatic of the West’s indifference to a genocide taking place in a tiny country, off the map, in faraway darkest Africa. (Linden 2004, 16)

Linden uses humour to make this same point in the dramatic text: in his first encounter with Juliette, Simon says:

SIMON: And what is your book about? Is it a novel? JULIETTE: It’s about the genocide. SIMON: Of course. And … is it a personal account? JULIETTE: It’s a history of my country and what happened in 1994. SIMON: 1994 being the year … JULIETTE: … of the genocide of the Tutsis. SIMON: I’m sorry. I didn’t know the exact date. (20)

The wry humour of this exchange, its plausibility, the fact that spectators can probably recognize themselves in Simon’s polite but distant concern, sets the tone for Linden’s awareness-raising drama. Simon is gradually drawn from contemplation of his own career disappointments to an understanding of Juliette’s living conditions. This is important, because one objective of the play is to address the propaganda that refugees are provided with free houses, cars, furniture, and so on. Linden’s depiction of Juliette’s plight, unable to buy even soap without the charity of the refugee centre, unable to purchase a phone card or to catch a bus or tube in 148 L. FITZPATRICK

London’s sprawling metropolis, monitored for every penny, attempts to rectify this. Juliette’s pride, her fear of the pity of others, her shame at being so poor, are also shown to emphasize her humanity to an audience likely to be schooled in images of African poverty and need, and stories of greedy and lazy asylum seekers exploiting Western generosity. In this portrayal of Juliette, all these stereotypes are challenged. The play only once directly describes the genocide. Speaking to Simon, Juliette describes the day of the massacre. The family was betrayed by their neighbour and friend, a Hutu man who didn’t kill them but who ‘brought the killers to our house’ (58). She describes the murder of her father, brother and sister, uncles and cousins. Then they took the women of the family away: ‘And then they took us to a place where there is other women. (Pause) We survived too much, me and my mother and sisters’ and then the women were taken away and shot ‘by the side of a big pit’ (58–59). Juliette alone survived. Like Eric Ehn’s Maria Kizito, which also addresses the genocide in Rwanda, Linden eschews naturalism to evoke instead the ways that these horrors haunt Juliette. Her description of the massacre is expressed very simply and without adjectives. While mass rape was one of the war crimes committed in Rwanda, Juliette says only that they had to get into the car with the murderers of her family, and were taken to where other women were. Then she pauses. In the silence, the audience are left to fill in what is not said. The information in news reports of genocides from the Balkans to Rwanda to Congo, and the cultural historical knowledge of what conquering armies do to women, fills the pause. The gap in speech therefore functions to draw attention to the indescribable suffering and terror of the women, and to the brutality inflicted on them by people they had once known. The words become redundant. Juliette’s testimony would be only one more catalogue of horror: the audience’s imagination supplies the information for her, and out of empathy with her.

Rape and Civil Conflict: The Domestic Example of Northern Ireland The chapter will now turn to a very different kind of war: the civil conflict that was fought on the borders of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland over a thirty-year period. This is a minor conflict by global standards, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 3523 people before the THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 149

signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which led to the estab- lishment of a power-sharing executive. The conflict was never fought as an outright war, but involved paramilitary organizations pitted against each other and against the state-supported, heavily armed local police force and the British Army who were brought in as a peace-keeping force in the region. This section of the chapter examines the impact of civil conflict on gender relations and domestic and sexual violence, as it is reflected in the theatre. There is no suggestion that rape was committed as a crime of war in Northern Ireland, by any party to the conflict. And yet, sexual and gender violence is a feature of this small domestic war as it is in any other conflict. The plays discussed below represent a society dominated by an ethno-sectarian conflict fought between two Christian sects. As is normally the case in such conflicts, the real agenda is not religion per se, but political power and control. Religion is only a marker of political identity. This conflict has been explored in detail in a number of histories by A. T. Q. Stewart, Paul Dixon, Tim Pat Coogan and others, while Tom Maguire (2006) offers a history of the theatre of the period, and Marilyn Richtarik’s excellent study of Field Day Theatre Company (1995) examines this significant Irish company and its intellectual and artistic engagement with the conflict. In the plays discussed here, as in the society, women’s roles were tightly circumscribed. This was the effect of a number of different social and cultural pressures combined: fairly strict adherence to the tenets of Roman Catholicism and biblical Protestantism; a situation of conflict that tended to prioritize public forms of violence over the more private, domestic forms of violence that impact upon women’s lives; and an attitude to gender shaped by nationalism (whether in the guise of Irish Republicanism or Ulster Unionism or Loyalism).2 Joane Nagel (1998) explores the construction of nationalism and masculinity, arguing that the two are intertwined. Drawing on Cynthia Enloe (1990) Nagel argues that nationalism tends to relegate women to ‘minor, often symbolic, roles in nationalist movements and conflicts, either as icons of nationhood, to be elevated and defended, or as the booty or spoils of war, to be denigrated and disgraced. In either case, the real actors are men who are defending their freedom, their honour, their homeland and their women’ (244). These findings resonate in the texts discussed above, by Nottage, Visniec and Linden. In each of these, the women become the scapegoats and their bodies become the repositories of their enemies’ hatreds. Nagel’s review of the literature (including Edgerton on Northern Ireland) 150 L. FITZPATRICK finds that nationalist women often feel pressure ‘to remain in supportive, symbolic, often suppressed and traditional roles’ (253). In the texts sur- veyed below, women occupy largely subservient family roles, and are inculcated into the politics of their male relatives rather than being agents of their own political destiny. Their sexuality is closely controlled and policed by their men, and betrayals of the tribe by forming sexual relationships with men from outside are punished. The consequences can be brutal: not only social ostracism, but beatings, tarring and feathering, rape, and murder. The plays below explore examples where rape is used as a response to women’s resistance or rebellion against family and community norms.

An Armed Patriarchy: Rape in the Northern Irish Conflict The evocative phrase, ‘an armed patriarchy’, recurs in journalism and in sociological studies of Northern Ireland during the 1980s and 1990s. In their respective studies of domestic violence in Northern Ireland, Eileen Evason (1982) and Christine Taylor (1995) use the term to express the struggle of two groups of armed men for control of the state, in a social and cultural context where women as a class were marginalized and where violence against women was secondary to the ‘real’ violence of paramilitary bombings and shootings. Susan McKay writes in 1985 that ‘guns ostensibly used for the protection of communities are used in the rape of women from those communities’ (1985), and more than two decades later, in the post-ceasefire society, the Belfast Rape Crisis and Sexual Abuse Centre reported on its website that a significantly higher proportion of rapes were committed at gunpoint in Northern Ireland than in the rest of the UK and Ireland. These rapes ‘involve guns that are both legally and illegally held’ (online). This suggests a high level of sexual violence amongst the security forces (police and army) and other groups who tend to legally hold weapons, as well as amongst members of paramilitary groups in both Loyalist and Republican communities, and violent offenders more generally. Social and judicial responses to acts of sexual violence can vary widely, depending on the perceived credibility and social status of the accused and the accuser; and while this is true of all instances of rape, in Northern Ireland it is complicated by the recent history of civil conflict. Offenders who commit acts of sexual violence are still, sometimes, punished by paramilitary vigilante groups within their communities; and THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 151 therefore offenders who are paramilitaries are likely to escape punishment, with victims too intimidated to make an accusation. During the conflict in Northern Ireland, and to a lesser extent still today, some communities were very reluctant to approach the police and the paramilitary organizations filled the gap by tracing and punishing offenders, but now punishment beatings and shootings can be in addition to formal prosecution through legal channels. Thus two parallel approaches to sexual crime are evident, each governed by different sets of priorities and conventions: the police focused on enforcing the law, and the paramilitaries focused on sup- pressing violent or criminal behaviour not sanctioned by them. It is not surprising that Northern Ireland would have high levels of domestic and sexual violence; civic unrest and sectarian violence permeate the private and domestic spaces within troubled societies almost always to the detriment of those perceived as vulnerable—normatively, women and children. Violence functions to produce certain kinds of bodies and certain kinds of gendered behaviour that may be subtly or at times overtly differentiated from normative or peace-time gendered behaviours (by which I mean Anglo-American norms). These differences are manifested as heightened expressions of stereotypical ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ particularly in relation to the discursive and behavioural expressions of vulnerability, honour and freedom. The interplay of civil conflict, postcolonial experience, and discourses that idealize the feminine through the imagery of Mother Ireland, the Virgin Mary, or the more solidly material Loyal Ulsterwoman, together create a performative culture in Northern Ireland that shares similarities with some other conflict and post-conflict societies while also occupying its own unique position. In theatrical performance the dominant aesthetic is naturalism, and plays tend to focus mainly on male experience of the conflict with female characters in sup- porting roles. This replication of conventional social attitudes to gender obscures gendered experiences of the conflict. However, some theatre practice in Northern Ireland before and after the 1994 ceasefire and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement3 attempts to reflect the complexity of women’s social and cultural positions. This is made visible in the work of female playwrights like Christina Reid, Anne Devlin, the practitioners attached to Charabanc Theatre Company, and the younger generation of playwrights like Lisa McGee and Abbie Spallen; it is also sometimes the focus of community-based performance projects like those of Derry Frontline, Sole Purpose Theatre, the Theatre of Witness, and Smashing Times Theatre Company amongst others. Where there are central female 152 L. FITZPATRICK

protagonists who are the main focus of the plot—as in the work of Charabanc Theatre Company, Christina Reid, and Anne Devlin—they are most commonly represented within the home or family and aligned or identified with a public political community primarily through the men of the family. This identification can be very strong: some of Anne Devlin’s female characters are active members of the Provisional IRA, though most fulfil secondary roles hiding weapons, making tea, and bearing the next generation of fighters; and in general the women are represented as ‘recruited by and for a patriarchal unit’ (Longley 1990, 1082) as is often the case in reality. The staged representation of female characters within the domestic space reifies their economic and political situation both as marginal in a public life dominated by a violent patriarchal culture, and as primarily concerned with maintaining a functioning home-life in a time of civil war. Although such representations are normative and even canonical, Reid and Devlin’s focus on the gendered nature of the civic violence and the way their texts grant female characters visibility, in itself evidences the counter-normativity of theatrical performance having, as the main focus, a female character in an ordinary domestic situation. These characters are ‘mothers and sisters and wives’ in Reid’s phrase, but they are also at the centre of the plot; they are the protagonists in their own fictional worlds. Meanwhile, the characters’ frequent ambivalence towards repressive conceptions of femininity, and their perspectives on gender, sectarianism and economic deprivation, and the framing of violence within the work as personal and embodied rather than metaphoric or symbolic, add to the counter-normative qualities of the work and can elicit discomfort on the part of male reviewers. These restrictive conceptions of gender are communicated in restrictions on speech, self-expression and public behaviour. Restrictions are also imposed on sexual freedom, but these limits are expressed and policed through demands that women be silent, submissive and modest in all things. The emphasis on women as the locus of family respectability is explored in Christina Reid’s Tea in a China Cup, which is structured around the 12th of July celebrations to portray the lives of three generations of women, as seen through the eyes of the protagonist Beth. While gendered violence and intimidation are commonly represented in the work of Reid and Devlin, there are relatively few explicit depictions of sexual violence. Although Devlin’s plays include scenes of fathers beating their daughters and dominating their lives in their role as head of the THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 153 family, and violent boyfriends who also assert their masculine status through physical force, After Easter is the only play where the abuse is figured as sexual. It is framed within a context of civil violence by both the paramilitary groups and the agents of the state and there is a sense of abid- ing fear and insecurity even in the domestic space of the family home: British soldiers enter the house in pursuit of Greta’s brother, and in the hours before the funeral the mother is afraid of who the light will attract. Shots are heard from off stage and the women sit beneath the table in case the windows are shattered (1994, 67–68). In this public chaos, the family home can offer at best only limited protection and safety and it is unsur- prising that it is repeatedly represented as permeable and vulnerable. After Easter premiered at The Other Place in 1994, directed by Michael Attenborough in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company. It shows Greta, the central character who is mentally ill, recounting what appears to be a memory of sexual abuse by her father. The play has an episodic structure, moving in its eight scenes from London to Northern Ireland and back to London, and covering a period of about a week. It opens with Greta on stage talking to a man, who is revealed to be her doctor in a psychiatric unit. Originally from Belfast, Greta has been living in England for many years, is now married to an Englishman, and has recently separated from him due to his infidelity (she says) and her erratic behaviour (he says). She is signed out of the hospital for a week by her sisters, Aoife who is visiting from Northern Ireland, and Helen who is a business woman living in London. The sisters go first to Helen’s apartment, where Greta encounters an apparition which she variously describes as her mother, Mother Ireland, and the Banshee (a harbinger of death). That scene takes place off stage and is signalled to the audience by Greta’s screaming, and by her verbal description of what she saw. Shortly after this, news comes that their father has had a heart attack and the three women return to Northern Ireland. Their father dies and Greta is reunited with her birth family, and through this return to her homeland she tries to unravel the cause of her psychological distress. In the play’s opening monologue Greta diverges from her discussion of how she came to be hospitalized to tell the doctor that:

My mother used to scream. She’d run upstairs after me and pull my hair. I’d sit behind the bedroom door for hours—with the bed pushed up against it. And she’d scream and scream and pound the door… After a while she’d stop and go downstairs … She’d shout ‘Nobody loves you! Nobody loves you!’. (Devlin 1994, 1) 154 L. FITZPATRICK

This section of the monologue is unexamined and unexplained in the dialogue, but it is picked up in the next scene when the sisters receive a call about their father’s heart attack. According to the stage directions Greta is isolated in a spotlight. She picks up the monologue where she left off earlier:

After a while, when everything was quiet I’d pull the bed away from the door and go asleep. And it would happen that in the middle of the night she’d come bursting in—and she’d stand there, trembling and frightened herself. And I’d have to put her back to bed. It only happened that summer when I was thirteen, and the others were away. It never happened any other year—and I never knew why. (19)

The lights come back on the sisters, as Aoife and Helen discuss how their father was ‘a really sexy man’ ‘you wonder that he married such a thin woman’ (19). Greta picks up the story again to explain that her mother had been reading ‘a cheap pornographic story of incest, the rape of a girl by her father’ and that it ‘drove her mad’ so that she would run in ‘screaming: Where is he? Where are you hiding him?’ When their father returned home he burned the book. In these first scenes, the credibility of the abuse is gradually established. The first mention (11) seems like a normal subject for discussion with a psychiatrist: the primary relationship with the mother. The second mention provides more troubling detail, and is corroborated to some extent by the dialogue of the other sisters, who seem to sense a sexual tension or unhappiness between their parents. Although Greta frames these events as bewildering and as just an episode in her difficult relationship with her jealous, unstable mother—who is later revealed to be alcoholic and physically abusive—for the theatre audience the scenes create a sense of unease. What is it about this story that the mother recognizes in her own family? Why does her father burn the book? What does that, in itself, suggest about the power dynamics in this relationship and about his relationship to his wife? Or does he burn the book out of guilt? In fact, why does Greta claim in one breath that she ‘never knew why’ her mother behaved in this way, and in the next breath identify the cause as the ‘cheap, pornographic story’? This unease intensifies later with the enactment of the violence that the character attempts to deny. In scene 6, following her father’s death, Greta is alone in the wake room. Her father sits up in the coffin and mistakenly addresses Greta by his wife’s name, Rose (59). They have a conversation THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 155 which includes Greta’s comment that ‘I think I loved you too much’ and that her son looks like her father: innocent remarks, given a sinister undercurrent by her earlier story of her mother’s jealousy. Then, in this dream or expressionistic sequence, the mother again interrupts ‘hammering at the door. ROSE is pounding the door with her fists’ (60); she shouts ‘I can hear you. I know he’s in there’. Later in the scene, still from off stage, she calls ‘You love her more than you love me!’ On stage, she performs a jealous guard over her husband’s body, kissing his face and begging her daughters not to kiss him after her and ‘chase my kiss away’ (62). She pushes her daughter Aoife away from the coffin, saying, ‘He’s my husband. Not yours!’ (63). The enactment of Rose’s jealousy on stage confirms the truth of Greta’s stories for the audience—for Greta is constructed as an unreliable witness who has spiritual visions and is under medical care. The violence of the mother’s words and her physical and verbal defence of her husband’s body as her property, against the encroachment of her daughters, suggests at the least that she remains suspicious that her husband’s relationship with their daughters was a sexual one. This is never confirmed. However, towards the end of the scene, once more alone on stage, Greta leans over the coffin to ask ‘Are you in heaven, Father?’ ‘MICHAEL’s hand comes up out of the coffin and grabs her by the throat. She struggles to free herself. She fights it off. Gasping, she drops to her knees on the floor’ (66). This sequence is structured to startle the audience with the sudden, unexpected and violent movement of the dead father. By stifling Greta his gesture also carries meanings of silencing, which are significant for the subject matter. In the final scenes of the play, Greta and her sister Helen sit on Westminster Bridge, and Helen pleads with Greta not to kill herself: ‘He’s dead. Let him go. Our father is trying to drag you into that river after him—let him go! Don’t rot the lives of your children on his account!’ (72). This action of silencing problematic women recurs in Devlin’s work: in After Easter for example Greta is also effectively silenced by her husband committing her to a psychiatric unit, while Aoife and Helen are both in relationships where they must keep secrets or refrain from expressing their desires. In Ourselves Alone (1985) one of the characters dreams of her baby’s father suffocating her, and the central character Frieda ultimately leaves Northern Ireland so that she can find her own voice and ‘sing my own songs’, having been beaten and threatened for doing so in Belfast. Devlin creates a tension in the play between Greta’s family, and the theatrically 156 L. FITZPATRICK conventional, normative Irish family on the stage. Thus the mother’s shouting in the wake scene, Michael choking Greta so that she gasps for air, Greta’s spoken testimony which is sometimes directed to another character and sometimes spoken directly to the audience, her sister’s Aoife’s affair—all of these elements reveal the gaps between superficial respectability and the turmoil beneath the surface. There is a clear undercurrent of violence by both parents that emerges from the dialogue among the siblings. The suggestion that the abuse is sexual is communicated in Greta’s memories of her mother’s distress and jealousy, which she rationalizes as a response to a book; Rose’s jealous guardianship of her husband’s corpse, and her accusation that he loves his daughter more than he does his wife. Furthermore, the connotations of silencing and stifling are unmistakable in the sole violent gesture of Michael grabbing Greta’s throat. The gesture also suggests Michael dragging his daughter into the grave after him, as Helen notes (72). It is as if Michael wants Greta, rather than Rose, to be buried beside him; she is to take on the role of the wife in the afterlife. It is a recurring feature of Irish women’s writing that relationships between generations of women are often represented as tense, even destructive, and these plays by Devlin include mothers who are absent (the dead mother in Ourselves Alone) or inadequate, even abusive (the Virgin Mary/Mother Ireland/Banshee figure of Greta’s hallucinations; Rose who is hostile to her daughters, and Aoife and Greta themselves who are loving but absent for various reasons from their children’s lives). The lack of a loving female genealogy experienced by the dramatic characters suggests an actual transgenerational alienation of women from each other. This is reflected in other work by Irish women writers, including that of Marina Carr whose play On Raftery’s Hill is discussed in Chap. 3. Like Devlin, Christina Reid avoids the representation of sexual violence though her work explores abusive family relationships. In The Belle of Belfast City she explores the web of local sectarian, misogynist and racial tensions; Tea in a China Cup explores the repressive effects on women of the imperative to be publicly respectable, and Did You Hear the One About the Irishman traces the linkages between the systemic violence of colonialism and the murderous sectarian hatreds manifested in Northern Ireland. But while Devlin and Reid tend to eschew explicit representations of sexual violence, a small number of texts written and performed prior to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 do show acts of sexual violence on stage. Bill Morrison’s A Love Song for Ulster is an example of one that includes an THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 157 on-stage rape. The rape in this instance is used as a metaphor for the colonial relationship between Ireland and Britain. Representations of sexual violence in Northern Irish theatre are framed by a complex set of cultural, political and social circumstances and attitudes to gender, gender behaviour, and interpersonal violence, shaped and intensified by decades of civic violence. These cultural circumstances are shaped and validated through an intertextual engagement with foundation stories of the colonial conflict, in which woman and land are elided and gender violence becomes part of a narrative about national identity and self-determination. ‘Rape’ has been used as a metaphor for invasion and colonization for hundreds of years, in both imperial and anti-imperial texts. Luke Gernon’s seventeenth-century essay describes Ireland as ‘at all points like a young wench that hath the green sickness for want of occupying’, and as lying open and receptive to potential husbands ‘betwixt her legs (for Ireland is full of havens) she hath open harbor, but not much frequented’ (Gernon qtd Lewes 1999, 35). Like other British colonies, female Ireland is imagined as being unhusbanded in all senses of the word: as being without a mate, as being without a master, and as being without someone to manage (husband) her resources; the men of the island are thereby rendered invisible and impotent. Ireland is, for Gernon, ripe for the rape/seduction that constitutes the first step, the invasion; the second step, a constant relationship that is expressed in terms of sexual union, follows (Sharkey 1994, 18). Colonization thus becomes naturalized as a sexual and familial relationship. Bill Morrison’s trilogy A Love Song for Ulster reflects this. Commissioned by the Tricycle Theatre and premiered there in 1993, the trilogy uses the family of Kate and her husband John (who is murdered) and Victor (his brother, her second husband)—to express the claustrophobic, intimate nature of the Northern Ireland conflict. It must be noted that the play has apparently never been performed in Northern Ireland, perhaps because it was poorly received on its London premiere. It seems to be written largely to represent the ‘Troubles’ to a London audience. Daragh Carville’s Family Plot, which premiered in 2005 in a production by Tinderbox Theatre Company, also uses the unhappy family as a symbol for the state, this time as it struggles towards reconciliation. The first play in Morrison’s trilogy, The Marriage, visualizes the 1922 Partition of Ireland4 as the splitting of a family, with the Catholic Mary and her son Gabriel pushed across the border into the Free State and her daughter Kate left behind in Northern Ireland, to be forced into an 158 L. FITZPATRICK arranged marriage with John, a Protestant farmer. Sections of the play, like these early scenes that establish the background to the action, are non- naturalistic, so the drawing of the border is represented on stage by two narrator figures moving baggage from one side of the stage to the other, while recounting the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. The family is then split by a soldier who blocks Mary’s path, saying ‘Sorry, the line’s been drawn. You can’t cross it’ (1994, 8–9). The mixture of playfulness in sketching major historical events, storytelling by narrator figures, and performed scenes shapes the aesthetic of the work. In this way, the play clearly identifies the central characters as representative of their communities and establishes their functions as metaphors: the Catholic community is split apart by the border, and those remaining in Northern Ireland are forced into an intimate and hierarchical relationship with the Protestant community. Not long after the marriage, John is killed by Gabriel in a cross- border raid, and Victor finds Kate standing over John’s dead body. He correctly guesses that she knows who the murderer is, but she refuses to betray her brother. The play continues with Victor’s marriage to Kate and the birth of a son, Boyd. The play contains two rape scenes which are used as symbolic representations of the oppressive and violent cohabitation of the Nationalist and Loyalist communities. The first of these consummates the marriage of Kate to John, and the second is the rape of Kate by Victor on John’s murdered body. Both take place in the first act. Time is elided so it is not clear how much time has passed since the wedding night; rather, life on the farm is depicted through the staging of brief episodes in the lives of the characters. There is time for an affectionate relationship to develop between Kate and John, and time for her to realize that her brother is taking part in cross-border raids. This flexibility with time heightens the sense of the characters as non-naturalistic: they are not completely individual- ized, but function partly to identify key tensions in the society and to move the plot along. The second rape marks Victor’s appropriation of his brother’s estate, of which Kate is part; and it also offers a powerful image of violence and hatred as a tangle of human bodies. The play examines the systemic nature of sectarian violence, and its intrusion into the private domestic space of the family expresses the oppressive and violent cohabitation of the two main communities, and the intimate nature of most sectarian violence. Gabriel murders his brother-in-law, thereby expressing the deformation of normal family affection by the pressures within the society; Juliette in Linden’s play is betrayed by their Hutu THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 159 neighbour who brought the killers to their home. Similarly the framing of the scenes as partly allegorical positions the act of rape as a metaphor rather than a naturalistic depiction of interpersonal violence, and maintains the audience’s primary focus on the violence and abuse of power as characteristic of inter-community relationships in Northern Ireland, rather than personal relationships between men and women. In imperial writings on Ireland, like the example from Gernon quoted above, the representation of colonization as a sexual or marital union allows the imperial text to activate, in reception, a range of intertextual meanings about gender and gender relationships that normalize and naturalize the colonization process. These meanings include those relating to male governance of the female as endorsed by church and state, while largely erasing the native population from the discourse, identifying them either with the female country or as brutes who are incapable of governing themselves. Sharkey argues that ‘the gendered anatomisation of the land as a female figure and the accompanying elision of women facilitated the easy displacement of possible culpability … the horror of rape and of colonial violence are thus both denied in these metaphorical shifts and dis- placements’ (1994, 18). Thus the rapes in The Marriage also become ‘something else’, something other than bodily violence; and Kate’s violated body signifies ambivalently in these scenes. The first rape in The Marriage takes place on the wedding night, following a dialogue between John and Kate about her cooking skills and her welcome contribution to the smooth running of the household. John tells her, ‘We can make a go of it, you and me’ (18), and reminds her that she has only him since her family have abandoned her. But there are conditions to their peaceful cohabitation and these explicitly identify the Protestant John in the role of patriarch, with the Catholic Kate in the subordinate role as his wife and helpmeet. As the scene unfolds, he warns her ‘I will have your obedience. Honour and obey. Those are the words’ (18). Her continued resistance and refusal to accompany him to bed pre- cedes the rape, which is performed on stage in view of the audience and is described in the stage directions as follows:

He lifts her up, spins her round, swings her onto the table on her back with her head towards the audience. He is upstage of the table. Flings up her skirt, rips away her pants, fumbles and unbuttons and thrusts into her. She stays limp and as lifeless as possible through it. Her head hanging back down off the table, the sacrifice on the wooden altar. It is a painful business for 160 L. FITZPATRICK

both. The reality is not pleasure but power. When he comes he cries out in rage and shame … He becomes aware of [blood] on his hand. He smears it down his face. (19)

There is no indication in the text of the duration of this very sad scene, which seems to attempt the signification of despair rather than desire. Such an explicit representation of rape is not very common in contemporary Irish or British drama. The many impediments to the naturalistic staging of rape include that the exposure of the body (usually of the female body) to the gaze of the audience potentially complicates the violence of the action with the visual pleasure of the spectacle, but Morrison’s stage directions specify the positions of the actors so that Kate’s body is not exposed. Rather than offering a titillating display, Morrison seeks to emphasize the violence of the rape with the blood on John’s hand and face, Kate’s uncomfortable position, and John’s cry on orgasm. The blood signifies not only pain, but the mingling of blood that makes them one, and the act of generation—and indeed by the end of the first act Kate is pregnant though the identity of the father (John or Victor) is deliberately ambiguous. The emphasis on generation is carried into the second rape, of Kate by Victor on the body of her dead husband. The stage directions read:

[Victor] grabs her, flings her forward across the body, her face towards the audience. He is behind her. Throws up her skirts. Behind the bunched cloth unbuttons and thrusts into her. (Not an act of sodomy.) Quick. Harsh. Comes with a manic cry. Turns away from her. Goes off. She lies across the body. KATE: I can feel a child in me. (37)

This odd direction ‘(Not an act of sodomy)’ is both unperformable— the audience can have access only to the physical representation of the action by the characters, and the only way to perform this would be to show the act of penetration—and seems to be included to signify the possibility that this child is Victor’s as well as John’s. It also emphasizes the normativity of the act: the claiming by Victor of his new wife. Rape is thus configured in the plot as something other or more than interpersonal violence, as the characters’ individual subjectivities are obscured and they are positioned as pawns of historical inevitabilities. The rape silences Kate: in the moments preceding it she is eloquent and able to THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 161 argue and oppose first John and then Victor, but she does not attempt to resist the physical violence. This silence may be read as a sign of her resistance, but it also signifies submission. It may signify her helplessness in the face of historical forces, but it also reinscribes that helplessness because she realizes that neither her family nor her church can, or will, come to her aid. In fact, she is advised to submit and she paraphrases her priest’s response to the first rape as, ‘It’s a holy act of procreation within marriage. You have to do it, he says, but you don’t have to enjoy it’ (20). Therefore, although the metaphor of the marriage in certain ways effectively represents this forcible union of two opposing communities in the small space5 of Northern Ireland, it does so through a reliance on, and performance of, normative gender roles and a model of marriage that is repressive and male-dominated. The play therefore offers a dramatic representation of the Northern Ireland Troubles using a metaphor that subordinates or even erases the experience of half of the population. At the level of plot, Kate represents, not (only) women, but the Nationalist community; and by assigning a gendered character to represent each community the play obscures the gendered experience of the Troubles. As a symbol of one community’s subordination to another, Kate and John perform the injustice and oppression endemic in sectarian society through the symbolism of rape; but they do so by performing the accepted roles of wife and husband respectively. At the level of the plot, the injustice is not only or primarily to Kate as a woman, but to Kate as a sign for the (male) Nationalist population. Through this adoption of rape as an allegory for colonization or political oppression, it becomes, essentially ‘something else’—something other than bodily, gendered physical violence; thus the violated body signifies on multiple levels in ways that detract from a woman-centred understanding of rape. Feminist scholars have argued that literary representations of rape need to be re-read to reinstate its violent and traumatic nature and to reposition the (usually and normatively) female victims as subjects and agents, rather than passive objects in a power struggle between male protagonists (Higgins and Silver 1991; Catty 1999; Solga 2009). In her 1991 study Reading Rembrandt, Mieke Bal proposes a methods she calls ‘hysterical poetics’ to re-read or re-instate these gaps or lacunae that mark the absent voice of the female victim. Recognizing the complications of representing and reading rape, she argues that rape is a semiotic event, which can be divided into two levels. The first of these is the ‘semiotic behaviour surrounding rape, such as the difficulty survivors have in recounting the 162 L. FITZPATRICK experience, the refusal of others to listen to survivors, and the semiotic use of rape for other purposes. Another level is the semiotics of rape itself, its status as, amongst other things, body language, as a speech act of aggression, as an attempt at destroying the victim’s subjectivity, which equates rape with murder’ (1991, 61). While arguing for a semiotic reading, Bal identifies gaps in the narrative: the difficulty in recounting the experience and the refusal to listen produces texts that are incomplete, or where the victim’s expression of her experience is lost; the problems of creating a coherent narrative from an inchoate physical experience, and the gap that this opens up between the narrative or plot; the image glimpsed in the present of the stage performance. The Marriage, by opting to stage both rapes that Kate endures, on one level of course makes rape visible and present. However, I would suggest that the stage action as detailed in the stage directions and the dialogue, operate at another level to naturalize it. This creates the textual incompleteness that Bal describes. Firstly, the rape in this instance is the forceful consummation of a marriage. If rape is defined by the absence of consent then by marrying John, Kate has already given her consent—as he reminds her: ‘You are [mine]. You have to be. And there’s an end to it. You have to accept me’ (18). The principle that the marriage vows constituted a perpetual and irrevocable consent to sexual intercourse was enshrined in law until the 1980s in most Western countries; marital rape was named a human right violation by the UN only in 1993, in the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (online). Thus in the scene, John frames his violence as a reluctant enforcement of Kate’s submission, which is further obscured by being also a forcible submission of one religious and political community to another. The priest’s comments, quoted above, and Kate’s own gradual affection for her husband which is clearly depicted in brief episodes in Act 1, both act to erase and normalize the violence of the scene. In fact, beyond Kate’s initial resistance and her pain and blood— which again, can be normalized within discourses of virgin modesty and the act of defloration—the act exists in the dialogue as part of a process of gender and sectarian domination, blurring distinctions between Kate/ women/Catholic community. The second rape, by Victor, is more clearly framed as an act of personal violence and revenge, but its operation as metaphor again complicates its impact as an act of interpersonal violence. Two reviews of the 1993 production, both in The Independent, describe the ‘clunkiness’ of the image (Butler 1993) and of the allegorical structure (Taylor 1993). THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 163

Bal’s ‘hysterical poetics’ recommend the reading for image rather than for plot, and for detail rather than main line (63), and as imagery—however awkwardly realized—the rape scenes would seem to signify quite differently. Removed from plot, the images are of Kate hanging awkwardly, painfully, over the side of the table; being forcibly stripped and moved around the stage like an object; moving ‘painfully’ after the first rape with her blood smeared on John’s hands and face (Morrison, 19). The image of the rape by Victor, literally over John’s murdered body, signifies on the level of the plot as an act of conquest, Victor’s claiming of his estate, and a reassertion (albeit a violent one) of normative gender relationships and patriarchal continuity. But at the level of image, it has the potential to recall images of war crimes and of historic and contemporary massacres. It suggests the narratives that have emerged since the 1990s from the Balkans, Darfur, Rwanda and Congo. While in the plot it is an act of generation (immediately afterwards Kate says, ‘I can feel a child in me’), as an image it suggests annihilation, resonating with plays from other war zones and zones of conflict.

Radical Interventions—Derry Frontline Morrison’s recognition of a performative relationship between patriarchal oppression of women and inter-community oppression is more explicitly examined by the group Derry Frontline, who developed a piece called Threshold over a two-year period and staged it in the Derry Playhouse in 1992. Frontline was a community cultural education organization which had developed during the 1980s and early 1990s from a relationship with Dan Baron Cohen and Manchester’s Frontline. Derry Frontline was founded by Jim Keyes in the late 1980s, following his work with the Manchester group. Though it was formally politically non-aligned, the group was based in the Bogside and Creggan (Irish Nationalist) areas of the city and was expressly opposed to British rule in Northern Ireland. It also aimed, however, to challenge Nationalist and Republican attitudes and beliefs, and did so in particular in relation to gender, sexuality and the status of the Roman Catholic Church. The plays created and performed by the group explore issues of abortion, rape and state violence and censorship,6 and were devised within the group and performed publicly, sometimes touring (though Threshold did not tour). The works are didac- tic and argumentative, privileging political debate over theatricality and often over-labouring the point; but they document a process of community 164 L. FITZPATRICK exploration of the web of connections between forms of oppression, violence and poverty. The objectives of the Threshold project are given at the beginning of the published script and include alerting the Nationalist and Unionist communities to ‘the need for a radical unity to resist the invisible violence of neo-liberalism’ (Baron Cohen 2001, 144). While this statement reflects the ethos of the organization, the work itself more clearly—in print, and particularly in the film of the performance—reflects its challenging and detailed exploration of divisive and problematic issues like rape and abortion. One scene in the play replicates a public meeting and expresses the conflicting social and moral attitudes that the issue of abortion in particular raises in Ireland. This allows the company and the audience to engage with the nuances of the debate, beyond the slogans. As a piece of theatre, Threshold is somewhat unwieldy, its form reflecting the idealistic but naive politics of its membership. It is three hours long in performance, with twenty-eight characters and an episodic structure of fourteen scenes, in the kitchen-sink style of naturalism with detailed representational sets and costumes. The structure allows for a mosaic of community life to emerge, but the central thread concerns a young woman, Marie Doherty, who is pregnant as a result of rape. Marie feels that it would be unethical to bring a child into the world where injustice and inequality are unavoidable, but she rejects abortion because it will only hide her experience and obscure the wider problems of violence. She decides to go on hunger strike—or ‘freedomstrike’, which will result in the death of both herself and her baby. She writes letters to the community documenting her decision and its process, which are broadcast on the local radio station to bring her action to public attention. The resulting debate examines various responses to Marie’s plight, and also engages the on- and off-stage audience with the global problems she raises. The play is striking for its exploration of the relationship between ‘public’ and ‘private’ violence, and for an examination of social attitudes to rape that resists making the act a symbol for something else. Indeed, Threshold actively seeks to situate rape as a form of interpersonal violence that is embedded in gender and power relationships within Northern Irish culture. In the image of the hunger-striking pregnant woman the play challenges the long history of hunger-striking as a political tool by Irish rebels and revolutionaries. Marie’s actions hijack the masculine politics of the hunger strike and subvert them by using them to protest against private forms of oppression. THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 165

Threshold seeks to portray a dramatic world in which the police and army are hostile forces, reflecting the ‘real world’ circumstances that made women reluctant to involve the police in their lives; but the play also identifies the police and the army as part of the system of violence that overwhelms the society. The community in Threshold is under siege, from the military, from the Catholic Church, and from its own internalization of repressive rules and mores. The women, Marie and her Protestant friend Diane, draw attention to this as they speak about their experiences of brutal sexual violence and their internalization of blame. In the third scene of the play, ironically titled ‘The Annunciation’, Marie tells her priest friend Declan that she is pregnant as a result of rape. The title, in its reference to the Christian story of the conception of Christ and the Virgin’s submission to God’s will to carry His child, foregrounds and critiques Christian beliefs about the role and status of women. Unlike the Virgin, Marie decides not to have the baby: she would not have chosen to conceive it, and having conceived against her will she is not willing to bear it. Her decision is based on her sense of the horror of the world, and of the ethically indefensible compromises that must be made to live within it: ‘I won’t bring a life into this world to tremble in corners and cry in the dark. I won’t bring a life into a world where to eat it must consent to famine’ (177). She blames the Catholic Church for some of this, pointing out to Declan the limitations that religious belief has placed on her mother, who has subordinated her own desires and ambitions to fulfil the role of wife and mother, and who will not challenge the Church’s teaching in any way. Declan’s response to her distress is to counsel abortion and to offer money to pay for it, but he will not speak publicly in support of that choice. Marie responds with one of the central arguments of the play:

MARIE: I’m asking you to break the silence. If you can condemn the guns and bombs then surely you can speak out against the violence people don’t see […] You’d be explaining the violence that makes abortion necessary. You’d be exposing the silence that allows it to go on. (180)

In interview with Pilkington, Baron Cohen describes the creative process and the group’s arrival at the rape story, explaining that the group included a number of women who had been raped, some as children. As a group they felt that the destructive and counter-intuitive act of a pregnant woman going on hunger strike could only be justified by a violation as brutal as rape. They also decided against staging the rape, choosing instead 166 L. FITZPATRICK to have the characters describe what happened. Baron Cohen says, ‘We did not want to risk the voyeurism, the titillation, the unconscious reinforcing of reactionary desires that—if unavoidable in secular patriarchal cultures— would be all the more virile within the sexually repressed culture of Catholicism’ (Pilkington 1994, 40–41). Baron-Cohen explains this further, saying that the project was committed to ‘representing Catholicism’s collusion in creating a culture of sexual crime’ based on misunderstanding and fear, while also noting that most of the participants were supportive of liberation theology and the young priest is deliberately conceived as supportive of Marie, though troubled by her actions. This critique of Catholicism would appear to be motivated by the project’s aim of uncovering the local social and cultural operations of power and force that make rape possible. There are three rapes in the play, and all are described in words. These are the rape of Marie, who is first knocked unconscious and who realizes afterwards that she must have been raped because of the injuries she sustained. Her description is mainly concerned with the aftermath of the act and her feelings of violation, shame and guilt: ‘I couldn’t get rid of the feeling of dirt. Inside. I tried to put the fear of rape out of my mind […] If I’d dreamt it, I’d desired it. If I’d been raped, I was the one responsible. Either way I was guilty’ (175). Her friend and ally, the Protestant Diane, reveals that she was the victim of a sectarian gang rape by her brother and his friends, when he discovered she was going out with a Catholic. She describes the violence of the attack and its bodily consequences: ‘both eyes swollen out to here? I couldn’t eat for the bruising round my neck’, and ‘I blamed myself … That I was a fenian whore! No better than the dirt I lay on … I lived that lie because to imagine anything else was unbearable.’ Using rape as a punishment for sexually transgressive behaviour is a method of enforcing heteronormativity, endogamy and chastity; the rape of one woman (or more rarely, man) can act as a warning and a deterrent for the rest of the community. Punishment rapes are very rarely mentioned in public discourse in Northern Ireland, but other methods of public humiliation including tarring and feathering were used with the victims displayed afterwards; these punishments were often inflicted by women on other women. In Dawn Purvis’s short play Picking Up Worms (2014, unpublished) the child narrator sees paint and feathers on the lamp post near her house, and her conversation with the other small girls allows the audience to piece together what has happened: a young woman has been THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 167 beaten, tarred and feathered by the other women for dating a Catholic boy. Diane finds strength to assert that the blame lies with the aggressors and not with her, and to find solidarity and resistance with other women who have also been ‘mocked. Harassed. Assaulted. And raped … But I did nothing. (Beat) My time has come’ (214). The characters’ process of claiming the violence done to them and making a decision to resist involves breaking the silence that previously kept them isolated from one another, and therefore powerless. The third rape is described in confession in the penultimate scene of the play. Declan the priest is murdered by a man who confesses to beating and raping his wife, though, he argues, sex with his wife is not rape but ‘rightfully’ his, ‘by law’ (304). This claim contrasts with the women’s earlier attempts to assert their bodily integrity, and summarizes again the opposing attitudes to power and violence that the play examines. Though none of the rapes are staged in Threshold, within the plot they are rendered ‘visible’ as acts of interpersonal violence and are situated clearly within the context of a violent and misogynistic society. What the play proposes is a radical re-evaluation of gender relations, and a radical interrogation of the functioning of power, authority and control within the state. In the process, it develops and performs female roles that name the violence enacted upon them and that recognize its provenance and its political and ideological underpinnings.

Rape and Post-Conflict Northern Ireland The post-conflict work by some contemporary women playwrights7 appears less concerned with identity, perhaps largely because the question of sectarian identity has become less pressing over the past two decades. So although it may be possible for the spectators to recognize the character’s sectarian identity (in Pumpgirl, for example, Sinead’s Irish name suggests she is Catholic), the characters are no longer represented as consciously practising one or other community identity. Where Tea in a China Cup uses the 12th of July as a spine for the plot, and the characters identify themselves with a specific community and with the characteristics attributed to that community, in Abbie Spallen’s Pumpgirl or Patricia Byrne’s Don’t Say a Word or Lisa McGee’s Girls and Dolls, sectarian identity is purely incidental. Lucy Caldwell’s Carnival, being concerned with Romany characters, avoids the issue entirely. But the women’s lives in 168 L. FITZPATRICK these plays are still bound about with the material consequences of being female in a particular society at a particular time: what has changed is that the misogyny the characters experience and confront is shaped by contemporary popular culture as well as tradition. Patricia Byrne’s Don’t Say a Word is a one-woman show first produced by Sole Purpose Productions in Derry in 2004. The play was developed in consultation with Women’s Aid, the Probation Board and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI)’s domestic violence unit. Since its premiere it has toured regularly to theatres and community centres on both sides of the Irish border and is part of the company’s current repertory. It was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2008 and at the Scottish Parliament in 2009 as part of the ‘Sixteen Days Against Gender Violence’ initiative, and was nominated for an Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award in 2008. In the piece, Byrne plays the female protagonist Pauline, occasionally taking on the physicality of her overbearing, violent partner Paul. He is represented by a black leather jacket and by props, which the actor arranges and touches as the monologue charts the development and gradual breakdown of their relationship. The work seeks to explain how an apparently confident young woman might be drawn into a frightening private world with a controlling and violent partner, who systematically alienates her from her family and friends, and forces her to leave her job so that she is reduced to complete dependence. The story is a recognizable and credible one, and the one- woman form and minimal set and props leaves space for the spectators to reflect upon the material and its relationship to the local context, or indeed personal experience. The violence is represented mainly in the physical responses of the performer as the character is slapped, kicked and raped: Byrne’s clothed body moves to express the pain and violence of these assaults. But the character speaks from a point in the stage present where these experiences are in the past, so she reflects upon what happened with the wisdom of hindsight, aware of the impact of the violence on her personality and her worldview. The work is developed to tour, and contains no references to local events of any kind. It does, however, trace the ways in which the relegation of women to the domestic space offers opportunities to an abusive partner. In Byrne’s text, Pauline begins as a happy, sociable young woman with a job she enjoys. She meets Paul at a bar, and they fall in love. His controlling behaviour is initially framed as romantic and loving: he dis- courages her from going out with her friends so that they can spend more THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 169 time together, for example. But as the relationship continues, he begins to question her about her activities, expresses disapproval of her friends, and eventually blocks her from seeing them. She retreats further and further into the domestic space of the home, no longer allowed to go outside without his permission. Yet she finds this early, psychological violence difficult to name. It mimics her relationship with her disapproving mother, and so is familiar to her; equally, it is difficult to separate it from popular discourses of love and romance. Is Paul controlling, or just very protective? Is his jealousy an expression of love, or a warning sign? Is his determination to support her financially an act of aggression and control, or is it the socially approved desire of a husband to support and care for his wife? While the physical violence, which results in a miscarriage, is unambiguous, Pauline wrestles with the earlier manifestations of abuse and frequently distrusts her own instincts in relation to it. Meanwhile, Paul’s cycle of rage and remorse allows Pauline to interpret what is happening as something she is causing by her behaviour, while her social isolation means she has no one with whom to discuss her concerns. The naming of the characters—as Paul and Pauline—situates them as an ‘Every-couple’, making this a generic story that the audience can make their own. The play is clearly intended to raise awareness of domestic violence and to support spectators who have been, or are, in abusive relationships by dramatizing a common, predominantly female, experience. While the work has been criticized for sketching a generic male character, it would be more accurate to say that neither character is particularly detailed. By referring to Pauline’s early, unsatisfactory bond with her mother Byrne allows the audience to find reasons for her toleration of Paul; but the main focus of the play is on capturing the dynamic of the marriage and charting Pauline’s disintegration. The play relies on plot for its efficacy, and Byrne’s deft performance clearly communicates the stages in the characters’ relationship with each other. Abbie Spallen’s play Pumpgirl is constructed from monologues by three characters, and is set in the border area between Northern Ireland and the Republic, an economically deprived region that was heavily mili- tarized and saw large numbers of paramilitary attacks. The play premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 2006 in a production by the Bush Theatre, playing at the Traverse before transferring to London. Two years later it was produced by the Lyric Theatre in Belfast. Generally well-reviewed, it is a grim story, lightened with black comedy, which paints a vivid picture of a contemporary culture where the conflict is over but the scars remain, 170 L. FITZPATRICK in the form of roadside memorials and poverty and endemic violence of the strong against the vulnerable. There are three characters on the stage: the eponymous Pumpgirl, an androgynous young woman who works in a petrol station and is a local target for ridicule; her married boyfriend Hammy, and Hammy’s wife Sinead. They do not interact, but they narrate a series of overlapping events in their lives. There is only one reference that situates the action precisely in post-ceasefire Northern Ireland: Pumpgirl says she and Hammy have sex in a deserted area ‘where two Prods were took and killed about fifteen years ago. Their families have stuck wreaths and things onto the trees. It looks well’ (2006, 20). The unseen characters—Hammy’s friends McCabe and McManus, the local women who tor- ment Pumpgirl, and Hammy and Sinead’s children—are brought alive in quick verbal sketches that skilfully evoke familiar types and stereotypes of small-town life. Pumpgirl describes McCabe as having a ‘snake-eye hyena hairy eye ball look. He presses one sweaty, rolled up ten-pound note into my hand and he’s being all intimate like … the bottom of his shirt, the bit with no buttons left, squeezes his fatty flesh out over the top of his belt’ (11). McManus has a ‘body too long for his legs … his fags tucked into the sleeve of his T-shirt. There’s salad cream in his moustache and a bit of carrot stuck in one of the curls of his Lethal Weapon hairdo’ (23). The grim economic desolation of the town and the impoverishment of its inhabitants are communicated very clearly in the language, which is casu- ally misogynistic: Pumpgirl calls Hammy’s wife ‘the cunt’ and in turn is called ‘the cunt’ and sometimes addressed as ‘cunt’ by him. Their romantic trysts beside the hatcheries, the burned out library van and the memo- rial (she admires the wreaths)—are meaningful to her. The details—that is it a library van that is burnt out; that the plastic wreaths seem pretty to Pumpgirl—evoke the spiritual and intellectual as well as material poverty of the setting. At the end of Act 1, Hammy, McCabe and McManus take Pumpgirl out, get her so drunk she is barely conscious, and rape her. The rape is described by Pumpgirl in a monologue, spoken in the present tense, and hers is the only testimony. She is unable to name it as rape (though the men are aware of what they have done and Hammy later commits suicide). She narrates slipping in and out of consciousness as the attack continues, and not being quite sure what is happening. Meanwhile, the aesthetic of the work gives the audience access to the characters’ interiority, while in no way mitigating the horror of the attack. The confusing THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 171 nature of violence and its randomness, which would be difficult to fully represent in performance, is given an expression in language:

And I can’t help thinking of the people whose car went into the bog. My head is moving back and forward and I’m looking at the scratches on the roof above. Four people on a night out in Warrenpoint. Four people scratchin on the roof of a car. Broken fingernails, silent screams, stiletto shoes and Saturday-night boots banging against black squeezing windows. Hammy is the last, and when he stops he rests his head beside me and he looks so sad I whisper in his ear, ‘It’s okay’. (35)

In Don’t Say a Word Byrne uses her body to suggest the performed violence, but Spallen chooses not to stage the violence at all. This approach can offer an opportunity to recuperate the female character’s individuality or subjectivity, and to reverse or counteract her reduction to a body for display. In this description of the rape scene the spectator encounters the victim’s confusion, her suppressed panic and distress, and her disgust at the bodies of her assailants. Shawshank’s breath smells of tin as he licks her face, fingers in her mouth taste of ‘dirt and salt and cigarettes’ (34); the details express her disgust at the smell and weight of the men’s bodies. Pumpgirl replicates, almost exactly, what Hanley et al. describe as the typical rape scenario in Ireland (2009, 360): she is younger than her attackers, in a low-skilled job, she goes voluntarily with them to a secluded place, all are intoxicated, and a low level of force is used. Hanley et al. note that these rapes are usually not reported for more than twenty-four hours, and that they are rarely prosecuted. Unlike the punishment rape meted out to Diane in Threshold, in which the tensions within the society at war exacerbate and deform traditional attitudes to the patriarchal control of female sexuality, in Pumpgirl the violence is motivated by the men’s contempt for women, and their struggles for dominance over each other. This is expressed in the dialogue, and in the dynamics between the men in the rape scene, where Pumpgirl becomes an object to be used by the men to humiliate her lover Hammy. Hammy’s monologue describes his realization of the mood-change in the group and the danger that Pumpgirl is in, but he lacks the courage to defy the others and protect her. Towards the end of the play Hammy kills himself, while unbeknownst to him Pumpgirl takes his children away from their home to an area of wasteland. For the spectator, it seems likely that she will harm them. However, she decides against this course of action and instead brings them safely home 172 L. FITZPATRICK to their mother. In this way, she obliquely establishes a positive way forward for herself that does not include Hammy or his family, and that seems to open up a kind of hope for the future. Taking a very different approach to post-conflict performance, the Theatre of Witness project ran from 2010–2013 in Northern Ireland. It was based at the Playhouse Theatre in Derry–Londonderry and directed by the American artist and counsellor Teya Sepunick. The project worked with volunteers from the local population to gather first-person narratives of the civil conflict, and each production included six monologues, spoken by the volunteers themselves. Of the four shows produced, two address experiences of sexual violence: I Once Knew a Girl (2012) which is performed by women, and Sanctuary (2013) which explores the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers in Northern Ireland. In interview, Sepunick commented that she had not set out to explore experiences of sexual violence but that she was not surprised when the volunteers raised the issue. In her work with marginalized communities and with post-conflict societies, she has found experiences of sexual violence to be very common.8 Of the six women who speak in I Once Knew a Girl, three refer to experiences of sexual violence. Two of them situate that violence in direct connection to the civil conflict: Anne in her account of her time in the IRA, and Theresa in her account of childhood sexual abuse by paramilitaries in her family home. The third woman, Maria, speaks of the impact of the conflict on the breakdown of her family, and the resulting sexual violence that she experienced when her family lost their home. Like Anne and Theresa, the other women make reference to sexual abuse (though outside the immediate context of paramilitary violence): ‘Who knows what goes on behind closed doors? So whose gonna believe you anyway?’; ‘I would have night- mares about men coming to get me’; ‘Something bad was happening, something dark and so scary’; ‘I thought it was insignificant, but it wasn’t’. During the Troubles, gender-based violence was often marginalized by the state and regarded as a minor problem in comparison to paramilitary violence, as Susan McKay, Eileen Evason and Monica McWilliams attest in their research. Post-ceasefire, there has been little engagement with the gendered experiences of the conflict, or with domestic or sexual violence offences by former paramilitaries or security forces. There are only a small number of performances by local community and arts organizations who have engaged with issues of gender and conflict, utilizing a range of performance strategies to do so: most commonly first-person testimony, storytelling performance, and works of collective creation. THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 173

The performances of Theatre of Witness, which are received as ‘authentic’, offer particularly interesting case studies in terms of audience response to such revelations in the theatre space. The productions tour across Northern Ireland, playing in small theatres, church halls and community centres, and the tickets are free. The performers are local people who are not actors, and the audience is invited to ask questions and respond to the work verbally and in writing after each show. This makes the performance far more personal to the spectators as well as the performers: these are people they might know, living in small and familiar communities, sharing stories that are quite disruptive and shocking, yet commonplace. The productions therefore facilitate dialogue about this taboo subject. ‘Taboo’, because sexual and domestic violence is often minimized or marginalized in representations and narratives of the Northern Irish conflict, where the focus is on the ‘masculine’ constructions of nation and nationalisms, with the security forces or paramilitaries cast as the heroes of their communities. This silencing includes male victims of sexual abuse who recently reported to the press that being Catholics in Northern Ireland they could not go the police; and that neither the Republican political party Sinn Fein nor the Catholic Church would take action against each other. As Monica McWilliams has noted, ‘When cultural values subscribe to keeping the family together … the introduction of alternative approaches to domestic violence can be problematic. Until relatively recently, those who attempted to create some kind of sanctuary … were themselves sanctioned for doing so’ (1998, 127). I Once Knew a Girl addresses the taboo issue of sexual violence but frames it to create as little disruption as possible. In this way, it becomes more legible, less threatening, and opens the topic to the input of the local audience. The production as a whole presents a conventional, even a sentimental, version of femininity through the repeated singing of Que Sera, Sera (evoking a kind of Doris Day, 1950s womanhood), a white set and the use of watery images in the washing of hands and repeated pouring of water, to suggest purity, and the testimony of four of the women whose main ambition had been to marry young and have a family of their own: at least three of them became mothers while still in their teens. Even their engagement with peace activism is motivated by conventional female concerns for family security and the welfare of younger members of the community. However, the performers speak of changes within themselves, changes that have to do with engaging more actively as democratic 174 L. FITZPATRICK

subjects. They reflect on their decisions to become active with a range of peace-building initiatives that involve them in affective work at the level of their everyday activities, but that also involves them in political activism as community advocates and as advocates for marginalized groups. The former activity is normatively female of course, and often involves hours of unpaid labour; but in conservative Northern Ireland the latter is not. By taking on these roles, the performers have challenged deeply held patriarchal prejudices about the proper role of women, and cultural imperatives about the public silence of women. As the performer Ruth says, ‘I wres- tled with restrictive codes of behaviour, beliefs, and especially those that seemed to limit what women could do, be, or wear. It was our dress that would indicate levels of holiness […] And where are the women’s stories in all of this? Too often we have to read between the lines to find the stories of women hidden behind the stories of men.’ In each case, the women’s speech minimizes the violence to themselves because it seemed minor in the context of the civil or ‘real’, public violence. Anne Walker, an IRA quartermaster, talks of being raped a number of times by her superior officer but she does not use the word ‘rape’. She says he ‘came on very strong’ and that she ‘wanted to say no but didn’t know how’. She had no one to talk to, and he had power and authority; she was afraid of him. Later, she found out that ‘more and more men back home in Derry were being violent with their women’, asking ‘Was it the frustrations of not being able to talk about the Troubles? Was it fighting for power? That’s the damage of war and culture that doesn’t get talked about here.’ She does not specify that the men were paramilitaries but it is implicit in her words. This is rarely spoken of in any public forum: sexual or domestic violence by paramilitaries or by state security forces is a deeply uncomfortable subject. These suppressed or ‘disappeared’ stories (Tal 1996) of sexual and domestic violence offer a glimpse of an aspect of the Northern Irish conflict that is rarely visible, rarely discussed, and only occasionally staged. When it is staged in work like Bill Morrison’s Love Song for Ulster it is framed as a metaphor for colonial oppression, so overshadowing the audience’s engagement with the interpersonal, gendered nature of the violence. The cumulative effect of the women’s memories suggests the systemic nature of violence against women in times of conflict. It also draws the audience’s attention to the ways this kind of violence is formu- lated in language as a lesser kind of violence—it is ‘domestic’ or ‘sexual’, adjectives that minimize rather than heighten the brutality of the noun. THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 175

The symbolic violence is revealed through the operation of language that makes this apparent in the performance.

Conclusions These representations of Northern Ireland and the conflict there, on the borderlands of two wealthy and stable European nations, reflect in minia- ture some of the other conflicts represented in theatre productions on the Irish and British stages. This includes productions like The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War, I Have Before Me, or Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden; in plays like Sarah Kane’s Blasted, or various playwrights’ representations of the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The protagonists of Reid and Devlin’s pre-ceasefire plays are represented as very much bound about by family roles and responsibilities, their contact with the public world of politics entirely negotiated through the identities of their male relatives. Thus in Tea in a China Cup, the female characters are defined through their men’s participation with the Orange Order, and in Ourselves Alone the women are Republican activists through the agency of their fathers, husbands, brothers and lovers. This appears to be a stable feature both of women’s experience of war, and its representation on stage. In Ruined, Body of a Woman, and I Have Before Me the women are identified and targeted as members of a particular ethnic group. Their attempted destruction at the hands of their enemies is really aimed at their male relatives and compatriots: it is a demonstra- tion of their men’s impotence, their failure as men to protect their women. The rape of women in wartime is therefore, to a large extent, culturally understood as an attack on the honour of their ethnic group. In Pumpgirl the central character is again the site of a masculine struggle for dominance, and in Don’t Say a Word Paul’s violence is motivated by his sense that his masculine identity and honour is being threatened by any show of independence from his wife. Throughout all of these plays, the female characters are written and performed as struggling to define themselves without reference to male relatives or family structures, and as independent subjects. The challenges they face as they navigate the public world expose societies fractured by decades of civil violence, sectarian abuses of power, and a postcolonial conception of masculinity and femininity that valorizes tradition and, with it, traditional models of gender behaviour. 176 L. FITZPATRICK

Performance work that explores Northern Ireland’s troubled history and transition to a post-conflict society is still in its infancy, and to date shows little engagement with the systemic nature of violence, its intrusion into every aspect of life, and its effect on citizen’s interpersonal relationships. Nonetheless, as plays like Pumpgirl or Don’t Say a Word or I Once Knew a Girl can show, the theatre offers a space for the investigation of women’s status and circumstances in post-ceasefire Northern Ireland. Monica McWilliams writes of societies that are emerging from a conflict that it is important for both sexes to consider what elements of the culture to preserve and what to discard (1998), a question which resonates through all these texts. These plays are all concerned with vulnerability: the characters are vulnerable to harm and to the violence of others. The next chapter examines the question of vulnerability, and its evocation in performance. It examines, firstly, corporeal vulnerability and its tricky connection to eroticism, and secondly, it explores the potential for objects to act as substitutes for the vulnerable human body, sometimes with remarkably empathetic effect.

Notes 1. The Guardian newspaper reports that newly opened files from the UN War Crimes Commission dating from 1943 ‘demonstrate that rape and forced prostitution were being prosecuted as war crimes in tribunals as far apart as Greece, the Philippines and Poland in the late 1940s, despite more recent suggestions that this was a legal innovation following the 1990s Bosnian conflict’. Owen Bowcott, ‘Opening of UN files on Holocaust will Rewrite Chapters of History’. The Guardian, 18 April 2017. The newspaper reports that the archives are held at the Wiener Library in London, and accessible online. The archive holds over 450,000 digital images of the files, covering the period 1943–1949. See https://www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/Collections and http://wiener.soutron.net/Portal/Default/en-GB/RecordView/ Index/92681. Last accessed 17 September 2017. 2. I describe these opposing movements as nationalist, but as engaging with different nations. The terms Irish Nationalism or Republicanism refers to a nationalist impulse that seeks the reunification of Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland. This movement is usually referred to locally as nationalist or nationalism, and it covers a gamut of political opinion from THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 177

constitutional nationalism to armed struggle republicanism as typified by the actions of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). British nationalism in Northern Ireland is always referred to as Loyalism or Unionism, meaning that its adherents are loyal to the British Crown, or to the Act of Union that created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801. Broadly speaking, Irish Nationalism tends to be more left-wing, while Unionism is conservative and some Unionists are sympathetic to the far- right. Both Nationalism and Unionism tend to be socially conservative, with social and cultural attitudes influenced by Roman Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism respectively. 3. In August 1994, the Provisional IRA announced a ‘complete cessation of military operations’. Although the ceasefire was briefly broken in 1996– 1997, it was a decisive event in Northern Ireland’s history. In 1998, the Good Friday Agreement was signed; it was ratified by the electorates of both parts of Ireland and established local, devolved power-sharing government for Northern Ireland. 4. In 1922 Ireland was split into two jurisdictions. The Free State (now the Irish Republic) occupies twenty-six of the thirty-two counties on the island. Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, occupies the other six counties in the North and North East of the island. 5. Northern Ireland’s current population is about 1.7 million, occupying an area of approximately 13,800 km2. 6. For an exploration of their work, see Lionel Pilkington, ‘Dan Baron Cohen: Resistance to Liberation with Derry Frontline Culture and Education’. TDR 38:4, pp. 17–47. See also Theatre of Self-Determination, ed. Dan Baron Cohen (Derry: Guildhall Press, 2001). 7. Marie Jones is an obvious omission here. However, her work really deserves separate consideration as it ranges from social realism (with Charabanc) to slapstick and from monodrama to the musical. Her work can be described as ‘popular theatre’ and is a remarkably successful example of that genre. For a recent critical examination of her work, see Eugene McNulty and Tom Maguire (eds.), The Theatre of Marie Jones: Telling Stories from the Ground Up (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2015). 8. Unpublished interview with Teya Sepunick, May 2014.

Bibliography

Performance Reviews Brantley, Ben. ‘War’s Terrors, Through a Brothel Window’. New York Times, 10 February 2009. 178 L. FITZPATRICK

Books and Articles Bal, Mieke. Reading Rembrandt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; Amsterdam Academic Archive, 2006. Baron Cohen, Dan, ed. ‘Threshold’. In Theatre of Self-Determination: The Plays of Derry Frontline. Derry: Guildhall Press, 2001. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Catty, Jocelyn. Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999; 2011. Devlin, Anne. After Easter. London: Faber & Faber, 1994. Enloe, Cynthia. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Evason, Eileen. Hidden Violence. Belfast: Farset Press, 1982. Foucault, Michel. ‘Enfermement, Psychiatrie, Prison: Dialogue Avec Michel Foucault et David Cooper’. Change 32–33 (1977): 76–110. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. London: Penguin, 1998. Hanley, Conor, with Deirdre Healy and Stacey Scriver. Rape & Justice in Ireland. Dublin: Liffey Press, 2009. Higgins, Lynn and Brenda Silver, eds. Rape and Representation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Katrak, Ketu. ‘“Stripping Women of their Wombs”: Active Witnessing in Performances of Violence’. Theatre Research International 39:1 (March 2014): 31–46. Lewes, Darby. ‘The Female Landscape’. Mercator’s World 1 (1999): 35–41. Linden, Sonja. I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady from Rwanda. London: Aurora Metro Press, 2004. Longley, Edna. ‘From Cathleen to Anorexia: The Breakdown of Irelands’. In The Flowing Tide. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1990; reprinted in Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader, ed. David Pierce. Cork: Cork University Press, 2000: 1082. Maguire, Tom. Making Theatre in Northern Ireland. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2006. McKay, Susan. ‘Rape and Incest in a Violent Male Society’. Fortnight 220 (27 May–9 June 1985): 9–10. McWilliams, Monica. ‘Violence Against Women in Societies Under Stress’. In Rethinking Violence Against Women. London: Sage Publications, 1998: 111–140. Morrison, Bill. A Love Song for Ulster. London: Nick Hern Books, 1994. Nagel, Joane. ‘Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations’. Ethnic and Racial Studies 21:2 (1998): 242–269. Nottage, Lynn. Ruined. Introduction by Kate Whoriskey. London: Nick Hern Books, 2009. THE BODY OF A WOMAN AS A BATTLEFIELD: RAPE AND CONFLICT 179

Pilkington, Lionel. ‘Dan Baron Cohen: Resistance to Liberation with Derry Frontline Culture and Education’. TDR 38:4 (1994): 17–47. Richtarik, Marilyn. Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Sharkey, Sabine. Ireland and the Iconography of Rape. London: University of North London Press, 1994. Solga, Kim. Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Spallen, Abbie. Pump Girl. London: Faber & Faber, 2006. Spivak, Gayatri. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’. In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988: 271–313. Tal, Kali. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Taylor, Christine. ‘Ireland: The Policing of Domestic Violence in Nationalist Communities’. Wisconsin Women’s Law Journal 10:2 (1995): 307–326. Taylor, Paul. ‘Triple the Trouble: A Lovesong for Ulster’. The Independent, 20 April 1993. Visniec, Matei. ‘The Body of a Women as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War’. Trans. Alison Sinclair. Balkan Plots: Plays from Central and Eastern Europe. London: Aurora Metro Press, 2000. Wolfthal, Diane. Images of Rape in the Heroic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. CHAPTER 5

Eroticism, Vulnerability and Affect

Introduction Slavoj Žižek identifies two main categories of violence: subjective—the most visible kind, with an identifiable agent and victim—and objective, which appears to operate apart from human agency, and which he further divides into systemic and symbolic. While subjective violence is a ‘pertur- bation of the normal’ state of civil or domestic peace, objective violence is ‘precisely the violence inherent in this “normal” state’ (2008, 2). It may be systemic (described as ‘the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems’) (1) or symbolic. Symbolic violence is embedded in language but—crucially—is not simply a matter of hate speech or incitement, but is rather concerned with ‘the imposition of a certain universe of meaning’ (2). It is the means by which objects of violence come to be identified and understood as aberrant or destructive, a threat to the well-being of the community. Symbolic violence encodes some bodies as less valuable and more disposable than others, and the plays discussed here have been variously very much concerned with the encoding of gendered bodies and their relative social value. But symbolic violence also shapes beliefs and assumptions about different kinds of violence, and relationships between violence and other human affective experiences. This chapter explores the network of meanings that link violence to eroticism and to vulnerability, and considers the affective force of these in relation to the performance of sexual violence on the stage.

Georges Bataille represents erotic desire and sex as essentially violent (2006). He defines eroticism as more than the biological need to procreate: it is closely related to the human awareness of death. It is this awareness of our own mortality that gives rise to the desire to procreate, but reproduction is only further evidence of our discontinuity since the child is a separate entity who cannot satisfy the desire for continuity of existence (13). This proximity of death to the erotic impulse leads Bataille to one of his key statements: ‘In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation’ (16). Continuing this exploration of continuity/discontinuity of being, he asks ‘What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners?—a violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?’ (17). In the realm of the erotic the individual experiences a ‘partial dissolution’, a petite morte, a glimpse of the dissolution of death and of the almost-possible continuity with another body. Although this is true of both sexes, Bataille’s conception of the erotic is strongly aligned with heteronormative, essentialist ideas of gender, within which the woman is the passive object to be possessed and the male is the active agent, the possessor. While recognizing and expressing the vulnerability of the male partner in an erotic act, Bataille also notes the historical tradition that links lovemaking with sacrifice: ‘the female partner in eroticism was seen as the victim, the male as the sacrificer, both during the consummation losing themselves in the continuity established by the first destructive act’ (18). Later in the study he returns to this language to explore the nature of sexual desire and desirability. Describing women as ‘the privileged objects of desire’, Bataille states that although a man may be the object of a woman’s desire, men are normally the active pursuers. ‘Men have the initiative, and women have the power of exciting desire in men … With their passive attitude they try by exciting desire to bring about the conjunction that men achieve by pursuing them … They put themselves forward as objects for the aggressive desire of men’ (130–131). There is some tension between this passivity and the activity required to draw attention and desire; there is an agency behind the seeming absence of agency, though this remains unexplored. Bataille goes on to argue that prostitution ‘is the logical con- sequence of the feminine attitude’ to sex. He explains: ‘In so far as she is attractive, a woman is a prey to men’s desire. Unless she refuses completely because she is determined to remain chaste, the question is at what price and under what circumstances she will yield. But if the conditions are fulfilled she always offers herself as an object’ (131). Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that Bataille interprets women’s behaviour as using EROTICISM, VULNERABILITY AND AFFECT 183 refusal as part of a game or an exchange of power, in which the refusal (to be seduced) increases the suitor’s desire. Bataille attributes this ‘feigned denial’ to modesty or the appearance of modesty, a necessary counter- movement to the ‘fundamental feminine attitude’ of ‘putting oneself forward’ (132). ‘She could not invite pursuit and especially preference if, far from retreating, she did not make herself conspicuous by her expression or her attitude’ (132). The argument here, that women deliberately draw a man’s desire and then pretend to reject his advances in order to sharpen his appetite, since he could not desire them if they did not act to awaken that desire, is an enduring justification for rape. Bataille never proposes sexual violence, and his conception of the erotic is clearly consensual and consummated by two desiring partners. Nonetheless, he invokes a kind of romanticized violence and his representation of masculinity associates it strongly with qualities and actions of violence and domination, locating the source of this dominance in the phallus, which he describes in quasi-mystical terms. He draws a deliberate analogy between the dissolution of individuality experienced by the sacrificial victim, and the sexual act:

The act of violence [in a sacrificial ritual] … is intentional like the act of the man who lays bare, desires and wants to penetrate his victim. The lover strips the beloved of her identity no less than the blood-stained priest his human or animal victim. The woman in the hands of her assailant is despoiled of her being. With her modesty she loses the firm barrier that once separated her from others and made her impenetrable. She is brusquely laid open to the violence of the sexual urges set loose in the organs of reproduction; she is laid open to the impersonal violence that overwhelms her from without. (90)

By associating eroticism with violence and violation, extolling masculine activity and feminine passivity, and describing the sexual act as despoil- ing the woman of her being, Bataille reads the actions of the male lover in terms that make sex indistinguishable from rape. The old word ravishment perhaps best describes what he envisions, in its competing connotations of force and pleasure: it means both to fill someone with delight, and to rape. But this description is not idiosyncratic, rather it is a poetic description of the dominant narrative trope of popular romantic fiction, folklore and mythology, pornography, and commonly held social beliefs, frequently reflected in mainstream popular culture. Modern works as diverse as Brecht’s Baal, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel and the wholesome 1954 filmSeven Brides for Seven Brothers attest to the centrality of this 184 L. FITZPATRICK construction of masculine and feminine sexuality in our culture. Caryl Churchill’s Abortive and the interaction of Edward and Sherry in Judith Thompson’s Lion in the Streets dramatize the impact of these beliefs on trust in a relationship when the woman has been raped: both male partners fear that the rapist was simply more virile, masculine and desirable. Bataille’s construction of the woman’s role as exciting the man, refusing him or pretending to, and finally yielding to his overwhelming desire and finding her own pleasure in this, is part of the meaning-making in almost all of the dramatic texts discussed here. In Miss Julie, the daughter of the house entices her valet until he succumbs; she teases him and refuses him, but must eventually take refuge in his bedroom where he seduces or rapes her. In the sexual act, she is transformed into the sacrificial victim who must commit suicide to spare her family disgrace and save her lover Jean from the poverty and ignominy of losing his job and his position. Almost all of the plays discussed as feminist interventions exhibit an awareness of the belief in the woman as the temptress and initiator of the sexual act, even when she is only a child, as in Beside Herself or Five Kinds of Silence or A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. Eve Lewis’s Everywoman protagonist in Ficky Stingers understands that she is to blame and her friends and mother agree; in Wertenbaker’s Love of the Nightingale and Grace of Mary Traverse the rapists and at times their victims attribute blame to the woman who was in the wrong place, at the wrong time; who said the wrong thing, or looked the wrong way; who deliberately or accidentally aroused the aggressor’s desire and who is required—for the sake of honour, or propriety, or love—to remain silent and perhaps to submit to further rapes. Many of the plays discussed here are explicitly or implicitly engaged in a rebuttal of this accepted rape script, in their depiction of the brutality, violence and pain inherent in the assault.

Vulnerability Bataille’s exploration of eroticism and his description of its operation in practice draws attention to the fact of human vulnerability as an element of the erotic. His descriptions of erotic desire suggest our vulnerability to each other, as material beings occupying shared physical space, while his depiction of human sexuality identifies women as made vulnerable, stripped, ‘laid bare’, penetrated in the act of erotic love. This chapter approaches the exploration of violence through the representation of the victim’s corporeal vulnerability, as it is represented in diegesis and EROTICISM, VULNERABILITY AND AFFECT 185

didascalia. I am defining the term with reference to Judith Butler’s work since September 11, 2001, and the work of Adriana Cavarero, Erinn Gilson and Ann V. Murphy, three philosophers who are essentially concerned with violence, ignorance and vulnerability. These scholars are all engaged to greater or lesser extent with the possibility of basing an ethics of interpersonal relationships on the ontological vulnerability of the human subject—who, being constituted as embodied, is necessarily exposed to the actions of others. While the various strategies and extents by and to which women are constituted as more vulnerable have been a feature of feminist theory for more than a decade,1 Butler and these other scholars emphasize it as an ontological quality of human existence. This focus on the human avoids essentialist conceptions of gender and of defining women as eternally victims or as inherently potential victims. However, cultural norms of femininity do stress vulnerability and the simulation of helplessness, both physical and psychological or intellectual, and locate female sexual attractiveness and masculine desire within that matrix of vulnerability contrasted with strength or protectiveness, as Bataille’s comments illustrate. The body is available to injury and suffering, but also to caring: the quality of vulnerability is ambiguous, provoking different responses dependent—in part—on the recognition of shared humanity with the Other. Therefore, the concepts of recognition and (in theatre) of audience reception are also significant for this issue. Butler and others adapt from Spinoza, Hegel and Foucault in their use of the term recognition, meaning the process by which we recognize our shared humanity, and thus our shared vulnerability to emotional and physical harm. Butler writes: ‘to persist in one’s own being is only possible on the condition that we are engaged in receiving and offering recognition. If we are not recognizable, if there are no norms of recognition by which we are recognizable, then it is not possible to persist in one’s own being, and we are not possible beings’. She suggests Foucault would express this as ‘norms or recognitions function to produce and deproduce the notion of the human’ (2004, 31–32). Taking the example of those whose sexuality doesn’t conform to norms or whose body doesn’t conform to morphological ideals, she posits ‘that life itself requires a set of sheltering norms, and to be outside it, to live outside it, is to court death’. The negation of the transgressive body ‘is a vain and violent effort to restore order’; and hate-crimes committed against those defined as transgressive are not always included as real or “legible” crimes by governments. Thus the category of human is not stable and requires a 186 L. FITZPATRICK careful consideration and awareness of who is being included or excluded at any point (34–39). Butler’s reading of vulnerability here might be applied to examples of rape—particularly the violence of gang-rape or systematic rape in wartime—and to the unstable identification of the gendered victim as ‘innocent’ or ‘heinous’, to use Ehrlich’s terms again (2001, 28). Women’s bodies teeter on the edge of transgression by virtue of their femaleness: they are often held responsible for provoking desire and thereby instigating their own violation. Erinn Gilson defines vulnerability as ‘a basic kind of openness to being affected and affecting in both positive and negative ways, which can take diverse forms in different social situations (for example bodily, psychological, economic, emotional, legal vulnerabilities’ (2011, 310). She contrasts this with normative definitions of vulnerability ‘as an essentially negative state tantamount to harm’, arguing that it is instead an ambivalent state that is a precondition for meaningful engagement with others: ‘Vulnerability is not just a condition that limits us but one that can enable us’ (italics in original) (310). Her analysis, which draws and extends from Butler, opens questions of the ethical potential of vulnerability and also engages with the epistemology of ignorance. She takes as her starting point that vulnerability is an ontological quality of humanness, but one that is normatively associated with harm and with the potential to be harmed. Therefore personal vulnerability is often denied and is projected onto others, particularly others with whom one does not identify. Gilson argues that this ‘disavowal is a form of cultivated ignorance’ (312). It results in ‘a closure to certain modes of being affected’ (313). Gilson uses Nancy Tuana’s (2006) taxonomy of ignorance and identifies ignorance of vulnerability as wilful ignorance, Tuana’s fourth kind of ignorance, on the grounds that it must be actively cultivated and maintained. It is relevant to the formation of subjectivity and is maintained because the subject feels that this stance is in his or her best interest. The appearance of invulnerability is self- control and self-possession in a social context; it suggests mastery of the environment and of the self within it. But it is useful to consider how the refusal of vulnerability might work, particularly in relation to performances and narratives of rape. In the case of rape victims, victim-blaming is understandably commonplace since most women are socialized to fear rape and so seek to identify reasons why some women are raped, that might enable them to stay safe. This behaviour conforms to Gilson’s and Tuama’s definition of ‘wilful ignorance’, and it easily results in a process that more or less explicitly EROTICISM, VULNERABILITY AND AFFECT 187 blames the victim. Secondly, there is a vested hegemonic interest in victim- blaming since this avoids serious discussion of the role of rape and sexual violence in maintaining normative gender relationships and normative conceptions of gender. Women are encouraged to maintain a stance of wilful ignorance because this sustains current social attitudes towards women, female sexuality, and masculinity. It offers a layer of protection to ‘respectable’ perpetrators of sexual violence, allowing the continuation of binary responses to victims of rape based on the identity of the perpetrator. Thus other women may disclaim their shared bodily vulnerability with the victim of rape, and men may also do so. If vulnerability is identified as a quintessentially feminine characteristic, then men may wilfully ignore their own vulnerabilities and capacity to be harmed. Men who are sexually violated may be labelled effeminate or inadequate in some way, with male– male rape understood as a ‘potent signifier of absolute and uncanny trauma’ as Lisa Coulthard argues (2010, 171). Meanwhile the idea of vulnerability as a negative quality, one inhering primarily in the bodies of women and ‘weak’ men who are Other to the secure and successful subject, can be maintained. Surveys of social attitudes repeatedly show high levels of victim- blaming, and government-sponsored anti-rape campaigns frequently target women’s behaviour and measures that women can take to avoid attack. This mode of campaigning exhibits a hegemonic attachment to invulnerability. The vulnerable is ‘Other’, in so far as women are normatively constituted as ‘Other’ to the masculine norm; they are constituted as physically vulnerable (therefore as lesser, weaker, needing protection), and they are constituted as inclined to engage in dangerous acts (going out alone at night; drinking alcohol; engaging in low-level sexual activity with strange men). Women are thus generally constructed as liable to act irresponsibly while the neoliberal state and criminal justice system struggles to protect them. While there are other campaigns that warn of criminal prosecution and prison sentences as consequences of rape, multiple examples of anti- rape poster campaigns that target women can be found online. In 2007–2008, the National Health Service and Home Office in the UK ran a poster campaign warning that ‘One in three reported rapes happens when the victim has been drinking’, alongside a black and white picture of a laughing young woman, apparently lying down drunk; in 2013 Calderdale Council in West Yorkshire produced a poster with a young woman in a very short and revealing dress, dishevelled and perhaps bruised, alongside the caption ‘Night of the Reckless Drunk’. The smaller 188 L. FITZPATRICK text reads, ‘When you drink too much you lose control and put yourself at risk. Don’t let your night out become a nightmare!’ A particularly strange example from Thames Valley Police in 2012 shows a young girl on the ground, being attacked by the young man who is holding her down; the caption reads, ‘Her mum bought her the cider’ and warns that buying alcohol for under-18s is a crime. This poster appears to suggest that mothers who buy alcohol for their teenage daughters are at least partially responsible if their child is sexually assaulted, while boys who assault drunken girls are not identified as culpable. Other posters warn women of the dangers of unlicensed taxis, and one which uses the word ‘vulnerable’ asks, ‘Which one of your mates is the most vulnerable on a night out? The one you leave behind. Many sexual assaults could be prevented. Stick together and don’t let you friend leave with a stranger or go off on their own’. This poster, which has an image of two young women dressed for a night out, taking a selfie, offers sensible advice but also seems to place the responsibility for avoiding rape onto the friends rather than onto perpetrators.2 In performance, the invocation of a character’s vulnerability may create a wide range of reactions in the spectator, including shock, distress, revulsion or empathy; the vulnerability may be depicted in normative terms (relating to harm), or in non-normative terms (relating to the ability to be affected by others in positive as well as negative ways). It may also be used in attempts to prompt the spectators to respond actively to the drama, to recognize their own ontological vulnerability and thus move to a spectatorial position that Kelly Oliver (2001) and Hans-Thies Lehmann (2006) term ‘response-ability’. Oliver uses this term in a paradigm that positions the spectator as witness (7). Along with address-ability, response-ability describes the ethical demands of human relationships with others. Possibly, the ‘making strange’ quality of theatrical performance enables a greater openness of response to the vulnerable or suffering subject. However, it may also offer opportunities to exoticize or even eroticize the spectacle of suffering. The question for the artist thus becomes one of the production of empathy: how or when is ethical engagement more likely, and how can ethical engagement be nurtured? Meanwhile in relation to live performance, Dolan’s theory of the ‘utopian performative’ suggests that such recognition can be a powerful affective experience, one that allows an audience to ‘come together, embodied and passionate, to share experiences of meaning making and imagination that can describe or capture fleeting intimations of a better world’ and that such kinds of performance EROTICISM, VULNERABILITY AND AFFECT 189

‘inspire moments in which audiences feel themselves allied with each other, and with a broader, more capacious sense of a public, in which social discourse articulates the possible, rather the insurmountable obstacles to human potential’ (2005, 1). By considering eroticism alongside vulnerability, I am concerned to point out some of the potential difficulties of staging rape and sexual violence in view of the audience. If vulnerability is coded as a feminine quality, and is linked—as it is in Bataille’s writing—to the sexual desirability of women, the erotic potential of scenes of rape is heightened. The strategies for representing the rape, and its framing, shape the meaning for the audience. In her analysis of representations of ‘heroic’ rape in fine art, Wolfthal identifies narrative devices that naturalize the violence and that suggest a happy ending. Analysing the representation of the Sabine women by artists of the period, she notes that the women in the foreground are struggling against the Roman soldiers, but those in the background are walking arm in arm with their new husbands. This narrative is embedded in Western cultural narratives of rape, in every medium but most brutally in pornography, which explicitly depicts women being violently overwhelmed by male sexual aggression and submitting to it, finding pleasure in helplessness and humiliation. The description of such acts as ‘surrender’ on the part of the woman suggests an agency at work on her part, a willingness to succumb to the seducer, as described by Bataille. These narratives tend to eroticize vulnerability by making it central to female desire. Wolfthal notes that women do not depict these stories in these ways in their works of art. Rather, their work sets the victim at the centre of meaning-making, representing the events as the women might have experienced it. Nonetheless, women are inducted into the culture that produces the work. Images of the rape of the Sabine women were commonly painted onto linen trunks for a bride’s trousseau, for example. The texts discussed here deliberately challenge such conceptions of rape, and seek instead to foreground a different kind of embodied vulnerability that emphasizes pain and suffering. Christine Stoddard (2009) argues that pain can operate as an ethical force by promoting an intersubjective engagement, a concept not unlike Oliver’s conception of witnessing and bearing witness. This engagement is dependent on a sense of shared vulnerability, which arguably allows the female spectators to engage more affectively with the women’s experiences of violation and of bodily pain. Like Elaine Scarry (1985), Stoddard describes pain as isolating and unshareable because it resists language—so we can know of pain, but not feel it for each other. However, she points 190 L. FITZPATRICK out, we can empathize and we do respond affectively. Pain makes us ‘uneasy. It is inarticulate, pre-linguistic, a phenomenological problem that exists on the margins of what can be represented’ (online). She argues that pain can operate as an ethical force, destabilizing the ‘epistemological drive towards the real in performance’ and promising an intersubjective engagement similar to Oliver’s idea of witnessing. Stoddard is exploring the ‘actual’ pain of Orlan’s surgical performances, and of the affective response to ‘real’ rather than represented pain. But in dramatic performance, although the pain cannot be known, it can be communicated at the visceral level of the affect as well as intellectually through language, and can arouse much the same affective response in the spectator. Ketu Katrak argues that ‘Violence on women’s bodies in live performance can elicit profound emotional responses from spectators … the brutalization of women on stage involves and affects audiences as active witnesses … Affective responses such as hope, social consciousness of injustice and outrage, among other emotions, are elicited by the transformative potential of power theatrical representations of violence on female bodies and the latter’s resistances [in performance]’ (2014, 31). Yet violence against women can be received as pleasurable for the spectator in a range of ways, including in the display of the body, and in the eroticization of female vulnerability and male strength. Nor does Katrak’s statement invalidate such a possibility. But what it also suggests is that the violence is (or may be) received as more distressing or affective when it is aimed at bodies which are culturally understood to be particularly vulnerable, or which are constituted as helpless in performance. The previous chapter considered Ruined, and other examples of the depiction of rape as an act of war committed upon the bodies of women, who are vulnerable physically and ontologically, and vulnerable in the situation where their men are dead or defeated and there is no civil society or state to appeal to. In producing the notion of the human, Butler has repeatedly argued for a ‘staying with’ the realization of vulnerability rather than a rush to violence or war, which are arguably predicated on an assumption that it is possible to be invulnerable, or at least that strength resides in the appearance of invulnerability. Adriana Cavarero, like Butler, points to the ambivalent status of vulnerability and the two possible responses of ‘wounding and caring’. Vulnerability in itself does not pre- suppose a protective response: as Butler, Cavarero and Murphy all point out there is clear evidence that vulnerability very often provokes violence and anger. This is particularly apparent in plays that depict rape in wartime, EROTICISM, VULNERABILITY AND AFFECT 191 where the vulnerable bodies of the characters in Ruined, I Have Before Me and The Body of a Woman all depict the destruction of the female body through rape and rape with objects. The vulnerability of the female body, in these plays, provokes brutal violence. Such actions are possible through the failure of recognition of shared subjectivity, and because the destruction of the vulnerable Other may act to reassure the perpetrator of his (or her) comparative invulnerability.

Affect and Witnessing in Performance Building initially on Spinoza’s Ethics and on potential collaborations between performance studies, queer theory and cognitive science, the concept of ‘affect’ has become popular in the scholarship of the past decade. Sara Ahmed’s work on affect explores the role of the emotions in shaping bodies and social interactions, and examines the physical, visceral aspects of felt emotion (2004). Teresa Brennan’s work explores affect as something that is communicated between people, a non-verbal ‘atmosphere’ that is both psychological and physiological (2004, 1). This idea of affect—of the communication of emotion through non-verbal as well as verbal means—is a feature of dramatic theatrical performance, where the actor elicits a physiological, emotional response from the audience through his or her physicality and voice. As spectators we do not only recognize the character’s fear when it is mimetically presented to us, we also feel in our own bodies the tension evoked by a skilful performance of fear or the effective creation of suspense and threat; or indeed of joy or sympathy. Thus ‘affect’ is a feature of theatrical reception, though not always configured in those terms or in that language. Jill Dolan’s work on the ‘utopian performative’ (2001, 2005) circles the question of affect through its exploration of moments of ‘feeling together’, when the audience at a live performance experience a shared moment of unity, of ‘present-ness’, that Dolan specifies is pre-political. Affective and effective, these moments are about a glimpse of utopian possibility, brief instances of shared grief or pleasure. Dolan’s concept of a ‘fleeting intimation’ or ‘moment’ echoes with Lehmann’s concept of the ‘absolute present’ of post-dramatic theatre, the moment that he links to the ‘aesthetic of startling’ or ‘aesthetic of responsibility’ (2006, 143). Lehmann argues that post-dramatic theatre is ‘a theatre of the present’ (italics in original). ‘The presence of the actor is not an object, an objectifiable present but a co-presence in the sense of the 192 L. FITZPATRICK unavoidable implication of the spectator’; this extra-aesthetic encounter with ‘the presence of the actor as the presence of a living human being’ can be described as ‘shock’ (142–143). He draws upon Bohrer’s concept of the ‘absolute present’ to conceive of presence as a process or verb, rather than as an object. The presence of the performer therefore does not demand mimesis or representation, and does not function ‘according to the registers of representation and interpretation’. Rather than assuming the co-presence of actor and character, post-dramatic theatre assumes the co-presence of performer and spectator in a moment of ‘absolute present’ (141–143). Lehman refers to ‘responsibility’, rendered by Kelly Oliver as ‘response-ability’, meaning the encounter with the Other in the moment of performance. This is potentially an ethical moment—though pre- political and not necessarily lasting. This moment of response-ability and address-ability is connected, for Oliver, with the process of witnessing and with the witnesses’ capacity to recognize the testifying Other as a being like them. This ethical engagement arguably offers opportunities to create change in the spectators’ political or moral lives by offering a glimpse of a shared humanity. Equally, to return to Dolan, it offers the possibility of ‘fleeting intimation’ or alliance. Katrak invokes affect as the underpinning of ethical responses to work like Ruined. By focusing on the damage and embodied consequences of the rape, the play forecloses any possibility of finding the women’s vulnerability erotic or titillating. Outside of pornography (where rape is a recurring trope) both nineteenth-century melodrama and Restoration comedy eroticize rape and feminine vulnerability, though in different ways. Restoration comedy tends to do so by treating rape as a kind of seduction, which a respectable woman can resist, catching a husband in the process. Sometimes the threatened rape is a pretence to allow the hero to rescue his beloved in the nick of time, so winning her admiration and affection. Meanwhile in melodrama, the heroine is saved from the villain by the arrival of the hero (in this case it is not intended to be comic). This plot structure allows the audience to be titillated by the female character’s distress and dishevelment, while being reassured that no real harm comes to her and she is instead safely betrothed to her saviour. The display of the female body, in the form of tousled hair and ripped or disarranged clothing, functions as a semiotic sign for rape or sexual assault while also providing scopophilic pleasure. While displays of vulnerability may be pleasurable for the viewer, some work seeks a more active and empathetic engagement with the fear and EROTICISM, VULNERABILITY AND AFFECT 193 suffering of the dramatic character. This chapter explores a number of ways in which the vulnerability of the characters can be depicted for the audience. The first is an examination of Howard Brenton’s Romans in Britain, looking at the staging of a rape that is usually interpreted as a metaphor for colonialism. The reading offered here attempts to reclaim the realism of the rape scene as an engagement with the brutality of colonialism and with actual crimes committed on the bodies of the colonized. Secondly, the chapter explores representations that substitute objects for the bodies of the raped women, allowing the passivity of an object, or its smallness or softness or another of its ontological qualities to substitute for the vulnerability of the flesh.

Romans in Britain Howard Brenton’s Romans in Britain stages the vulnerability of the male body, in a scene that uses rape as a metaphor for colonization. The play is infamous for its staging of the homosexual rape of a young Celtic druid by a Roman soldier, which led to the attempted prosecution of the director Michael Bogdanov in 1980 for the crime of procuring an act of gross indecency.3 The result, as Brenton ruefully admits in an interview in advance of the play’s next professional production at Sheffield Theatres twenty-five years later, was that the play ‘became “reified”, as the philosophers say: turned into something it is not. It was no longer a piece of theatre—it was either a cause or an outrage’ (28 January 2006). The play depicts the Roman conquest of Britain and uses this as a metaphor for the conflict in Northern Ireland. It spans three time periods: Part 1 is set in 54 BCE during the Roman invasion and 1980 (present day of the premiere) Northern Ireland, and Part 2 is set in 515 AD during the Saxon settlement of Britain, moving again to 1980 Northern Ireland. The play’s first part ends with a coup de théâtre: the sound of a military helicopter and British Army uniformed troops with 1970s equipment emerging from the Roman ranks. Part 2 alternates between a fictional version of Robert Nairac just before his execution in a field in South Armagh, and scenes of conflict between Saxons, Romans and Celts in sixth-century England. Brenton’s thesis is that the Roman invasion of Britain set in motion a history of colonizing other countries; he returns to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to seek the darkness in the culture of the imperial power. The play has been critiqued for its romantic and ‘Othering’ representation of the Celts and for perpetuating a dichotomous view of Anglo rationality 194 L. FITZPATRICK and logic against Celtic romanticism and imagination—in his introduction to the play, Brenton suggests that ‘They (Celts/Welsh) mention heroes and battles, but without any sense of what we call history’ (1982, xi). The rape scene arguably reinscribes the stereotype of the ‘feminine’, dreamy Celts through the forced sexual penetration of the young man. Nonetheless, after a decade and a half of the ‘War on Terror’, renditions, enhanced interrogation techniques, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the soldier’s sexual abuse of their captive and their flippant indifference to his suffering is credible and far less shocking than it must have been to a London audience in 1980. The scene opens with the clothes of the three young Celtic men—Brac, Marban and Viridio—on the stage; after a ‘silence’, the brothers emerge naked from the ‘river’ and lie down, laughing, joking and wrestling with one another. Their potential vulnerability is marked firstly by their nakedness and secondly by the moments when they stop and listen to the sounds from the surrounding forest, unsure what they are hearing. Their play fighting and relaxation stop abruptly when three Roman soldiers walk out of the woods; they all see each other at the same time. ‘Three wogs’, says one of the soldiers (1982, 25–30). The naked bodies of the three brothers become immediately vulnerable when contrasted with the bodies of the soldiers, fully clothed and armed. As the scene continues with the killing of Veridio and the wounding of Brac, who dies slowly on stage screaming with pain and trying to pull himself to safety, the sense of physical threat to Marban becomes more and more pronounced. The soldiers surround him, disarm him, and use his own knife to cut his shoulder and buttocks; then the Third Soldier ‘holds Marban’s thighs and attempts to bugger him’. At the end of the scene the Second Soldier straddles Marban’s head and, as the three joke amongst themselves, he orders ‘Fucking Latin talking nig nog! Suck me off!’ (38). Throughout most of this sequence, Marban is reduced from the fluency of his speech to his brothers to inarticulate groans; his final, broken speech is in Latin, in which he curses the soldier (‘I am a priest. I curse you Roman soldier. Kill. Foully’) before he is silenced again by the (presumed, but unseen) oral rape. The inarticulacy of the rape victim is explored in feminist writing on rape by scholars like Sharon Marcus and Carine Mardorossian. Marcus argues that the act of rape functions like a script, using that term to ask ‘how the violence of rape is enabled by narratives, complexes and institutions which derive their strength … from their power to structure our lives EROTICISM, VULNERABILITY AND AFFECT 195 as imposing cultural scripts’ (2002, 772). These cultural scripts act to silence the—normatively female—victim through fear, pain and shame; but men who diverge from the normative White, heterosexual male are also vulnerable to sexual violence where that violence functions to feminize the victim: we might point to historical and contemporary examples of castration, reports of the mass rape of male prisoners in war zones like Congo,4 prison rapes that script specific men as substitute women, the photographed sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and sexual violence that targets the LGBTI community. The rape of Marban is pre- figured in the soldiers’ mocking comments about ‘pretty arses’ and about having fun with their captives. The cutting of his buttocks prior to the rape adds to the brutality of the rape and the audience’s sense of dread at what is happening; it also suggests a violent defloration in the spilling of blood and the penetration of the skin with the knife (the soldier creates the ‘wound’ which is an archetypal signifier of womanhood and the vagina; the knife becomes the semiotic substitute for the phallus. This is not unusual in stage representations of rape where weapons are substituted for the penis; representations by women writers tend however to eschew this in favour of the grotesque or ridiculous). Meanwhile, Marban’s inarticulacy and his animal groans communicate his physical suffering and the world-shattering violence that is being done to him; and it reinscribes his helplessness and vulnerability. Like Sorrel in On Raftery’s Hill, he is inarticulate and likened to an animal. Through his body, the vulnerability of his community and culture to annihilation by the Roman invasion is made material and visible on the stage. Like the rape in The Marriage, the rape of Marban functions at least partially on the level of metaphor, distracting to some extent from the representation of interpersonal acts of brutality to communicate something of historical significance as well, or even, perhaps, instead. Marban’s vulnerability is located visually and aurally in his naked body and in his inarticulacy. The vulnerability of the military bodies is obscured— though it is visible in the moments when Marban cuts one of the soldiers, or when the soldier abandons his attempt at sodomy with a comment that it is uncomfortable for him. Marban’s inarticulacy also points to his vulnerability within the discourses of militarism and imperialism. His perspective on the Roman conquest of Britain is rendered null in the hegemonic narratives of British history which figure the Roman conquest as generally positive (as Brenton points out in interview); he is silenced in the play, and in the history. The use of rape as a metaphor for imperial conquest—where 196 L. FITZPATRICK it is often elided to mean seduction—or as a postcolonial image of the brutality of colonization, is well known. Luke Gernon’s seventeenth- century history of Ireland figures it as a sexual conquest, with Ireland as the desiring and available maiden awaiting the arrival of her ‘husband’. Like other British colonies, female Ireland is imagined without a master, without someone to manage (husband) her resources; the men of the island are thereby rendered invisible and impotent. Through the representation of male/male rape, Brenton’s text represents the elimination of the masculine from the native population. Whether his representation enables the audience to recognize the process by which colonies are feminized in the service of patriarchal discourses of power, or simply reiterates the imperial position but with some pity for its victims, is arguable. But the play foreshadows the soldier’s rape of Ian in Sarah Kane’s Blasted both in the vulnerable male body as it is tortured in view of the audience, and in the evocation of military brutality and its impact on the civilian population. Although Katrak argues that audiences are particularly susceptible to violence enacted on female bodies, the violence enacted in these two plays also evokes disgust through its detail, its mutilations, and its duration on the stage. The suffering of Ian in Blasted, or of Carl who is raped and systematically dismembered in Cleansed, is not titillating. This is in part because normative discourses of sexuality and love guide the audience to understand that women’s resistance is not sincere, and can be forcibly overcome, and that women and men will both find pleasure in forced intercourse. But also, Kane attempts an approach to representation that connects the spectator affectively to the suffering body on stage. Therefore, the spectator’s sympathetic identification with Ian is not only because, as a male character, Ian is recognizably an agent; it is also because the structure and visceral quality of the performance with its visual and acoustic violence, works directly on the bodies of the spectators as well as the bodies of the actors.

The Body as Object Strategies for the performance of rape frequently make use of stylized actions that suggest characteristics of sexual violence rather than staging the violence explicitly in view of the audience. For example, the large-scale performance of The Conquest of Happiness inspired by Bertrand Russell’s writing included a short scene that referenced the mass rape of the Balkan Wars. The work, co-produced by theatre companies in Belfast, Sarajevo EROTICISM, VULNERABILITY AND AFFECT 197 and Ljubljana, was staged on the ten-acre Ebrington site (a former British military barracks) on the banks of the River Foyle, overlooking the historic walled city of Derry on the other side. The siting of the work offered clear resonances between the exploration of the horrors of twentieth-century warfare, and the local history of the city. Amongst mass scenes with community casts and local choirs was a choreographed sequence where two men in military fatigues and a woman in civilian clothes represented gang- rape. The woman was passed back and forth between the two men, pulled first towards one, swung around, pushed, manhandled, then grabbed by the other and pulled to him; pulled back by the first, manhandled, turned, and shoved back again, and so on. The body of the woman passed in this way, gradually transformed from a living, resisting body to a heavy object, slowly becoming almost a thing without agency, expressed the exhaustion of the victim and the unremitting violence of the aggressors. The actor playing the woman was clearly middle-aged, a decision that stressed the violent and destructive intent of the act rather than offering it as a stereo- typed representation where the soldiers’ desire is constituted as natural and as aroused by the beauty of the woman. The audience was not offered a pleasurable spectacle, or an erotic conflict. The ordinariness of the woman suggested the ordinary banality of rape in wartime, and the duration of the scene expressed the debasement of the individual and the brutality of the action. The reduction of the performer’s body to an object through the enactment of violence recalls Simone Weil’s analysis of the Iliad, which defines force as that which makes a thing of its object. She writes:

Force is that which makes a thing of whoever submits to it. Exercised to the extreme, it makes the human being a thing quite literally, that is, a dead body … From the power to change a human being into a thing by making him die there comes another power, in its way more momentous, that of making a still living human being into a thing … The spectacle of a human being reduced to this degree of misery chills one like the sight of a dead body. (2003, 45–47)

The scene from Conquest of Happiness demonstrates this degradation of the woman’s body to object, and similar techniques are used in choreographed representations of rape such as Kenneth Macmillan’s cruel ballet The Judas Tree (1992), DV8’s Enter Achilles (1995), or Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre’s production of Giselle (2003). All these works use 198 L. FITZPATRICK

movement to represent the journey of the female protagonist from suffering to death or dehumanization. Fabulous Beast’s Giselle is a cross-cast, carnival version of the classical ballet that draws on different forms of dance, song and dialogue to situate the tale in the more or less contemporary Irish Midlands. Giselle is mute, outcast from the local population, and sexually abused by her brother Hilarion. In the rape scene, he gallops around her as if on horseback, and loops a rope around her ankle pulling her to the floor. He then drags her across the stage, turning and twisting her body, finally arranging her on his knee. The violence of the action is indicated both through the humiliation of Giselle and her loss of control to Hilarion. Her puppet-like frozen face and physicality as he manipulates and arranges her suggests the routine nature of these assaults, and her blank submission to them. Meanwhile, he makes the sounds of birds and animals as he tosses and turns her, laying her on the ground to canter over and around her, finally dribbling spittle onto her face in an image of ejaculation. Giselle’s withdrawal into a kind of physical passivity suggests the paralyzing fear suggested by Weil, as well as the dehumanizing effects of sexual violence. That she is mute, situates her within a gallery of raped and silenced women in both classical and contemporary theatre and literature. While Giselle is identified as an innocent and blameless victim, the woman in The Judas Tree teases and taunts a group of men on a building site in an explicitly sexual manner. This one-act ballet created by Kenneth Macmillan—his last work—was inspired by the story of Judas and Christ, and examines the consequences of violence and human complicity in it. He created it for Irek Mukhamedov who choreographed the 2010 production for the Royal Ballet with Carlos Acosta in the central role. A beautiful woman, danced by Leanne Benjamin, appears within a group of construction workers, their foreman, and a Jesus character. She dances with the men, lifting her leg onto their shoulders and moving sensually against them. Their responses become increasingly violent until they represent a gang-rape in which she is tossed from one to another. Her body is passed amongst them, disappearing beneath them, until she is reduced to a battered object. The foreman (Judas), the only one who has not raped her, is enraged with jealousy and breaks her neck. Jesus comes forward to guard her body, and Judas kisses him, which is a signal to the other men to kill him. Horrified by what he has done, the foreman hangs himself from a steel girder. Mukhamedov describes the work as ‘very dark’, and ‘emotionally demanding … frightening’ to perform (2010, online). EROTICISM, VULNERABILITY AND AFFECT 199

Macmillan’s earlier ballet The Invitation also represented an explicit rape on the stage, using similarly stylized movement to express the violence, violation and physical devastation of the act. While these texts reduce the violated body of the human performer to the status of the object through choreography, other representations of rape substitute an object for the violated body. DV8’s Enter Achilles (1995) is a dance theatre piece, adapted for film the following year, that explores masculinity and male group relationships. Using cartoon references and comedy, the work is set in an ordinary pub where a group of men gather to drink and play pool in an all-male environment. Alongside the camaraderie, however, is a potent and dangerous jostling for position in the pack, and a violently guarded but fragile heterosexuality that leads to the ostracism and victimization of the slightly effeminate stranger, and the exploitation of any perceived weaknesses. Although the men bond by harassing female passers-by, reinforcing their heterosexuality through this objectification of their collective Other, the most potent sense of threat is evoked when they circle and advance on a chosen victim from within the group. However it is the final scenes with the mimicry of a gang-rape enacted on a blow-up doll that most powerfully and chillingly expresses the communal dehumanization of women and group capacity for extreme sexual violence. In this, they offer an insight into the mechanics of gender. While plays like Ruined, Nightingale or Romans in Britain demonstrate the actions of conquering soldiers and their depredations, Enter Achilles examines the formation of masculine identity and the relationships within a male friendship group in everyday settings. In doing so, it dramatizes the group dynamics that can drive acts of sexual and gender-based violence. The blow-up doll is beloved by one of the men, who prefers it to his live girlfriend. Early scenes juxtapose his erotic attachment to the doll against his disregard for the real woman, who phones as he kisses the doll to ask where he is. When he is spotted kissing the doll by one of the other men, however, it is snatched from him and the group performs a parody of a gang-rape in the back yard of the pub; by showing affection for something he has revealed a weakness for which he is punished. The scene depicts oral rape, rape, rape with a bottle, and the beating, kicking, and throwing about of the doll in a choreography that recalls The Judas Tree but is far more explicitly depicted. The scene ends with one of the men breaking a bottle and frenziedly stabbing the doll, as a blood-red stain spreads across its chest. The men’s shouting, barking noises and laughter add to the disturbing violence of the scene, during which they also hold down and strip 200 L. FITZPATRICK the effeminate man, using the doll to ‘rape’ him, to show him—as one says—how to treat a lady. The action is frighteningly believable. Although the ferocity of the assault indicates a desire to inflict serious damage or to kill, the violence is commensurate with the violence described by the female characters in Ruined, or the group sex scene in Freak (discussed below) which gets out of control, or the rape depicted in Nirbhaya based on the real murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey, or any of the texts and performances that represent gang-rape or rape in wartime. The final image from the scene is the man weeping over the crumpled body of the doll, as his mocking friends exit the space. The plot explores the way that the men abuse the doll to hurt the man, reflecting the ways in which women become objects, battlegrounds in conflicts between men, sometimes with devastating results. Dolls are also used to stage rape in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s intertextual two-act play The Love of the Nightingale, discussed in Chap. 3; the story is based on the Greek myth of Philomel and Tereus recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Tereus is the King of Thrace who marries Procne, an Athenian princess, and their son Itys is born. He falls in love with her sister Philomele, who rejects him; but Tereus isolates her, rapes her, and cuts out her tongue to prevent her denouncing him. He tells Procne that her sister is dead. However, Philomele weaves a tapestry depicting the rape and sends it to her sister, who realizes what Tereus has done. In revenge, she and Philomele kill Itys, and serve his cooked body to his father. When Tereus finds out he pursues them, and in order to stop the bloodshed the gods transform all three into birds: Tereus into a hoopoe, Procne into a swallow and Philomele into a nightingale. In a departure from Ovid’s text, Wertenbaker’s Philomele uses large dolls to perform Tereus’s rape of her before her sister Procne and the assembled crowd at the feast of the Bacchae. Her puppet show is greeted first with laughter and then with silence by the on-stage audience. Procne recognizes Philomele, and believes her story. In this instance, the dolls are used indexically to substitute for Philomele’s violated body, and as a storytelling strategy that redirects the audience’s attention from the reliability of a woman’s words to the evidence of their own eyes. Rendered unable to speak, Philomele is no longer subject to cultural beliefs about women’s lack of veracity. The first rape in the play takes place off stage, and is performed in the monologue of the Nurse, Niobe. Niobe is also a victim of rape, having been taken as a slave when her country was defeated in a war against Athens. Her narration of Philomele’s rape therefore includes elements of reflection and advice based on her own experience. She advises not to resist because resistance will make the pain worse, and reflects that the EROTICISM, VULNERABILITY AND AFFECT 201 shame is the worst aspect of it ‘A cool cloth. On her cheeks first. That’s where it hurts the most. The shame’ (330). Although the stage directions don’t insist upon it, reviews and scholarship describe Philomele’s audible off-stage screams as an essential element in Wertenbaker’s feminist staging strategy (Roth 2009, 47). Roth writes that this staging ‘subjectifies’ Philomele’s experience and ‘refuses any scopophilac desire and/or fetishization of violence against women’ (47). Ovid’s Philomele weaving a tapestry and sending it to her sister is a feminine and domestic act, as Roth points out. In contrast, the performance with puppets is both in keeping with Philomele’s Athenian love of theatre, and is ‘a public embodied activity of street performance, marked feminist by “making a spectacle” of it for an onstage community of women’ (45). In both the dance pieces and Nightingale, strategies of staging rape complicate the audience reception experience from a representation of vulnerable femininity in danger that risks creating a pleasurable and erotic spectacle, to a confrontation with the horror of sexual violence through the reduction of the violated body to an object (Giselle, The Judas Tree, The Conquest of Happiness) or through its substitution with an object (Enter Achilles, Nightingale). Without the visual spectacle of Tereus attacking Philomele in Nightingale, the potential eroticism of the young woman’s struggle against overwhelming masculine strength becomes screams of pain and panic. The audience therefore experiences what Bohrer calls ‘an epiphany of fright’ (1994; qtd Lehmann 2006, 143). Lehmann summarizes Bohrer’s consideration of Caravaggio’s Medusa, that Medusa is not frightening in herself, but she seems to see something frightening: her own destiny (142). Lehmann, however, argues that it is not her destiny that she sees but ‘a frightening reality that cannot be named at all’ (143). Therefore, rather than the spectator experiencing an aesthetic fright which is stylized and ornamental, the spectator experiences the ‘“shock” (Benjamin), of suddenness (Bohrer), of being assailed (Adorno), of “being horrified” that is “necessary for cognition” (Brecht)’ (143). The shock in the case of Love of the Nightingale is the sudden aural presence of violence in the theatre, and the audience’s inability to see that everything is all right, that it is ‘only’ a performance. The screams therefore rupture the spectator’s experience of the work and constitute a ‘real fright’ rather than simply an ‘aesthetic fright’. Bohrer’s concept of the ‘absolute present’ disrupts the concept of the aesthetic as ‘an intermediary, a medium, a metaphor, or a representative of another reality’ (144). Philomele’s screams, unmediated by sight, signify fear, and pain, and suffering, and 202 L. FITZPATRICK violence; and the spectator, bound by the conventions of the theatre, does not intervene and so enters the world of the play to be faced with the same ethical dilemmas that the other characters wrestle with. The soldiers and Niobe see what is going to happen and do nothing to save her, and they do not intervene in the violence; the soldiers see it is better to say nothing (333), and Niobe sees the rape as inevitable ‘It was already as good as done … She should have consented’ (330). The off-stage screams and on-stage narration add credibility to Philomele’s testimony, and to the spectator’s understanding of the rape as an act of violence and not as a sexual act; and of her resistance as sincere rather than as signifying a desire to be overwhelmed. She is not, as Bataille describes, feigning denial to excite Tereus further. In fact, in translations of Ovid and in Wertenbaker’s play Philomele’s defiant resistance of Tereus and clear attribution of blame to him contradicts Bataille’s statement that a woman ‘could not invite pursuit … if … she did not make herself conspicuous by her expression or her attitude’ (132). Philomele says:

My body bleeding, my spirit ripped open, and I am the cause? No, this cannot be right, why would I cause my own pain? That isn’t reasonable. What was it then, tell me, Tereus, if I was not the cause? … It was your act. It was you. I caused nothing. (335)

At her insistence that she will tell his people and expose his actions, Tereus cuts out her tongue. He justifies this because she threatened his rule; he had to ‘keep her quiet’. In a significant small detail Wertenbaker has him say, ‘You are more beautiful now in your silence’ (338). Philomele’s insistence on the pain and injury of rape makes illogical the argument that she desired or caused the violence. The same credibility seems to inhere in the staging of the rape using the puppets. Niobe and a servant have brought Philomele to the carnival of the Bacchae on Tereus’s suggestion, and Philomele has insisted on bringing her three large dolls. Niobe regards Philomele as a child, or as simple-minded, following the rape and mutilation. They gather to watch the acrobats perform and she pushes Philomele to the front of the crowd to enjoy the show. But as a space opens up:

Philomele throws the dolls into the circle. Niobe grabs one of them and tries to grab Philomele, but she is behind the second doll. Since the dolls are huge, the struggle seems to be between the two dolls. One is male, one is female and the male one has a king’s crown. (Wertenbaker, 342) EROTICISM, VULNERABILITY AND AFFECT 203

Niobe calls for help, calling Philomele a ‘mad girl’, but the crowd ‘applauds, makes a wider circle and waits in silence’ mirroring the expectations of the audience in the theatre. The rape scene is then performed with the dolls,

in a gross and comic way, partly because of Niobe’s resistance and attempt to catch Philomele … The crowd laughs. Philomele then stages a very brutal illustration of the cutting of the female doll’s tongue. Blood cloth on the floor. The crowd is very silent. Niobe still. (342)

In the response of the on-stage audience, the grotesque (‘gross and comic’) representation of the rape causes laughter, but not the violent silencing of the female doll. The vulnerability of the body is signified by its mutilation, represented both by the blood cloth and by the silence of the ‘mad girl’ who performs the story. The rape, the forcible sex, is less shocking to the audience than the cutting out of the doll’s tongue. The mutilation is a different kind of act: it is visible, there is proof that it occurred, it cannot be attributed to the victim’s secret desire to be overwhelmed or abused. Wolfthal writes of the historically persistent belief that women lie about rape, a history she traces through the paintings of the heroic period. But the belief that women lie is not confined to the past. JoAnn Elam’s1975 film Rape documents women’s experiences of being dismissed by police, psychologists and doctors who believe that women want to be raped (Elam 1975; Chau 1993). Jennifer Kabat, writing on Lutz Bacher’s film about the Kennedy Smith rape trial in the United States in 1991, makes the point that ‘speaking about rape is always a trap … The vocabulary is limited, and expectations are already shaped by previous descriptions’ (1993, 70). This awareness that women are not perceived as credible witnesses recurs in women’s representations of rape, in work by Churchill, Daniels, Lewis and Rame amongst others. Twice in The Love of the Nightingale Wertenbaker sidesteps the question of credibility to present the audience with signs of sexual violence that are not so easily reinter- preted: off-stage screams, and the re-enactment with puppets. Being mute, the re-enactment cannot fall foul of the limitations of language. Philomele does not bring shame upon herself by speaking of what happened to her. She does not have the option of trying to turn her embodied experience into language, and forcing it into the shape decreed by ‘previous descriptions’. Instead, the violence is enacted for the audience using objects, so 204 L. FITZPATRICK that the slippage of signification is minimized. Repeatedly in these performances, the silence of the victim acts both to heighten her vulnerability and her credibility: Giselle, the female characters in The Judas Tree and Conquest of Happiness, the puppets, or the grotesquerie of the blow-up doll: in each case the body displays what words would fail to capture. In a very different representation, in Lara Foot Newton’s Tshepang, the body of a baby girl is replaced with a loaf of bread. Within the world of the play, this object gathers a range of meanings that ultimately coalesce in the horrific image of the raped infant. Foot Newton’s work often uses images to communicate sexual violence: in Karoo Moose (2007) the gang-rape of the young girl is represented by the men entangling her in a football net and shooting the football at her body, while they race about celebrating their scores. Tshepang (2005) is based on a true story from 2001 that led to the revelation that 20,000 child rapes take place each year in South Africa. Foot Newton’s play is an attempt to bear witness to this sad, grim statistic, even as her play satirizes the short-lived media interest in such stories. The two characters, Simon and Ruth, are on stage throughout. Ruth does not speak apart from one word at the end; she sits on a pile of rock salt rubbing the salt into animal skins. A small bed is tied to her back. Simon sits next to her. His monologue creates the community which is the main focus of the work. He describes the village: ‘nothing ever happens here. Nothing. Niks’ (Foot Newton 2005, 12). He hails the passers-by, creating them from his gestures and his descriptions. Sarah passes first: ‘She is the one who did nothing when it happened. Just lit a match and walked out of the room’ (13). At this point, the play has not identified what happened: the work instead creates the history of the community through its inhabitants. All of them have experience of violence. Sarah was stabbed by her boyfriend and has a scar on her neck: Simon gestures the stabbing crying ‘Kwa! Kwa! Kwa!’ (13). Next there is Trompie, a drunk- ard, who was once employed in a good job but who has ‘retrenched’ and has tried multiple times to kill himself. Simon shows the audience the nativity scenes that he carves, using one of the Wise Men to speak Trompie’s ‘Fokkof!’ (15). Simon’s storytelling continues with the community and its impoverished desperation becoming more vivid. The monologue is punctuated with the refrain, in English and in Afrikaans, that nothing ever happens: Trompie’s suicide attempts are unsuccessful because nothing ever happens, Dewaal’s search for his missing child is inconclusive because nothing ever happens. Within this stasis, however, EROTICISM, VULNERABILITY AND AFFECT 205 the villagers prey on the more vulnerable among them. Sarah was prostituted by her ‘big brother Petrus’ for five cents, a comic, and some chewing gum. The phrase ‘big brother’ rather than ‘older brother’ suggests that they were children at this time. Indeed Simon refers to them as ‘kids’ (23). Each boy had a limited amount of time with Sarah, but if he had not finished ‘Petrus, for an extra two cents, would let us continue inside a half- loaf of white bread (Happily starts pomping again) … as my Aunt Thandi says, “a man, given half a chance, will put it in anything”’ (24). Throughout Simon’s monologue Ruth rubs the salt into the skins, though she pauses at times to stand and look down the road, and she occasionally seems as if she might speak. Simon is mindful of her, watching her and sometimes commenting to the audience. In interview, the actors who performed the roles in the premiere in 2003, Mncedise Shabangu (Simon) and Kholeka Quabe (Ruth), describe the female character as ‘speak[ing] through her body language’; she has to ‘say quite a few things for you to understand the story and to understand the pain’ (Quabe). The main focus of the play, Shabangu says, is what is happening around the baby. The play tries to understand each individual character, for although there is nothing happening, all these people have to do with the baby. The performers and the audience have to ‘dig deep: there are two victims here, the perpetrator is also a victim’, so despite the horrifying violence of the action the play tries to explain how this kind of violence can happen—and be tolerated. Shabangu comments that he had known cases of child rape when he was a child himself, and that because the main conflict was about Apartheid this kind of domestic, private violence was often ignored.5 Shabangu’s comment echoes with other histories of sexual and family violence in wartime and times of civil conflict in Northern Ireland, in the plays discussed here. The play builds gradually through the story of the battered child Alfred Sorrows, bones broken by his father’s girlfriend, who is described as ‘making a noise like a small dog’ and who tells Simon, ‘I don’t want to be a children any more … Jesus has forgotten us’ (30). But Simon also describes the girlfriend as ‘very young’, and angry with the domestic demands of caring for a small child: so the abuser of Alfred is, as Shabangu says, also a victim. It is Alfred, Ruth’s boyfriend, who commits the atrocious act at the centre of this play: he rapes and sodomizes Ruth’s nine-month-old baby girl, Siesie, renamed Baby Tshepang by the villagers and the media (Tshepang means Saviour). Then he dumps her tiny body in the veld, to be discovered by her grandfather: 206 L. FITZPATRICK

at first I thought it was some part of a sheep … a sacrifice of sorts … and then, slowly, the picture became clearer—an arm, … some fingers, two tiny little arms … hands … a small crumpled face … a little pot belly … fat little thighs … and in between her thighs … lay a mass … like a cauliflower; red, gooey … her derms [guts] … all bloody, her tiny, tiny little … split open. She had been raped, sodomised, disembowelled … they said. (40)

Alfred, sentenced, ‘didn’t even flinch … Nothing ever really mattered. Because nothing ever matters here. Nothing at all’ (52). Sarah had entered the house, hearing the baby screaming, and she ‘lit a match. Alfred stopped for a moment. Sarah looked at him, at the baby, left the room … and did nothing. Then Alfred continued … (Silence) Sarah went back to the tavern, found Ruth and told her the story. They drank valwyn [rotten wine] and ended up having a hell of a fight’ (52). When the baby is taken away, first to hospital and then into care, Ruth hacks off her breast with an empty pilchard can. It is Simon who finds her, races to hospital with her, and cares for her now. As this part of the play unfolds, Ruth physically attacks Simon, wrestling with him and throwing salt at him, in an effort to silence him. The rape itself is enacted using a broken broom that represents Alfred Sorrows the battered small child, and a loaf of bread. Ruth puts the loaf on the bed, as Simon narrates: ‘Alfred was drunk. He wanted sex. Ruth wanted to drink and wasn’t interested. She left her baby on the bed and went to the tavern. Soon it got dark. The sun went down (He acts out the rape, using the broomstick and the loaf of bread)’ (51). Reviewer Philip Fisher describes the action as ‘graphically and shockingly symbolised completely silencing the audience’ (2004) at the London premiere. The loaf of bread expresses, primarily, the vulnerability of Siesie’s tiny body. But it also recalls the earlier comment of Simon’s Aunt Thandi that a man will ‘put it in anything’; it recalls too the abuse of Sarah, the inculca- tion of a kind of exploitative and phallic masculinity in the young boys, and a corresponding lack of concern for the bodies of the girls and women that live alongside them. The vulnerability of the women is here figured as weakness, and availability for abuse. In itself, the bread connotes something that is consumable as the child is consumed by the despair of her community. The broom handle, so large in comparison, so insensate, sharp, broken as the rapist is broken, captures something of the unimaginable horror and damage of such an action. Simon’s story, as it unfolds, is largely concerned with the abuse of the vulnerable so that the villagers EROTICISM, VULNERABILITY AND AFFECT 207 have lost all capacity to feel for and respond to the wounded and the helpless. Nobody intervenes to save Alfred Sorrows from his father’s ‘very young’ girlfriend; nobody intervenes to save the girlfriend; nobody saves Sarah from her brother’s abuse, and Sarah and Ruth don’t save Siesie from Alfred Sorrows. Simon’s monologue includes an outburst at the journalists who arrive to cover the story (first reported as a gang-rape, as in the real-life case in 2001). Six men were arrested, in the play as in life, but DNA testing proved them to be innocent. Eventually the baby’s mother confessed that her boyfriend had done it and that she had protected him. In the play, a journalist asks Simon if he knows Ruth, and what he thinks of ‘the shame she’s brought to your town’. Ruth is outcast by the villagers and, though Simon saves her and cares for her, they are forced to live on the outskirts of the community. Through Simon, the play challenges this formulation: ‘Shame on all of you! … Where were you, where are you? … This town was raped long ago. This town was fucking gang-raped a long, long, long, long time ago!’ (48–59). Foot Newton’s play critiques the media representation which, as Lucy Valerie Graham (2008) examines, interacts with the anxieties and stereotypes of post-Apartheid South Africa while perpetuating class and race myths of the ‘Black rapist’ preying on the innocent and vulnerable (with infants substituted for White women). For Graham, the perpetuation of these myths is part of a heteronormative process of regulating sexuality. ‘Tshepang and Tsotsi present sacrificial characters whose suffering becomes elevated in redemptive national narratives that move symbolically towards restoring the black heterosexual couple as custodians of the new-born nation’ (105). Sarah Nutall (2004) explores the manifestation of these class and race anxieties in the development of a chastity belt for infants and young girls. Identifying the gendered complexities of sex, desire and violence Nutall notes that in the press coverage of the item ‘the first sentence refers to the protection of children, it is only girl children, and babies, who are involved. The second sentence refers to “the woman” who will be wearing the device, but it is not for women—it is for young and baby girls. Perhaps children and women carry a greater moral invocation, as political categories, than girls?’ (17) (italics in original). The object in place of the suffering body can act, seemingly counter- intuitively, to heighten our sense of vulnerability and the potential for affect, rather than to limit it. This may be in part because the performance of the represented action is also changed by the substitution of an object 208 L. FITZPATRICK for a vulnerable human body, and because the absent body (the absent baby) means that the audience must substitute an imagined body in its place. In fact, the whole sequence demands the audience to view the violence while imagining the corresponding reality, activating their capacity to imagine something worse than could ever be shown on stage. The violence enacted on the child—which is unrepresentable other than through metaphor or choreography—can be performed with all the ferocity of Simon’s community of the marginal, the alcoholic and the hopeless. This is a kind of violence that Cavarero labels ‘horrorism’ and describes as ‘ontological violence’: it is violence that seeks to destroy the body, to kill and then erase completely. In Nightingale the substitution of bodies for puppets eliminates the possibility of erotic or titillating display in the rape of Philomele; in Tshepang it heightens the audience’s affective engagement with the story. In both cases, the performance strategies express Weil’s statement that violence turns its human object into a thing; and both illustrate the operation of symbolic violence that limits and devalues the humanity of the woman or the child.

Conclusions In all these works, the device of replacing the body with an object, or reducing the body to an object through the choreography of the scene, seems to heighten rather than lessen the horror of the representation, engaging the imagination of the audience and working affectively to represent vulnerability that is not eroticized but instead demands recognition and respect. As with Romans in Britain where Marban’s ethnic otherness and vulnerable nakedness incite his tormentors to greater cruelty, so in the other plays and productions vulnerability provokes violence: against children, in Foot Newton’s Tshepang; against adult women in Giselle or The Judas Tree; and against the defeated women in The Conquest of Happiness. Violence makes a thing of its object, and several representations explore the dehumanization and objectification of the suffering body. But the alternative approach, such as Philomele’s representation of her rape using puppets, or the substitution of a loaf of bread for the infant body in Tshepang, substitutes an object for the human body. Seemingly counter- intuitively, this can heighten affect in performance by drawing an association between a quality of the object, and the subject of the representation. Thus the softness of the bread, and its yielding texture, comes to stand for the fragility of the infant’s tiny body; the rape, performed in this way with EROTICISM, VULNERABILITY AND AFFECT 209 a broken hoe and the loaf, evokes the qualities of the act (violence, brutality, physical destruction) without indicating its sexual nature. The evocation of affect acts to counter the potential for corporeal vulnerability to be received as erotic. Bataille explores the relationships between the erotic, sexual desire, violence and submission, and his analysis reveals the tension between romance and violence, often illustrated in popular music and entertainment. The trope of the woman who yields willingly in the end to the forceful and determined seducer reassures Tereus that his actions are reasonable, for as Bataille explains women’s denial is often feigned. By displacing the body of the woman in these plays, or by finding communicative strategies such as puppetry that do not rely on the slipperiness of the spoken word, these plays evade the culturally persistent belief that women lie about rape. In doing so, they engage the audience with the horror of Philomele’s rape and mutilation, without offering her body to the spectator’s gaze. The rape of Marban, in which the male body is positioned as vulnerable to sexual violence and harm, illustrates the ontological vulnerability of the human being to further dis- associate vulnerability from femininity, and thus from sexuality, and from the erotic. In the next chapter, contemporary texts that emphasize the vulnerability of the body in text and/or in performance are explored in relation to their evocation of affective audience responses of fear, horror and despair, but also of hope.

Notes 1. Laura Kipnis interrogates the relationship of femaleness to vulnerability in her thought-provoking and irreverent The Female Body: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability (London: Profile Books, 2006). Kipnis’s analysis of rape and the threat of rape argues that women are taught to fear rape above all else because the crime is so sensationalized by the mass media, and that more men are raped in the USA than women—most of them within the prison population. Her recent work focuses on the politics of sex on campus: Unwanted Advances (New York: HarperCollins, 2017). 2. These particular images are all available at http://www.buzzfeed.com/. Last accessed 22 February 2016. However, the posters are also discussed in newspaper websites and on the sites of the organizations mentioned. 3. The soldier’s rape of Marban is only one moment in the play, and were it not for the law suit launched by moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse it is quite possible that the rape scene would be only one piece in a mosaic, as it is in other plays. Its status in theatre history is due more to the legal case than to the performance of the play itself. 210 L. FITZPATRICK

4. There are a few reports that address the rape of men by male soldiers, and the violence and brutality described in these attacks closely resemble the testimonies of women victims. See for example Will Storr’s report for The Observer (17 July 2011), available at https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jul/17/the-rape-of-men, and recent reports on male rape in Libya (The Guardian, 17 November 2017). 5. All quotes come from an interview with Mncedise Shabangu and Kholeka Quabe on the BBC World Service. Tshepang by Lara Foot Newton broadcast on 9 December 2004. Available online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03m09c4. Last accessed 20 August 2017.

Bibliography

Performance Reviews Brenton, Howard. ‘Look Back in Anger’. The Guardian, 28 January 2006.

Books and Articles Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Bataille, Georges. Eroticism. Trans. Mary Dalwood. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2006. Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. London and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Brenton, Howard. Romans in Britain. London: Methuen, 1982. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. Chau, Monica, ed. The Subject of Rape. New York: Whitney Museum of Modern Art, 1993. Coulthard, Lisa. ‘Uncanny Horrors: Male Rape in Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms’. In Rape in Art Cinema, ed. Dominique Russell. London: Continuum, 2010: 170–184. Dolan, Jill. Performance, Utopia, and the Utopian Performative. Theatre Journal 53:3 (2001): 455–479. Elam, JoAnn (Director). Rape. Film, 1975. Ehrlich, Susan. Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Fisher, Philip. ‘Tshepang’. British Theatre Guide. 2004. Available online at http:// www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/tshepang-rev Foot Newton, Lara. Tshepang. London: Oberon, 2005. Gilson, Erinn. ‘Vulnerability, Ignorance, and Oppression’. Hypatia 26:2 (2011): 308–332. EROTICISM, VULNERABILITY AND AFFECT 211

Graham, Lucy Valerie. ‘“Save us All”: “Baby Rape” and Post-apartheid Narratives’. Scrutiny2 13:1 (2008): 105–119. Jill Dolan, (2001) Performance, Utopia, and the Utopian Performative. Theatre Journal 53 (3):455–479. Kabat, Jennifer. ‘Entrapment’. In The Subject of Rape. ed. Monica Chau. New York: Whitney Museum of Modern Art, 1993. Katrak, Ketu. ‘“Stripping Women of their Wombs”: Active Witnessing in Performances of Violence’. Theatre Research International 39:1 (March 2014): 31–46. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. Trans. Karen Jürs-Munby. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Mardorossian, Carine. ‘Towards a New Feminist Theory of Rape’. Signs 27:3 (2002): 743–777. Nutall, Sarah. ‘Girl Bodies’. Social Text 22:1 78 (Spring 2004): 17–33. Oliver, Kelly. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Roth, Maya E. ‘The Philomela Myth as Postcolonial Feminist Theatre’. In Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works. ed. Sharon Friedman. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company, 2009: 42–60. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Stoddard, Christine. ‘Towards a Phenomenology of the Witness to Pain’. Performance Paradigm 5:1. Available online at www.performanceparadigm.net Tuana, Nancy. The Speculum of Ignorance: The Women’s Health Movement and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Hypatia 21:3 (2006): 1–19. Weil, Simone. The Iliad or the Poem of Force. Ed. and Trans. James P. Holoka. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Žižek, Slavoj. Violence. London: Profile Books, 2008. CHAPTER 6

In Extremis: Staging Rape in the 2010s

Introduction A controversial production of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell at the Royal Opera House in London in July 2015 focused media attention on the representation of rape on stage. The production, directed by Damiano Michieletto, staged the officers’ banquet scene to include a female actor—who was not part of the singing cast—being stripped and sexually abused by the soldiers in view of the audience; in some reviews this is described as a gang- rape. The performance was booed—a very unusual occurrence at Covent Garden, as the newspaper critics point out. The story was picked up by Reuters and reported internationally, as well as generating debate amongst critics and audiences. The purpose of the scene was to draw attention to the abuse of women in wartime, particularly sexual abuse: the director commented ‘If you don’t feel the brutality, the suffering these people have had to face, if you want to hide it, it becomes soft, it becomes for children’ (Michael Roddy, Reuters, 30 June 2015). The Director of Opera, Kaspar Holten, argued ‘It is not gratuitous because it is what happens in warfare … so when we do an opera about oppression, about war, we need to show the reality of what that is rather than the romantic fantasy of it’ (Guardian, 30 June 2015). Nigel Farndale reviewing for the Telegraph, writes: ‘Clearly it was meant to be an ugly scene, but it was done in a theatrical way. To describe it as a graphic depiction of “gang rape”, as it subsequently has been in the media, seems disingenuous.’ He continues, ‘I found myself wondering: do people really get so easily outraged by stuff these days?

More to the point, do sophisticated metropolitan audiences, used to radical and provocative modern operas, get so outraged?’ and rather unfortunately concludes by saying ‘I bet these become the hottest tickets in town, especially if feminists start protesting outside the Royal Opera House, as they well might’ (2 July 2015). Guardian columnist Zoe Williams describes the scene as ‘[not] titillating in the least: a woman threatened, jeered and gang raped. It was horrible and humiliating, and, I thought, true to the nature of a violation and not sensationalist’ (3 July 2015). Williams’s piece is critical of the response of the opera audience, who complained that the rape scene ‘jarred with a very jaunty, brassy piece of music’, creating a sensory dissonance that made the scene more distressing to watch and the music more distressing to hear. However, as one of the letters to the Guardian points out, Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operetta The Pirates of Penzance includes a threatened gang-rape when the pirates capture a group of beautiful young girls to force them into ‘marriage’. This scene allows the audience a vicarious thrill of sexual violence before the girls are rescued, and is not usually described as disturbing or controversial. Guillaume Tell, in contrast, sets out to ‘show the reality’, as Holten argues. This brief media storm surrounding Guillaume Tell exposed different concerns about the staging of rape. For some commentators, it was about the music; the rape scene introduced something visually ugly into an event they had expected to be aurally beautiful. Some describe it as ‘prurient’, and some worry that it might be received as titillating; for some it is theatrical and for others it is too explicit and realistic. But as the Guardian letter writer points out, it is all about the framing: rape in comic operetta is acceptable, even funny, part of a romantic story; rape in high opera forces the audience to confront something ugly and disturbing behind the aural and visual beauty of the performance. In this instance, the brutality of the actual world intruded into the sublime of the art-form, in a way that opera audiences were unaccustomed to. This production, however disturbing the scene, is essentially a theatricalization of violence and uses sexual violence as a trope to convey the brutality of war and the violence of the Austrian soldiers towards the Swiss population. Its main focus is not on the lived experience of the woman, but on expressing abstract realities of conflict. It recalls many of the scenes discussed earlier that represent rape in wartime: in Pursuit of Happiness the woman is turned and pushed from one soldier to the other, while in other texts the narrated rape becomes a metaphor for oppression and the bodies of women become—in Visniec’s words—a battlefield. The brutality of the staged action aims to IN EXTREMIS: STAGING RAPE IN THE 2010S 215 show the ‘reality’ of war and of sexual abuse. Yet the question of showing the ‘reality’ is fraught with difficulties, and the meaning made is never simple and singular. The ‘reality’ of rape is usually very different from the popular narrative of stranger danger and dark alleyways: it is that sexual violence is most commonly experienced in intimate and trusted relationships. Although women authors in particular have explored methods of showing the ‘reality’ of sexual violence, some recent work has engaged with this question in particular ways that might be described as seeking to present the subjective embodied experience of sexual violence affectively. The approach in these recent works is subtly different from the work discussed above. This is not only a matter of explicitly depicting violence, since many of the plays discussed here explore, represent, and occasionally explicitly stage extreme acts of violence. In some instances the violence exceeds the violence of rape; it is what Adriana Cavarero describes as ‘ontological violence’ that seeks to utterly destroy the body of its target: ‘the physics of horror has nothing to do with the instinctive reaction to the threat of death. It has rather to do with instinctive disgust for a violence that, not content merely to kill because killing would be too little, aims to destroy the uniqueness of the body, tearing at its constitutive vulnerability’ (2009, 8). This kind of violence is described in the dialogue in scenes from Ruined in Salima’s harrowing monologues of gang-rape or the fragments of information about rape with bayonets that pass between Christian and Mama Nadi. This kind of violence is suggested in Tshepang through the image of the broken broom handle driving into the loaf of bread, tearing the infant body asunder. These extremes of violence can be likened to Weil’s concept of making the living being into a ‘thing’, in the mutilation of Philomele, the humiliation of Franca Rame, or the rape of Kate on the body of her dead husband in Lovesong for Ulster. As images of rape and violent sex circulate in mass media culture, and become mainstream through ‘the pornification of culture’ as it is increasingly called, some artists and activists have taken on the challenge of speaking and performing the violence of rape explicitly. They still draw on a range of strategies to do so, but with the aim of forcing public discourse to discuss the brutality, traumatic experience and personal outcomes of this very intimate and often secret form of violence. Affective performance strategies that seek to evoke instinctive empathy with the victims and revulsion towards the abuse are a feature of this kind of work. The plays are normally set in a recognizable and familiar urban landscape, and the violence is usually narrated rather than mimetically reproduced. It is striking how often critics’ reviews speak of audience 216 L. FITZPATRICK responses that echo Jill Dolan’s conception of the Utopian performative. This is not based on the vulnerability of women’s bodies, as Ketu Katrak argues (2014), but rather I suggest on a sense of shared vulnerability, an awareness of the suffering body as human rather than specifically female. The evocation of pain is not generally based on the gendered body but rather on the body in situations and conditions that spin out of control, where the capacity for chaotic destruction is unleashed.

Torture and Mutilation on Stage: Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Cleansed This representation of extreme violence is not new: Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) and Cleansed (1998) confront the audience with scenes of rape, mutilation, torture and murder. Blasted represents both male and female rape on stage, as well as cannibalism and mutilation and the fury of war. Cleansed, revived at the National Theatre in spring 2016 and directed by Katie Mitchell, also engages the audience with human suffering and in particular the cruelty we inflict on those we love. The setting is a labora- tory where Tinker, the Master of Ceremonies, investigates how far humans will go for love. The characters include Grace, the central character, on her quest for her heroin-injected brother, Graham; Carl who is progressively mutilated, testing his lover, Rod’s, commitment; while Tinker is enthralled by an erotic dancer in a portable booth, always just out of his reach behind the glass. The production includes a scene where Carl is stripped naked and tied to a chair, then impaled on a metal pole which seems to be stained with blood and faeces when his torturers pull it from his anus. Spectators reportedly fainted, vomited, and fled the auditorium as Carl’s tongue is cut out, his hands and feet are cut off, and his penis is cut off and grafted onto Grace’s body. Actually, the performance is less horrifying than the written text: the mutilation of Carl takes place safely behind the prosce- nium arch in Mitchell’s detailed and naturalistic interpretation, so that much of the gore of the torture is lost and the work clearly simulates pain and suffering, but does not confront the audience with an internal experience of humiliation and personal destruction. Blasted, similarly, is a different reception experience in text and in performance, as Kane noted in interview: ‘Reading Blasted is much harder work than watching it, because when you read it, it’s literally he eats the baby. When you see it he’s clearly not eating the baby … This is a theatrical image’ (italics in original) (Saunders 2002, 66). IN EXTREMIS: STAGING RAPE IN THE 2010S 217

Blasted opens in an expensive hotel room in Leeds, described as as a transnational space ‘so expensive it could be anywhere in the world’ (Kane 2001, 3). Cate, who is young and rather innocent, and who suffers from epilepsy, is overwhelmed by the luxury of the room. She is with Ian, a journalist in his forties, a repellent character who expresses racist and misogynistic attitudes and who will rape her and manipulate her. Ian, who is dying of lung cancer, literally stinks and the spectators or readers can share Cate’s revulsion when he kisses her mouth. Scenes 1 and 2 are stylistically naturalistic and are set in the hotel room focusing on this abusive relationship between Ian and Cate. Scene 2 ends with Cate’s escape through the bathroom window, and the invasion of the room by a soldier from a war zone. The scene ends with an explosion, and scene 3 opens with the same hotel room in the middle of a war. The soldier rapes and sodomizes Ian and sucks out his eyes and eats them; then he kills himself. In scene 4, Ian eats a dead baby, and weeps, and dies. Later Cate and Ian are reunited on stage in the war/hotel room, and she feeds him food that she has prostituted herself for; the play ends with Ian thanking her. Saunders describes the stylistic progression as naturalism to surrealism to expressionism. The violence is described in detail. Ian’s assault on Cate begins early: he doesn’t like her clothes. He tells her ‘You look like a lesbos’ and when she asks ‘What’s that?’ he replies ‘Don’t look very sexy, that’s all’ (7). He then strips naked and tells her, ‘Put your mouth on me’ (7). She laughs, and Ian must dress again but he turns his anger into an assault on her self-esteem, telling her she is stupid and will never get a job, twisting words to confuse and upset her. This results in a petit mal attack, which alarms him. His behaviour, typically for an abusive relationship, oscillates between abusive language, physical violence, and comfort when he goes too far. He tries to coerce her to have sex, and tries to make her feel guilty when she rejects him, telling her ‘If I don’t come my cock aches’ so that she masturbates him. The rape takes place in the time between the first and second scenes, and is conveyed in Cate’s hatred for him, her threatening him with his gun, and her revulsion when she fellates him. This last act is revenge: she bites him, holding on with her teeth until he hits her, and tells him that she is still bleeding where he bit her during cunnilingus. He tells her:

Ian: Loved me last night Cate: I didn’t want to do it. Ian: Thought you liked that. 218 L. FITZPATRICK

Cate: No. Ian: Made enough noise. Cate: It was hurting. (31)

Cate’s disgust at fellating Ian is expressed by her spitting ‘frantically’ and cleaning her teeth, then coughing and retching up a pubic hair which she ‘holds up and looks at Ian in disgust’ (33). Ian’s sexual violence pales against the violence of the soldier. This has two effects: it establishes the soldier as the alpha male, thereby interrogat- ing the relationship of masculinity to violence; and it proposes a continuum between Ian’s racist and misogynistic loathing and the murderous violence of the war. The acts the soldier describes sicken Ian, who has never imagined such violence. The soldier has tortured and raped and murdered women and children, and has witnessed such acts, and his girlfriend has also been raped and murdered by enemy soldiers: ‘Col, they buggered her. Cut her throat. Hacked her ears and nose off, nailed them to the front door’ and he mocks Ian, ‘Every seen anything like that? … Not in photos? … Some journalist, that’s your job’ (47). The heterosexual rape was not staged, in contrast to the soldier’s rape of Ian which is represented realistically and takes place close to the audience. At the premiere production in the Royal Court Upstairs, the proximity to the action was one of the overwhelming aspects of the performance. The stage directions read:

The soldier turns Ian over with one hand. He holds the revolver to Ian’s head with the other. He pulls down Ian’s trousers, undoes his own and rapes him—eyes closed and smelling Ian’s hair. The soldier is crying his heart out. Ian’s face registers pain but he is silent. When the soldier is finished he pulls up his trousers and pushes the revolver up Ian’s anus. (49)

In contrast to the difficulties of staging male–female rape, male–male rape is not generally received as erotic or titillating, and does not invoke the same set of cultural and narrative tropes. In part, this has to do with the question of the gaze: the spectators normatively identify with Ian; as a male character, his status as a subject is not in question. The female rape victim is frequently objectified, her vulnerability and passive suffering making her more desirable. Pornographic literature often structures its narrative so that the woman’s initial suffering and resistance turns to pleasure, and contemporary pornography frequently represents painful or uncomfortable or degrading sexual practices where men with unfeasibly large penises penetrate women’s mouths and anuses. Andrea Dworkin IN EXTREMIS: STAGING RAPE IN THE 2010S 219 quotes from pulp fiction novels of the 1950s in support of her argument that ‘in pornography, a woman is forced, she is horribly hurt, and the greater the force and the more terrible the pain the greater is her sexual desire and gratification … because that is her true nature’ 1993( , 238). An example from pulp fiction is Jim Thompson’sThe Killer Inside Me, which was adapted for film and directed by Michael Winterbottom in 2010. The story depicts the anti-hero’s sadistic relationships with a number of women, one of whom he beats almost to death—but she still desires him. The very popular novel and TV series of the 1960s Peyton Place, or the Fifty Shades novels published in this century, cover thematically similar ground though dressed as romance. Lynne Segal, whose work critiques Dworkin’s, nonetheless argues that ‘although it is not really possible to demonstrate a causal relationship between the consumption of violent pornography and men’s violence against women, we can certainly claim that such material is a significant part of the general sexist, racist and misogynist climate and culture of our times’ (1993, 421). In response to the ideas of Dworkin and Segal, it is clearly arguable that the suffering of Ian in Blasted is not titillating in part because a contemporary audience is guided by discourses of sexuality and love, to understand that women’s resistance can be forcibly overcome, and that women find pleasure in sexual violence. But beyond this, Kane attempts an approach to representation that connects the spectator affectively to the suffering body on stage. Therefore, the spectator’s sympathetic identification with Ian is not only because, as a male character, Ian is recognizably an agent; it is also because the structure and visceral quality of the performance with its visual and acoustic violence works directly on the bodies of the spectators as well as the bodies of the actors. Kane’s plays primarily provide an experience that subsumes and overwhelms the spectator, so that thought comes afterwards. Analysed by Ken Urban (2004) in terms of Artaud’s concept of Cruelty, Kane’s work becomes clearer as an engagement with human suffering in a world largely devoid of meaning. In the first act, Ian is violent in his language and his actions, his misogyny and homophobia seemingly markers of his belligerent masculine contempt for weakness. His rapid speech and physical aggression are in stark contrast to Cate’s inarticulacy and weakness, manifested by her narcolepsy. The power relationship is reversed in the final scenes, however, where Cate comforts Ian, feeding him with bread and sausage and pouring gin in his mouth. The last words spoken on stage, which break a silence between the two characters, are Ian’s: ‘Thank you’. Ending a scene of appalling devastation and an overwhelmingly painful spectacle, this moment offers the spectator a moment of human contact and of conscious reflection. The gender politics 220 L. FITZPATRICK at this point are subsumed into a moment of honest exchange between two individuals, perhaps allowing for a sense that Ian’s words recognize Cate’s humanity, as her actions recognize his.

Recent Explorations in Affective Performance: pornography, human trafficking and child abuse Kane, and some of her contemporaries, stage scenes of explicit sexual violence that have been discussed as shocking, and famously branded ‘in- your-face’ by Aleks Sierz (2001). The visceral nature of the representation shares something with the other works discussed here, but there are significant differences. One of these is the emphasis on affective responses in the contemporary works; another is the experimentation with dramaturgical strategies to explore the complexity of embodied experience. The focus of much of the work is on issues of consent (Freak, A Girl is a Half- Formed Thing), survival (Lela &Co.) and verbatim experience (Nirbhaya), with Walk as an example of protest theatre that emerges from personal and communal experience. These recent productions by feminist practitioners do seem to examine something new and different, as April de Angelis argues in her radio documentary Theatre of the Abused (BBC 2015). This documentary discusses work by Yael Farber, Cordelia Lynn, Anna Jordan and Eimear McBride, explored below. De Angelis, whose own plays explore the power and potential of her female protagonists, speaks of her discomfort with the portrayal of women as victims. Although her early work was concerned with representing women’s stories of abuse and violence, she worries that the explicit depictions of gender violence on the contemporary stage will simply reiterate tropes of women’s oppression, or show women as inevitably raped and always rape-able. She asks whether it is possible to represent violence without showing it explicitly, and whether these plays reinscribe cultural assumptions about women’s vulnerability and men’s violence. Through a series of attendances at performances and interviews with practitioners, she sets out to examine the effects and affects of plays that deal with extreme violence against women. The plays discussed vary widely. Yael Farber’s Nirbhaya (here discussed alongside Maya Rao’s Walk) was a response to the rape and murder of Jyoti Pandey Singh, which became a global focus of attention in December 2012. Jyoti, nicknamed ‘Nirbhaya’ (the fearless one) by the Indian press and known by that name as long as her anonymity was protected, was murdered in a horrifyingly violent gang-rape aboard a bus in Delhi. Directed by Yael Farber and co-produced with Indian actress Priyanka Bose, Nirbhaya is a testimonial play in which five Indian women describe IN EXTREMIS: STAGING RAPE IN THE 2010S 221 their experiences of sexual violence, against a backdrop that commemorates Jyoti Singh and seeks to pay tribute to her courage and her struggle to live. Maya Rao’s Walk was developed during the protests in Delhi that followed the breaking of the story, and is a response of a very different kind, while still engaging movingly with issues of gender violence and rape. Of the other works, two are monologues: Lynn’s Lela &Co. is described as a monologue for two performers, and recounts the experiences of a young woman trafficked into prostitution; and McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, like Anna Jordan’s Freak, examines the relationships of abuse, power and sexuality, and the troubled issue of consent. Freak was first performed in August 2014 at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The set is a double bed, with either side representing a different bedroom. Stage right is Georgie’s room, strewn with clothes, empty wine bottles and ‘dirty knickers’ (Jordan 2014, 3); stage left is her niece, Leah’s, bedroom which is a combination of childhood (‘a cuddly toy or two’) and adult (‘make-up, hair products … a poster of a generic female pop star—all tits and lips’) (3). The pre-show music is ‘Freak’ by Estelle, a piece of elec- tronica accompanied by a video in which the female singer’s head is repeatedly replaced with a pair of exaggerated dark pink lips. Leah sings along with the song, her dancing ‘animalistic, taking an altogether darker note’ (3) while Georgie sleeps. It is not immediately revealed that these are aunt and niece—that revelation comes much later in the play. In this opening scene a number of texts are brought into dialogue with each other, including the music and the décor in the two bedrooms—one suggestive of teenage sexual awakening and the last stages of childhood, the other suggestive of a woman perhaps in her late twenties, slightly disordered, perhaps drinking more than she ‘should’. The detail of ‘dirty knickers’ is there to suggest slovenliness, a glamour and sexiness that is surface only. While Leah experiments with mainstream images of female sexiness and desirability, Georgie recounts her dreams of being a pure object of desire. She dreams she is naked, in high heels, dancing on top of the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, and the whole of the Square is mesmerized, sexually enthralled by her image. The dream changes so that she is Fay Wray in King Kong, her dress torn off, about to be broken, torn, taken by the giant ape. She wakes up, screaming and orgasming (Jordan 2014, 4). In her ensuing monologue, the audience is offered Georgie as a victim of a neoliberal economy where she lives alone, works in a telesales office (having nothing to sell but her own skill at selling), and where her choices of sexual freedom and consumer goods are hedged about by her limited economic means and her personal misery. She cannot even vomit out the 222 L. FITZPATRICK

meaninglessness of her life. She has no community to provide her with emotional support, though it is also clear that she has alienated most potential sources of support with her self-destructive actions. When Georgie sleeps, Leah awakens to confront the audience with her own induction into a culture that defines her primarily as an object, even to herself. She plucks her arms as she speaks—her ambition is to be completely hairless ‘smooth, like an eel’ (6). She explains her friends’ repulsion at their own body hair, their removal of their pubic hair, and her fear that the boy she likes, who puts his hand up her skirt, will feel a hair. This obsession with the overly-groomed body, the idea of creating the body in a highly unnatural, commercialized image, is one of the manifestations of contemporary neoliberal culture. That the ideal for women comes directly from porn, and is furthermore a weird mixture of large breasts and no pubic hair, suggests that the female body is being reimagined solely in terms of visual pleasure, and generally as a toy for the heterosexual male partner. It is also an image of the body as personal choice: body hair and breast size are no longer genetically determined but are subject to surgical choices, paid for by the individual. The contrast between Leah’s sexual experimentation in Freak, and Terri and Wendy in My Mother Said, suggests that the feminist aim of enabling young women to explore and celebrate their sexualities has been largely pushed aside by commercial cultural pressures that now emphasize female submission to male desire (replacing female repression of male desire through modest dress and behaviour). Unlike Terri and Wendy who have each other as well as the older and more experienced Diane, Leah does not have any trusted female advice or female companionship to enable her to successfully understand and recognize her own feelings and desires. Despite her access to information, her ignorance of her own biology (‘I use the camera to look at my … Indicates between her legs’ (12)) is very similar to Beth’s in Christina Reid’s Tea in a China Cup; she also lacks a vocabulary to discuss her own body (‘down there, where you go to the toilet’ Reid 1989, 28–29). This inability or refusal to name her body or speak her sexual feelings and experiences limits Leah’s power and capacity to take responsibility for her decisions, though she doesn’t realize this. Her confused modesty is juxtaposed with Georgie’s monologues about working in a strip club, where the desire she sees in the customers’ eyes offers her an illusion of power and control. She remarks that ‘They like it when I bit my finger and look confused and innocent. And they like it when I look sort of afraid’ (13), illustrating again the relationship of IN EXTREMIS: STAGING RAPE IN THE 2010S 223 female vulnerability with eroticism. The text then splits to allow for overlapping scenes, where Leah reflects upon losing her virginity to the boy she really likes, while Georgie leaves the club with a stag party of five men, going home with them. In this scene, the audience become aware of the danger Georgie is placing herself in, and the calamitous possibilities of her actions. Georgie narrates the scenes in which the group sex begins, continues, and then gets beyond her control. The scenes are not of rape, exactly— though her injuries lead the hospital and police initially to that conclusion—because Georgie has consented and has initiated this contact, remaining an active participant throughout most of the event. One of the men even asks her explicitly if she consents: ‘He pulls me towards him and says, “Sweetheart, are you sure about this?” The boys swear and jeer and I laugh. Then I silence his fears with a long French kiss’ (18). Yet inevitably, as the audience will have foreseen, Georgie’s autonomy is gradually eroded: one of the men starts to touch her roughly: ‘All the things his girlfriend won’t let him do: grab my tits, slap my arse, pull my hair right from the roots. The others follow his lead: Someone holds my nose. There are hands around my throat. Spit and fingers in my arsehole’ (19). The dialogue is intercut with Leah’s description of first sex, demonstrating the influences of pornography on intimacy, through the teenagers’ attempts to mimic what they have seen online. But while Leah and her boyfriend say the things they think they are supposed to say, ‘You feel so good’, ‘Leah baby’, in Georgie’s case the scene is borrowed from the gang-bang genre of porn. She knows this herself; at the beginning she says ‘It’s like a text- book porno and I’m the star’ (17). The roughness of one of the men rapidly becomes part of the group’s bonding experience, so that they all become involved in the degradation of Georgie from a human being like themselves, to a thing:

They’re saying ‘Her’ and ‘She’. Like I’m not there. ‘Turn her over. Move her here’. ‘Fucking whore’. Beat. They’re all at it now. Cocks in every hole. This is what I wanted. But I thought I would be involved. Now my thoughts, my words, my will: none of them matter because they are well and truly In Me. And it hurts. I’m scared that something inside me might break. So I close my eyes and try to focus on giving myself to them completely … … I’m making this awful noise. There’s arguing, shouting, there’s something inside me. Something cold and hard. Someone shouts ‘Get it out’ and someone else shouts ‘Calm the fuck down’ and they take whatever it is out 224 L. FITZPATRICK

and throw it across the room and hear it smash so I guess it was a bottle or something. (20)

I have quoted this at length to give a sense of the violence of the scene, and the difficulty of listening to what the character describes: it is reminiscent of the wild violence that concludes Enter Achilles and the bonding of the men through a shared mimicry of rape with the rubber doll. The play addresses the difficulties of consent, for while Georgie has consented, she has not consented to this. She has not imagined injuries and violence and a real loss of control that is dangerous and harmful; her consent was predicated on her familiarity with pornography, which is performance. She therefore has not considered the actual physical damage inflicted by these sex acts. In the reality, she is ‘scared’; earlier, she has been amused that the customers at the strip bar ‘like it when I look sort of afraid’ (13). Their visual pleasure in her simulation of fear prepares the audience for the violence of the group sex, but Georgie has not realized its implications. The simulated fear of the stripping dancer who appears overwhelmed or nervous at the virility of her audience, lends the spectators a sense of power and superiority. Underlying this is an acknowledgement of the potential for the use of power and force: the look suggests that the dancer could be frightened but the customer chooses not to harm her. It proposes an erotic game of female vulnerability and male virility. The dancer’s fear might still be erotic to the spectators if it becomes real, because it would still imply power and virility on the part of the spectator. But when Georgie stops playing at being scared and actually is afraid, the experience has ceased to be erotic for her. Because this lengthy monologue is punctuated with short descriptive phrases from Leah, the effect is to draw their experiences into a comparative moment. Leah’s first sexual experiences are not of rape or violence, but she does find the experience unsettling. The boy, Luke, is chiefly concerned with his own physical pleasure—and so is she; her sexuality is secondary and she experiences her role as to be beautiful and to give pleasure rather than take it. Afterwards she reflects that ‘the world would be a different place if men didn’t have to put themselves inside women to have sex… And to have sex we had this sort of pair of lips, here, instead of our genitals. Which kind of suckered together, on the surface. It would be much more equal I think’ (22–23). Later, Luke wants her to have sex with his friend and himself at the same time. Leah knows that the boys in her year group have tried to persuade other girls to take part in group sex IN EXTREMIS: STAGING RAPE IN THE 2010S 225 activities, and she refuses, whereupon he ends their brief relationship. In the final scenes, Leah confides some of her sexual fears to Georgie, and the two find comfort and hope in each other. Reviewing the piece in The Guardian, Lyn Gardner comments that ‘Sexual exploitation is so tied up with the male gaze that depicting it on stage is a minefield, one that isn’t entirely avoided here. The piece sometimes feels exploitative rather than subversive’, but she judges that Jordan’s fine writing keeps the work clear and avoids potential pitfalls (25 August 2014). But Gardner has identified what is potentially the problem with the play: although it deftly explores Georgie’s self-loathing and desire to harm herself, and her use of her sexuality to achieve this, both she and Leah are victims of their male-focused, pornographic culture. Although Georgie’s references to her broken relationship with James function to remind the audience that relationships can also be sustaining and nurturing, in the moment of the performance there is only disappointment, degrees of exploitation, and sadness. In de Angelis’s documentary, Jordan describes her subject as the role women play in objectifying themselves, and the role objectification plays in darker parts of female sexual desire and fantasy. For Georgie there is initially a kind of dark exhilaration in her decision to kneel and suck the men’s penises, to crouch naked on all fours in front of them, and to see herself as an object of their lust. It offers her a sense of empowerment to play a role from pornography, and to explore the boundaries between pleasure and humiliation. It is a fantasy loss of control, which ceases to be pleasurable when she actually does lose control. This is a rarely explored issue, and it is redeemed by a perhaps too-neat solution in which the characters do begin to share and trust each other with their intimate experiences. They speak about what has happened to them, and in speaking they find strength and reassurance in each other. But although the play identifies the ubiquity of pornography as an issue in this debasement of male/female relationships, it does not seem able to offer a resolution beyond personal resistance. Jordan’s characters, however, are ultimately secure, and are inhabitants of the relative safety of contemporary urban Britain; even when they take risks that result in injury there are hospitals, police and family to intervene. In contrast, in Cordelia Lynn’s Lela & Co. the world around the eponymous protagonist is far more precarious. The play was first staged at the Royal Court in September 2015 as part of the theatre’s ‘Big Issues’ series, which aims to provoke public discussion of major social and ethical issues. There is a public Question and Answer session with the playwright on the 226 L. FITZPATRICK theatre’s website, in which she discusses her dramaturgical choices and the origins of the project. She was first approached by 1989 Production Company with the true story of a woman trafficked in wartime, asking if she would be interested in telling the story. Lynn’s initial impulse was that the play had to be a monologue, to allow the woman to tell her story and to enable an audience to hear it. However, in the course of her research she realized that the nature of these experiences of being trafficked and prostituted is that the women are shamed into silence, and that it may also be too dangerous for them to speak. This led to her decision to write the play as Lela’s monologue, which is repeatedly suppressed by the comments of different male characters: her father, her brother-in-law, her husband, and a peacekeeping soldier. It therefore becomes a monologue for two actors, performed by an actor playing Lela and an actor playing all the male roles. The geographic location is never defined, though there is a suggestion that it is in Europe, perhaps Albania. The characters apart from Lela are all given role names (Father) or names that are homonyms for letters: Elle (L), Em (M), Zed (Z) and Jay (J). This gives both individuality and anonymity. The play opens with Lela’s direct address to the audience, describing the night she was born, and through this revealing the strict gender roles of her society. While her mother rests, exhausted, her grandmother and aunts sang lullabies to the baby. ‘That’s how it works here, the women wake you up and they put you to sleep, they bring you into life and then they ease you into death. Men handle the bit in between’ (Lynn 2015, 3). After introducing herself through the story of her birth, she pauses and then begins to sing a folk song to the West Wind. The West Wind, in Eastern European mythology, is the mildest wind; but the song also recalls Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind in which the poet longs to be lifted and to fly with the wind: ‘if even / I were as in my boyhood, and could be / The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven’. The song therefore captures Lela’s longing for freedom. Repeatedly, she begins to sing; but each time ‘A Man’ interrupts and sings over her, so that she falls silent. This pattern of Lela speaking and being interrupted and silenced is repeated throughout the play. At first, it is childish: it is captured in her interactions with her father and in the construction of a family story in which Lela ate the icing off her birthday cake before the birthday party (actually she didn’t, she explains, she thinks her sister Elle ate it). This early false history of Lela seems like any innocent family story where the memories of different family members contradict each other, and where IN EXTREMIS: STAGING RAPE IN THE 2010S 227 family roles are assigned and inscribed in their private mythology. The next example of this process is more sinister, when Lela’s brother-in-law Jay insists that she had a crush on him. Lela argues that she didn’t have a crush on him, but he silences her, and through her silence she submits to his story. Like the story about cake, Jay’s story of Lela has to do with appetites and with her youthful inability (he claims) to properly suppress her desires. The play therefore links an appetite for sweet cake to an appetite for illicit sexual pleasure. Jay, who has a job in the city and a university education, likes to bring his young sister-in-law out with him and his wife. He ‘pulls [Lela] onto his lap’, gives her a lollipop telling her ‘You have to suck it’ (11). But worse is to come: he then ‘marries’ Lela to one of his business associates, who takes her out of the country. In the new country, which is at war, he takes her passport and locks her into their apartment for her own safety, then gradually confines her to smaller and smaller spaces until her world has shrunk to a single mattress in a locked kitchen, from where her ‘husband’ prostitutes her to anyone with the means to pay. The silencing of Lela continues in this next phase of her life. Like Jay who claimed she flirted and desired him, her husband presents a version of teenage Lela drinking cocktails—again, an illicit appetite—which she denies. He describes her as sexually voracious—she denies this too—suggesting that the prostitution might have been prompted by his inability to satisfy her sexually:

HUSBAND: The thing about my new wife was that she couldn’t get enough of it / LELA: And I hated it / HUSBAND: After that first time she wanted it every night, several times a night when I could manage it. In the morning too (17)

He adds, ‘She wanted it whether she wanted it or not’ (17). This phrase summarizes the power dynamic of their relationship. She is repeatedly accused of improper behaviour and desires, silenced when she attempts to defend herself, subjected to the lust of the men around her and forced to accept their version of her character and her hungers (cake, lollipops, cocktails, and sex). From the prostitution comes the birth of a baby girl, which Lela delivers alone and tries to protect, somehow managing to keep the infant alive in desperate circumstances. Eventually she escapes, but the baby starves on their journey back home through the mountains, and she must bury her in the wilderness. When she gets back home her speech is 228 L. FITZPATRICK once more suppressed: by Jay (who hurriedly describes her as a widow, but young and marriageable still), and by her father who is desperate to suppress his own suspicions of what he allowed to happen to his daughter. Lela’s monologue is—throughout—delivered in a ‘bravely maintained merry, self-deprecating manner’ signalling ‘her awareness that the world does not want to hear this narrative’ as Paul Taylor notes in his review for The Independent (online). This cheeriness is also captured in the text, in Lela’s chattiness and in her attempt to minimize the dreadfulness of her situation and experience. The reviews speak of the power of the performance, particularly moments where the theatre is plunged into a claustrophobic darkness as Lela describes the worst of what was done to her. In the darkness, Lynn avoids the problem of showing the violence and creating a potentially pleasurable spectacle in the vulnerable body of the central character. But the silencing is important. Through this device, Lynn makes visible and audible the silencing of women who are subjected to sexual violence. Lynn notes that speaking can be dangerous because the traffick- ers may punish or even kill the woman for speaking out. But speaking also shames the family, the male relatives who failed to protect Lela or who set out to exploit her innocence. And the pressure is on Lela not to dishonour her family by revealing the harm their greed and neglect has done to her. The price of doing so is likely to be expulsion from the family circle. Andrzej Lukowski’s review for Time Out describes it as ‘suffused with a burning sense of injustice at the ills that originate from male entitlement’ (online) and by Lyn Gardner as a ‘devastating critique of patriarchal violence’ (online). There is little violence shown explicitly on the stage, but the reviews repeatedly discuss the distressingly violent nature of the work. The violence is described by Lela, and is evoked in the way the male characters repeatedly contradict, undermine and silence her. In this way, the play returns to one of the main recurring issues in the representation of rape, both on stage and in the social world: the silencing of women and women’s experiences of sexual violence, and the ‘scripting’ of sexual violence to suggest women’s complicity and willing submission. The men in Lela’s life—Husband, Brother-in-Law and Peacekeeper—all decide that her sexuality belongs to them to use and abuse. They also decide that she is a willing participant in her own violation, and when she acts to contradict this they respond with panic and violence. Even the Peacekeeper, whom Lela believes is kind and her friend, will not help her because he will lose his job if his supervisors learn he has visited prostitutes. He is perhaps the most despicable character, if only because he is the most self-deluded. IN EXTREMIS: STAGING RAPE IN THE 2010S 229

Despite his asserted good intentions, he is a customer in a sex trade that distresses him with its brutality—but it doesn’t distress him enough to take action, or to protect Lela. He has brave words for her: ‘I swear to you, I swear, that I won’t leave, not under any circumstances, we won’t leave until you’re safe and we’ve got the job. Done. (Beat) Because I am pre- pared to die for this’ (40). Yet dying is a sentimental self-aggrandizing fantasy: in reality, he is unwilling to risk a beating at the hands of her husband, or face sanction at work. The play explores this sense of male entitlement to female bodies and to female labour of all kinds, from domestic chores to child-bearing to sex. It recalls Leah’s sad question in Freak, ‘Wouldn’t the world would be a different place if men didn’t have to put themselves into women to have sex?’ (23). Lela’s silencing recalls dramatizations of silenced women and children in plays by Sarah Daniels, the complexity of the silencing found in Churchill’s work, and Lewis’s Ficky Stingers where the imperative not to speak is cultural rather than personal. The scripting of the rape silences Lela as surely as the rape script silences Sorrel in On Raftery’s Hill: it makes it impossible for her to put forward her truth and her sense of herself and her own agency. The rape script offers Lela very limited scope to resist her captivity and abuse, since she is spoken for throughout, and offered for sale by the men who are—in family terms—responsible for her well-being. She cannot protect herself without rejecting her family. Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing explores some similar ground to Lela & Co., by portraying the experiences of a young girl who is abused by family members and who finds it impossible to speak and be heard. The formal experimentation in A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is in placing the audience inside the head of the central character. The original novel was adapted for the stage by Dublin theatre director Annie Ryan, and performed by Aoife Duffin. Ryan describes reading the novel in a single swoop, and being caught up in the performativity of it. ‘I knew [it was performable]’, she writes in the preface to the published text, ‘because to make sense of it in the first few chapters, I had to read it out loud’ (McBride 2014, 7). The stream-of-consciousness novel with its fragmented syntax, broken words and snaps of recalled dialogue with other family members conjures the interior world of the narrator, who speaks to ‘you’, her brother, throughout. These scraps (the novel never develops a fluency, but deliberately disrupts and jolts the flow of the narrative) communicate in a highly affective, quite direct way. In the production, the problem was to bring the audience into the narrator’s head—and to do so 230 L. FITZPATRICK with simplicity to allow the focus to be on the word and voice, rather than on the body. Ryan credits the performer, Aoife Duffin, with the ability to bring this character to life on the stage. The work premiered at the Dublin Theatre Festival in September 2014 to critical acclaim, before touring to London and New York. It was performed with a minimal set, with no props or furniture, and ran without an interval. Formally, it is a monologue, and the audience are offered access to the character’s interiority; the other voices that interrupt and rebuke are likewise inside the mind of the character. Like Georgie in Freak, the central character—Girl—uses violent and abusive sex in her search for power and control; and like Georgie she discovers that the promise of power through sexuality is, for women, often illusory. Like many of these works, the play is distressing to read or view. It foregrounds the vulnerability of the central character and the exploitation of that vulnerability by those who should nurture it. Girl’s father has left the family and she has a difficult relationship with her mother, who in turn is abused by her own father. Girl’s older, disabled brother is their mother’s main concern, so much so that after he dies she tells Girl, ‘your good kind brother is gone and God forgive me but it’s true. I almost wish it was you lying in that box. You. And not. My. Son’ (61). Girl is first raped by her uncle when she is thirteen, and then discovers that sex is an effective weapon to use against the boys who bully her brother—the abuse allows her to use her superior knowledge and experience to humiliate them. She stops when her brother finds out and physically attacks her, calling her ‘disgusting whore sputter filthy disgusting wrong it’s wrong to. Do. Fucking bitch’ (32). Girl then begins to seek men who will hurt and degrade her, finding some relief from her psychological suffering in the physical pain of these encounters. In each instance, the play dramatizes the characters’ exploitation of each other’s emotional and physical vulnerability and the impulse to pass grief and pain by scapegoating. The mother inflicts her grief at her abandonment by her husband and her hurt at her father’s abuse on to her daughter; she leaves Girl open to the sexual violence of her uncle, and the adult women blame Girl for the abuse. At the root of this is guilt, felt particularly sharply by the women: Girl’s guilt at her inability to behave as her mother wishes, to avoid sin, to protect her brother; the mother’s guilt at her children’s shortcomings. An early scene describes the visit of her grandfather and his verbal assault on Girl’s mother after he sees his grandchildren, then aged about eight and six: ‘I’ve just been talking to your son. And that child only made his communion a year IN EXTREMIS: STAGING RAPE IN THE 2010S 231 ago and he can’t even say his Hail Mary. / And look at that one. Forward rolls in a skirt. It’s disgusting. Underwear on display. How is she supposed to be a child of Mary?’ (18). The sexualization of the childish body, the blaming of the child for showing her underwear and so (perhaps) tempt- ing men to lustful thoughts, are recurrent themes in women’s writing but are given a particular resonance in Irish writing though the invocation of the powerful monolithic Catholic culture of past decades. Girl’s mother is ashamed, and responds with a violence that is vividly evoked through simple words and syntax: ‘She is jumping up the stairs. Take one and two. Crack my eyes are bursting from my head with the wallop. Blood rising up my nose’ (19). Girl’s first thought is of her brother’s fear and panic, and her need to protect him from her mother’s violence. The rape scene in A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is the narrator’s final experience of her own powerlessness and brings her to despair. Girl’s unnamed brother has died, and is being waked in the family home. Girl encounters a man she has previously met: while her brother was in the hospice she went in search of someone with whom to have violent, oblit- erative sex. She and the man started to have sex in the park, but her uncle found them and beat the man badly. On this last night, Girl meets the man again, and he beats her brutally and rapes her. The fragmented syntax conveys something of the damage he inflicts upon her, seeking to capture something embodied in fragments of language. The syntax illustrates Elaine Scarry’s description of the relationship between pain and violence, that physical pain ‘does not simply actively resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned … physical pain—unlike any other state of consciousness—has no referential content’ (1985, 5). Girl evokes the chaos and panic of the attack in this frightening, choked sequence:

Rip m open. Don’t break me open face open. Crushing Ihear boines on done he up me fuck me. Done fuk me open he dine done on me … Kom shitting ut h mith fking kmg … Piull my mth he pull m mouth with him fingers pull the side of my mouth til I no. Tear my mouth … Grouged breth sacled my lungs til I. Puk blodd over me frum. mY nose my mOuth I. VOMit … HoCk SPIT me. Kicks. uPshes me over. (57)

The Guardian review by Anne Enright describes the protagonist as ‘highly dissociated’ and ‘affectless and highly transgressive’ (online). 232 L. FITZPATRICK

Although the novel and play seem to cover familiar Irish territory (‘A rant- ing, Catholic mother, a disabled brother and a pervy uncle’ in Enright’s words), the way the narrator ‘inhabits—or fails to inhabit—her own account feels more French than Irish. Margeurite Duras and Catherine Millet come to mind as much as Sean O’Reilly or Edna O’Brien’ (online). Helen Meany describes it as ‘courageously feminist’ and ‘startling and upsetting’. She links it to the work of Marina Abramovic and Sarah Kane for its ‘unflinching’ exploration of female sexuality, and reads in Girl’s refusal to be passive an attempt to ‘turn her own body into an instrument of power, only to discover that liberation and abnegation are not the same thing’ (online). Meany’s analysis seems to disagree with de Angelis’s anxiety that plays like this are reiterating women’s victimization: for Meany, despite Girl’s suicide, her refusal to be silenced and forced into convention is a triumph of kinds. The performance echoes with the work of Marina Carr, whose female protagonists also frequently commit suicide, but who choose this option as the best available to them, and who assert their capacity to make choices.1 Like Lela, Girl opts for silence, knowing that her speech will too radically disturb her remaining family relationships and will bring her despair.

Staging the Real, Breaking the Silence Yael Farber’s collaboration with actress Poorna Jagannathan to create Nirbhaya was a response to the dreadful death of Jyoti Pandey Singh, the ‘Nirbhaya’ or ‘fearless one’ of the title, in December 2012. Horrified by the reports from India, Farber speaks in interviews of an urgent need to respond and to talk about women’s experiences of sexual violence and of the pressures upon women to be silent.2 Jagannathan contacted her shortly after Jyoti’s death to invite her to come to India to create the work, which was first staged at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2013. It subsequently toured widely, partly thanks to crowd-funding which brought it to India as well as to the United States and to various venues in the United Kingdom. The reviews of the work have been overwhelmingly positive, and often quite emotional. Laura Barnett, writing for The Telegraph, describes it as ‘one of the most powerful pieces of theatre I’ve seen’. ‘It is hard to overstate the emotional impact of seeing Pandey’s attack playing out on stage, and of hearing these women describe what they themselves have gone through’, she writes (5 August 2013). The review in Herald Scotland says ‘Great theatre requires the intercession IN EXTREMIS: STAGING RAPE IN THE 2010S 233 of the human imagination, and this piece combines the presentation of unbearable facts with ingenious aesthetics in a manner so brilliant that it is, surely, one of the most powerful and urgent pieces of human rights theatre ever made’ (11 August 2013). Similarly positive reviews appear in The Stage, The Times, Time Magazine, New York Times, and The Guardian— though Lyn Gardner criticizes some ‘artistic misjudgements’ in her otherwise positive review (2013). Several of the reviews refer to Farber’s Mies Julie, discussed earlier, which had been very positively received the previous year. The invocation reminds audiences of who Farber is; but it also reminds them of arguably problematic racial politics in Farber’s other work. My review of the work is based on a performance in March 2014 at the Women of the World (WOW) Festival at the Southbank Centre in London, where it played to a full house and was followed by a public Question and Answer session with the cast and the audience. The set for Nirbhaya is entirely black, with the emergency exit signs also screened so that when the lights go down in the auditorium it is completely dark. The set suggests a city-scape as well as this particular history: upstage there are windows like bus windows with blacks behind; there is a skeleton of a bus stage right; white graffiti-covered doors stage left; some buckets and pots upstage, and four basins in different colours; a hanging earthenware globe with a red cloth above it stage centre. Strongly scented incense billows out into the audience, so that the stage is misty with it; and low music plays, so quietly as to be little more than a reverberation. One low lamp lights the space as Nirbhaya, dressed in white with a pink scarf, walks slowly across the stage. Although the work is mainly composed of the testimonies of other women, a figure symbolizing Jyoti Singh is at the centre of it, evoked as a ghost or perhaps as a martyr. Although the violence is not shown explicitly—it is evoked through sound and movement—one of the horrifying features of the performance is that it lasts the same length of time as the attack on Jyoti Singh. The length of the attack upon her is mentioned at the outset and not referred to again; but for me it meant that during the performance I was conscious of the period of suffering endured by the young woman. Given Farber’s skill as a theatre- maker, it seems unlikely that the time detail is coincidental. The work is structured to weave together this specific case with a widespread cultural tolerance of sexual violence and the silence of women who experience it: in her testimony, Poorna Jagannathan states that her own silence is part of what made the rape on the bus possible. While the first focus is on Jyoti Singh in her persona as Nirbhaya, this is followed by a 234 L. FITZPATRICK scene on a Delhi bus which represents the constant touching that women endure on public transport. There are personal testimonies by the performances: one is a woman raped by her ‘uncle’ in Islamabad; a woman raped multiple times as a child; a woman, speaking through an interpreter, who was set on fire by her husband and now, still bearing the scars, works as a counsellor with other women; and a woman gang-raped one night in a stranger-attack in Chicago. There are six performers, including one male who doesn’t speak about experiences of violence but who translates the testimony of the burned woman, and plays one of the rapists and a pas- senger on the bus. The rape of Jyoti Singh is enacted twice, and though choreographed and stylized it evokes frightening and devastating violence and the vulnerability of the human body. A tableau that freezes Nirbhaya’s prone, spread- eagled body with her legs widely parted and the iron rod poised above and between them, viscerally induces a sense of the physical pain and devastation of the attack. Her hospital treatment is represented using simple props of lights and tubing, then her body is washed and laid out, wrapped in white, and lifted onto a simple stretcher and carried around the stage. Flower petals and incense indicate funeral rituals. Finally, Nirbhaya rises, and walks across the stage, reaching up to open the earthenware globe so that ashes begin trickling out, while the music and chanting rise. This is a very moving section of the performance: the depiction of rape and death recalls the living person behind the story. In the final section of the work the performers declare their refusal to remain silent any longer, and their determination to change society through the act of speaking out in public about what they experienced. As Farber comments in a video interview, shame is often part of women’s feelings about sexual assault: a feeling that ‘you are responsible for what happened to you or that you have to protect yourself or someone else from accountability’ (youtube.com). In interview with de Angelis, Farber has spoken of the difficulty of deciding what to show in Nirbhaya, and her feeling that, in order to speak out against sexual violence, it was necessary to show something that could evoke the reality of rape (2014). She and Priyanka Bose agreed that they wanted to show ‘the rage of the perpetrator’ and the ‘hell that was unleashed on that bus’ but without the work becoming titillating or sensationalist. They also wanted to focus on the other women and their experiences, rather than purely on Jyoti Singh. The show does present both its creators and spectators with a number of ethical problems. The IN EXTREMIS: STAGING RAPE IN THE 2010S 235

aestheticization of violence and its transformation into performance, particularly when the represented events were so grave, raises questions about the exploitation of an individual’s tragic death. There is the potential for the work to represent Nirbhaya as a martyr or sacrifice that functions as a rallying point for other women, losing sight of a material person who wished to live. However, the testimonies of the living create a performance that may be efficacious, or raise awareness, or respond to the horror of the event and the wider experience to which it attests, or even celebrate the human capacity to survive and respond positively to disaster. The women who testify or bear witness have all found it possible to live meaningful lives and they all resist being defined solely as victims of their experience. This is movingly true of Sneha Jawale, whose vulnerability is heightened by her communication through an interpreter. Her heartbro- ken longing for her son who remained with her husband’s family and whom she has not seen in many years, is expressed very simply: she stands sometimes on the street and looks at passing school boys, wondering if one of them is her child. The performance offers a platform for women to give voice to their experience, to reject shame, and to explore and acknowledge the ways that shaming women into silence protects rapists and rape culture. While the focus on India and Indian women is problematic for reasons I discuss below, the show clearly connects with its audience as it travels. On the night that I saw it, the theatre was full and the mostly female audience appeared moved and engaged with the material. The women’s experiences are culturally specific but also unfortunately common shared female experiences of childhood sexual abuse, rape by intimate partners, street harassment, and domestic violence. While female spectators in many countries can engage with the experience of sexual violence, however, the work does also seem to situate rape and sexual violence as something committed by and experienced by those who are ‘Other’. Farber might reasonably respond that one woman recounts her experience of being gang-raped in America; and that since she is working with Indian women their experiences are mostly situated in their home country. Though based in Montreal, she was invited to work in India and to create the piece there. And if the site of the premiere had been Delhi rather than Edinburgh, it is likely that the racial politics would be quite different. But the work played in the West before travelling to India, and has had a mixed response from Indian theatre scholars and critics. The bodies of the performers and their voices mark their cultural and ethnic backgrounds. These bodies are already marked by the discursive 236 L. FITZPATRICK violence of racial ‘Othering’, colonialism and postcolonialism. This mark- ing situates the performers in relation to discourses that mark them as variously available to sexual violence (by all men); vulnerable and requiring the protection of White colonial men against ‘native’ men; and untroubled by sexual violence because they are hardened or resilient. These Western discourses play with and against each other in different circumstances to make the body of the Asian woman desirable, virginal and vulnerable or highly sexual or eroticized, but always ‘Other’ to the Western gaze. Correspondingly, Asian men are both infantilized by colonialist discourses and constructed as wild sexually insatiable black beasts from which women (especially White, but sometimes Asian) must be protected. For Nirbhaya, Farber and her creative team use the theatrical aesthetic of Western verbatim theatre, or a very similar form. Although this production is more theatrical than verbatim texts like Exonerated in which the performers sit on stools facing the audience to read the testimonies, or Richard Norton Taylor’s tribunal plays where the courtroom is replicated in documentary detail on stage, it does rely for more than half of the performance on first-person testimonies delivered in direct address to the audience. Thus the work does not arise from Indian theatre practice—as Maya Rao’s Walk does—and rather is created for touring internationally and for ease of reception across the Anglophone world. My final discomfort with the piece is in its representation of Jyoti Singh. While in sympathy with the difficulty of staging violence that Farber and Bose discuss in interview (de Angelis 2014), the performance left me with the feeling that it risks losing the material, unique being of Jyoti Singh to a symbol around which the women of the show and the international audience can rally. It is also difficult to critique the performance, when the performers demonstrate such courage in speaking publicly about their experiences, and they risk their privacy to create positive change. Josette Féral discusses the presentation of ‘exceptionally violent, extreme scenes’ as part of the ‘emergence of the real onstage’ (2011, 52), which rather than bringing an absolute present to the stage in Lehmann’s terms instead tries to solicit a particular audience response. She calls this the aesthetic of shock, offering the example of Rwanda 94 by GROUPOV in which a video clip of man murdering another with a machete is played. Féral describes the audience’s reaction: shock, empathy for the victim, consternation at the barbarity of the action, repulsion and rejection, and incredulity (53). Most of the violence in Nirbhaya is not quite of this order, as it is mediated by language and by time (it is part of the past). The IN EXTREMIS: STAGING RAPE IN THE 2010S 237 performers exist in the present, with the audience. Their suffering is structured into language and into narrative that the audience can comprehend. In this way, the work echoes Franca Rame’s performance of Il Stupro (The Rape), which also creates a coherent narrative from an embodied experience, and uses particular performance strategies to convey the pain, terror and humiliation of the experience. Rame’s decision to speak about her experience also challenges the shame that rape victims are normatively expected to feel, and shames instead the police and the Italian state for failing its female citizens. The women who perform in Nirbhaya do something very similar, drawing attention to the failure of the public, the police and the state to value women citizens. But one of the performers presents the audience with the real on stage: Sneha Jawale, whose scarred face testifies to the violence she suffered, presents an unmediated image of extreme domestic violence (albeit still mediated by time). Her presence creates a genuine rupture because the spectators are forced to change their percep- tual register to be in sync with what they are presented with (Féral, 54). The performance breaks the usual contract between audience and performer, that everything is fiction: not only are these stories not fictional, but Sneha’s marked face is proof that her story is true, and that it happened to her. The experience of seeing and listening to her draws the spectators ‘out of the comfort of illusion, fiction, and the representation they were expecting’, in Féral’s words (62). The production does provoke or create a certain kind of audience reaction. Despite the troubling racial politics of the piece, the work played in London to clear affect, and the spectators’ questions in the public discussion at the end of the show were about their own experiences, sexual violence in the UK, and the potential to create change: that is, they were not exoticizing questions. Audience members were clearly moved, and many people wept, as I did myself, particularly in response to Sneha’s testimony. The representation of Nirbhaya’s death, while clearly open to criticism as sentimental and exploitative, was also emotionally affecting, especially since the audience were aware of the truth of the events behind the show.

I Want to Walk Compared to Nirbhaya, Maya Rao’s Walk has received relatively little attention in the West. Yet it is one of the most radical theatrical responses to sexual violence I have seen because, rather than representing experiences of sexual violence, it expresses women’s longing for freedom from 238 L. FITZPATRICK sexual threat. It offers in the simplest terms a definition of what such an almost unimaginable freedom would allow: the freedom to walk. Like Nirbhaya, Walk emerged in the immediate aftermath of the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh; but it is rooted in local performance traditions and evolved from the public protests in Delhi in January 2013. Since then, it has been performed at rallies, protests, in theatres and at theatre conferences and events around the world, including at the International Federation for Theatre Research in Hyderabad in 2015. Maya Krishna Rao is an actor, director and writer; a Kathakali performer, and a Theatre in Education practitioner, who has worked with many of the major figures in Indian theatre since the 1970s. She has toured her work widely in the West and has taught at a number of universities, though she is primarily based in Delhi. Her work has often addressed women’s rights, including two pieces in the early 1980s against dowry deaths and female infanticide. Bishnupriya Dutt discusses the development of the work from its first performance at Jawaharlal Nehru University on New Year’s Eve 2012, at midnight, ‘therefore bringing in the New Year, to commemorate the passing away of Nirbhaya’ (2015, 377). Dutt reads the performance as metaphorically continuing Jyoti’s journey to recovery through the idea of walking with her and with the protesters to create change, empowerment and community. The text very clearly states a longing that is surely widely shared:

I want to walk … not five, not six, not seven, not eight, not eleven … But at twelve midnight … I want to walk the streets … At two, at three, at four … I want to walk the streets, ride a bus Lie on a bench in the park … I try not to be afraid of the dark … Will you walk with me? … I will walk with you … Will you walk with me (Rao 2012; qtd Dutt 2015, 378)

The text is accompanied by music that sets the pace of the walk when it is a group, outdoor performance; for indoor demonstrations at conferences the music underscores Rao’s large and deliberate movements. She takes large strides, lifting each leg high, her voice deep and resonant, IN EXTREMIS: STAGING RAPE IN THE 2010S 239

urging the audience to respond physically or verbally to her performance. Her training in the male Kathakali role enables an ambivalent physicality that is strong, powerful and incisive in its movements. In the course of the work she demands ‘Give me, give me give me give me’ the things that are needed for this freedom to be possible: multiple convictions of rapists, police who pay attention to women’s testimonies of violence, marriages where women can safely refuse sex, and mothers who raise their sons to respect women. The text—which changes in different performances and is partially improvised—emphasizes consent and the requirement that you must have consent for ‘anything you want to do with another person’. It therefore demands changes to the law but also and primarily changes to social and cultural attitudes towards women. Dutt describes ‘hands reaching out to different members of the audience, gestures of embrace and invitation to join her, bending or kneeling to be at the same level as her audience, Rao encouraged an atmosphere of intimacy and sisterhood’ (379). Her performance resists images of vulnerability and victimhood that are often used to marginalize women in the name of protecting them: her body is strong, and resistant. Dutt’s analysis of the performance and of the influence of Kathakali elucidates this quality in Rao’s persona and work:

Rao’s powerful bodily presence and performative modes never give the scope to locate the female self inside the body or take at face value the premise that rape is an attack on the selfhood of woman … the performance technique she uses comes from her training in Kathakali and here she uses the upper and lower parts of her body, her facial expressions, and hand gestures, in ways that contradict each other. She constantly selects one part of her body to express a feminine code in all its classical aesthetic quality, while another tends to dismantle it, by creating a neutral and even masculine-coded meaning. This mixture of the feminine and masculine, taken from a classical tradition, subverts the classical codes. (382)

Dutt argues that in the performance of rape, Rao’s technique resists the audience’s imposition of ‘victim codes’ on the performing body, to challenge such representations (382). In discussing the future development of community and activist theatre, James Thompson distinguishes between effect and affect, arguing that we are now ‘beyond effect’. Thus the evocation of empathy and 240 L. FITZPATRICK other affective responses is at the heart of current activist theatre, and is recognized as essential to the efficacy of the work. Rao’s performance is startling in its immediacy: the performer speaks and gestures to the spectators, drawing us in to her performance in a way that feels both risky and exhilarating. Her vulnerability as a solo performer is undercut by the force of her physicality and the difficulty—as Dutt explores above—of categorizing her. Some of the exhilaration comes from the simplicity of Rao’s demand: the freedom to walk safely, which is so basic and yet so frequently denied to women and to members of marginal communities. The work recalls Thompson’s discussion of performance affects and the Utopian performative (Dolan 2005). Thompson uses Emma Goldman’s defence of dancing to argue for the importance of pleasure and joy in providing people with the resilience to keep their struggle going: ‘participation in the joyful is part of a dream of a “beautiful” future, in the sense that it becomes an inspirational force’ (2009, 13). Rao’s offer, ‘I will walk with you / Will you walk with me’, is an offer of solidarity and an inspirational force that suggests the possibility of a beautiful future.

Conclusions April de Angelis’s radio documentary raised important questions of what can and should be shown on stage in dramas that address sexual violence. Amongst her interviewees is sociologist Tiffany Jenkins, who argues that there is a ‘climate of hysteria’ around rape today and that theatre reflects that hysteria. Women, who are ‘better off than ever before in human history’, are being encouraged to see themselves as victims, as vulnerable to male aggression, and as out of control. This is one side of the argument, but De Angelis’s analysis, and the productions she chooses, are all female- authored and address the topic of rape to open dialogue about the issue, to acknowledge that sexual violence is a significant problem, and to enable women to speak of their own experiences without shame. As Doon Mackichan’s recent radio article for Women’s Hour argues, rape and murder have become staples of popular entertainment in film and television, rarely presenting the issue from a female perspective. This is perhaps part of a backlash against women’s increasing freedom and visibility in the public world (Kapur 2012; qtd Mardorossian 2014: loc. 262/4272). In popular entertainment, violence typically signals something about the perpetrator (the victim is often, though not always, unknown and IN EXTREMIS: STAGING RAPE IN THE 2010S 241 undeveloped as a character). In contrast to television and film, theatre usually avoids directly showing sexual violence. In these plays the violence is usually described, and when it is staged it is stylized with the use of freeze- frames, choreography, or darkness. These techniques express aspects of the experience: fear, chaos, pain, vulnerability; but they also demonstrate the limits of representation. These plays offer glimpses that shock or disturb, and that attest to the chaos of unleashed violence and the difficulties of capturing embodied experience in words and structured narratives. The plays discussed here use different strategies to elicit an affective, morphological response from the spectators. From Sarah Kane’s Theatre of Cruelty of the 1990s to Aoife Duffin’s gruelling performance in A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, to the first-person testimonies of Nirbhaya or the fact-based dramas of human trafficking and sexual slavery, the plays and performances seek to engage the spectators in an encounter with a particular embodied, lived experience. The purpose is not entertainment, but dialogue. The victims stand and speak, present their stories, and in most cases attest to their survival. The plays of the past ten years build upon the earlier work from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, which tended to seek strategies to represent rape from a female perspective to counter hegemonic narratives of female passivity and of rape as merely seduction. This recent work is more visceral, in examples like Nirbhaya or A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. Other plays examine contemporary abuses of women, as in Lela &Co.; or explore the objectification of women in Western culture and the impact of this on women’s understanding of themselves and their own sexualities. The tricky question of consent arises in Freak in particular, but also in A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing as the unnamed protagonist consents to—even welcomes—the abuse that is inflicted upon her. But perhaps most radically, by including first-person testimony,Nirbhaya emphasizes that women need not be ashamed; that, as Philomele says, rape is the fault of the rapist and no one else. The final production discussed here, Maya Rao’s Walk, is a piece that has not been performed to a large audience in the UK or Ireland, but that is one of the most radical of these productions. While all of this work is of aesthetic and political value and interest, Rao’s simple instruction to ‘Walk’ and appeal to the spectators to ‘walk with me’ is a simple and profoundly moving vision of a world without violence against women, where is it possible to walk in public unafraid. 242 L. FITZPATRICK

Notes 1. Several of Marina Carr’s early plays staged the suicide of the central female protagonist: The Mai, Portia Coughlan and By the Bog of Cats. The eponymous Mai and Portia both die by drowning, while Hester in By the Bog of Cats cuts the throat of her own small daughter and then stabs herself. This work has attracted considerable critical commentary: see for example Clare Wallace (2001), Eda Dedebas (2013) or the work of Melissa Sihra. 2. See April de Angelis’s interview with Farber in ‘Theatre of the Abused’ broadcast on BBC Radio 4, available on the BBC website at http://www. bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04styb4. Last accessed 22 August 2017.

Bibliography

Performance Reviews Barnett, Laura. ‘Edinburgh Festival 2013: Nirbhaya, Review’. The Telegraph, 5 August 2013. Farndale, Nigel. ‘We Should Be Applauding, Not Booing, the New Guillaume Tell’. The Telegraph, 2 July 2015. Gardner, Lyn. ‘Blurred Lines—Review’. The Guardian, 23 January 2014. Gardner, Lyn. ‘Nirbhaya—Edinburgh Festival’. The Guardian, 5 August 2013. Roddy, Michael. ‘London “William Tell” Gets Chorus of Boos for Nude Scene’. Reuters, 30 June 2015. Williams, Zoe. ‘Guillaume Tell Opera Rape Outcry is Over Offence to Music, not Women’. The Guardian, 3 July 2015.

Books and Articles BBC. Is This Rape? Television. BBC 3, 2015. Cavarero, Adriana. Horrorism. Trans. William McCuaig. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. De Angelis, April. Theatre of the Abused. BBC Radio 4, 4 December 2014. Available online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04styb4 Dedebas, Eda. ‘Rewriting of Tragedy and Women’s Agency in Marina Carr’s By The Bog of Cats …, Ariel, and Woman and Scarecrow’. Women’s Studies 42:3 (2013): 248–270. Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Dutt, Bisnupriya. ‘Performing Resistance with Maya Rao: Trauma and Protest in India’. Contemporary Theatre Review 25:3 (2015): 371–385. IN EXTREMIS: STAGING RAPE IN THE 2010S 243

Dworkin, Andrea. Letters from a War Zone. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1988; New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1993. Féral, Josette. ‘From Event to Extreme Reality’. TDR 55:4 (2011): 51–63. Jordan, Anna. Freak. London: Nick Hern Books, 2014. Kane, Sarah. Sarah Kane Complete Plays. London: Methuen, 2001. Kapur, Ratna. ‘Rape and the Crisis of Indian Masculinity’. The Hindu, 19 December 2012. Available online at http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/ oped/rape-and-the-crisis-of-indian-masculinity/article4214267.ece Katrak, Ketu. ‘“Stripping Women of their Wombs”: Active Witnessing in Performances of Violence’. Theatre Research International 39:1 (March 2014): 31–46. Lynn, Cordelia. Lela & Co. London: Nick Hern Books, 2015. Mardorossian, Carine. Framing the Rape Victim: Gender and Agency Reconsidered. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014. McBride, Eimear. A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing: Adapted for the Stage by Annie Ryan. London: Faber & Faber, 2014. Rao, Maya. Walk. Live Performance, 2012. Video available online at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=msUvCWKcCVQ Reid, Christina. ‘Tea in a China Cup’. Plays 1. London: Methuen, 1989. Saunders, Graham. Love Me or Kill Me: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Sierz, Aleks. In-Yer-Face Theatre. London: Faber & Faber, 2001. Thompson, James. Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Urban, Ken. ‘Towards a Theory of Cruel Britannia’. NTQ 20:4 (2004): 354–372. Wallace, Clare. ‘Tragic Destiny and Abjection in Marina Carr’s “The Mai, Portia Coughlan” and “By The Bog of Cats…”’. Irish University Review 31:2 (2001): 431–449. CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

Sexual violence provokes horror and revulsion, but it also fascinates. This is not news: in the 1660s the presence of women on stage encouraged ‘salacious spectacles of blood and violence’ (Howe 1992, 42); in the 1800s ‘a staging of an attempted rape would … draw a crowd’ and theatre posters often used images of distressed or dishevelled young women, clinging to the arm of their protectors (Branca 2005, 34–35); and graphic sexualized representations of rape and murder are used to sell contemporary film and television. It is not surprising that rape, so closely aligned with popular understanding of romance and passion, so embedded in normative conceptions of active powerful masculinity and passive delicate femininity, should hold an erotic appeal. This eroticism is underpinned by a conception of rape as forceful seduction in which the woman’s natural modesty is overwhelmed by the man’s passion and desire, to the final pleasure of both (Bataille 2006). The hero persists, and he wins the fair maiden; Prince Charming’s kiss wakens Sleeping Beauty, and in popular music, television, film and videogames the man who refuses to take no for an answer gains material and sexual success. Tanya Horeck has suggested that the feminist insistence on making rape politically visible has to an extent backfired: rape has become hypervisible, and is frequently sensationalized or eroticized in media reporting (2003). What strategies—dramaturgical, theatrical, performative—might effectively undermine or counter this paradoxical hypervisibility, which on the one hand surrounds us with the imagery of sexual violence and on the other obscures the lived, embodied experience it purports to represent?

Baz Kershaw uses the term ‘theatrical efficacy’ to describe ‘the potential that theatre may have to make the immediate effects of performance influence, however minutely, the general historical evolution of wider social and political realities’ (1992, 1). But what would efficacy look like, in the case of rape? To seek to establish that rape is a crime, is morally and ethically wrong and is harmful to the victim seems redundant. Most representations of rape in mass media position the spectator in sympathy with a clearly innocent victim attacked and often murdered by a dangerous and threatening predator, yet surveys of public attitudes to rape repeatedly demonstrate high levels of victim-blaming. Women’s testimony is regarded as unreliable, and there is a marked tendency to hold the victim at least partially responsible if she drank alcohol, flirted, or dressed ‘attractively’ (Office of National Statistics, online). This last overlooks the fact that women are normatively expected to present themselves attractively for male consumption: wearing make-up, dressing nicely, with at least some element of bodily display. They are also expected to flirt or at least to be socially pleasant, smiling and responsive to the emotional needs of others; to behave otherwise can result in verbal insults or threats. The disbelief that often greets rape victims effectively punishes women for behaving in accordance with these gender norms. Perhaps the representation of rape and murder is more misogynistic than its creators intend or believe. In media representations the victims are usually beautiful and well dressed; they are packaged and presented for the rapist’s consumption and for ours as spectators, and since the spectator often has more plot information than the victim she (or he) can appear to be wilfully blundering into danger. The villain, meanwhile, evades capture and outwits all those around him (or her), prolonging the action and allowing for exciting and suspenseful plot twists. These sexualized thrillers in their present form, therefore, offer little material for efficacious anti-rape representation. There are, however, emergent strategies that explore other ways of engaging the audience with the issue. The efficacy of the work is difficult to judge, because social and cultural change is a slow and complex process. The cumulative efficacy of women exploring, dramatizing, and publicly performing narratives and experiences of rape and sexual violence has put violence against women—understood from a female perspective—in the public sphere, as an important issue for legislators and law enforcement. It makes the issue of rape and sexual violence visible and audible, thereby showing it as commonplace, a shared experience amongst women, not something that the victim should feel isolated and shamed by.1 This is CONCLUSION 247 perhaps most powerfully and immediately felt in community drama and in verbatim theatre. April de Angelis, in a documentary for BBC Radio 4, records a deeply-moved female spectator at Nirbhaya saying that this is the first time she has ever seen a play that deals with rape. This is an intriguing comment. It is unlikely that the spectator means she has never seen rape represented in dramatic performance, because of the sheer number of plays for stage and television that include sexually violent material as part of the plot. What the spectator is perhaps saying is that she has never been in a theatre where women have spoken of their own personal experiences openly and without shame or embarrassment; she has never seen rape represented from the victim’s perspective with nuance and complexity. Despite potential ethical and aesthetic reservations about such first-person performances, in their assertion of truth and authenticity they can command deeply emotional responses from the spectators. As Derek Paget notes, despite audiences’ tendency to be sceptical about official narratives and documents ‘the witness’s claim to authenticity can still warrant a credible perspective’ (2009, 235–236), which suggests a potential for efficacious engagement. First-person witnessing in Northern Irish theatre has been useful for opening dialogue and sharing experiences across sectarian community boundaries, and in this work too the issue of rape and sexual violence can emerge organically from the rehearsal or devising process. The Theatre of Witness show I Once Knew a Girl is a significant example because it is not, in fact, about rape but sought to investigate women’s experiences of the conflict, as paramilitaries, peace and community activists, police officers, and mothers of families. The women raised their experiences of sexual violence themselves, during the rehearsal and devising process. It is an issue that is normally taboo, or at least heavily censored, but there is evidence of rape within state and paramilitary organizations,2 of sexual violence being used to control and punish women who form relationships outside their community, of rape being used as a weapon in conflict between men to control male behaviour, and of the brutality of the public space infiltrating the domestic world in the form of sexual and family violence. As in other war zones, this violence is rarely spoken of and often regarded as shaming for the victim. I Once Knew a Girl echoes with a much earlier community production by Derry Frontline—Threshold—in which the women in the group, during the creative process, shared experiences of sexual violence that were later incorporated into the play. In each case, the devising process created a safe space to share personal experience, 248 L. FITZPATRICK and the intimate nature of the finished work supports its potential for attentive audience engagement. Perhaps the more radical strategies employed in the published plays explored here is in the representation of the rapist rather than the victim or the act. Popular television drama still tends to reiterate the stereotype of the stranger rapist in the dark alley, but in most of these plays, the rapist is someone the victim knows and trusts, and the rape is committed in a private or domestic space that the victim has willingly entered. This strategy challenges beliefs about women’s truthfulness, by explaining why the woman enters the private space, why she believes she will come to no harm, and how her behaviour does not constitute consent. Miss Julie willingly enters Jean’s bedroom, and thereby is understood by the audience to consent to whatever occurs between them. That she might falsely accuse him of rape is a subtext in the original that Patrick Marber’s adaptation makes explicit when Julie tells John ‘Listen to what I say or so help me God I will scream rape and I will not stop screaming until you are in prison’ (2004, 160). Marber dramatizes the belief that vengeful women lie. In a sharply contrasting representation that illustrates Ehrlich’s study of rape in the legal system, Eve Lewis explores her protagonist’s confusion and disbelief at the suddenness with which her acquaintance turns into her rapist. The character Woman admits she doesn’t scream for help, though she isn’t sure why; and she feels pressure not to offend her attacker. In this way, Lewis situates the spectator inside Woman’s experience, so that we can empathize with her rather than judging her. We remain aware, however, that in court, Woman would be unable to explain her failure to resist and it is very unlikely that the Man/Tel would be convicted. Sarah Daniels’s plays represent rape by fathers, uncles, trusted family members; and in Beside Herself she sets the social credibility of the renowned medical consultant against his abused daughter, dramatizing the obstacles children encounter in disclosing experiences of violence. Daniels’s character Evelyn concludes ‘[rapists] are not the men you marry … because if they were, there would be words to say, “Don’t be alone with your father—he’s … he’s …”’ (1994, 180). Over and over and in various ways, the plays discussed here dramatize the most common kinds of sexual violence, and the kind that is least likely to be prosecuted (Hanley et al. 2009). In wartime, women’s testimonies are more likely to be believed though the victims may be rejected by their families and communities, forced to bear their rapists’ children, or physically mutilated by the violence inflicted upon them. Often in such texts women’s experiences testify to the brutality CONCLUSION 249 of the enemy, or the defeat of their own nation, rather than as interpersonal experiences of violence with consequences for an individual. And yet the brutality of the action demands that it be read as interpersonal as well as metaphoric: it shatters individual lives, families and communities. From the Trojan Women to Romans in Britain and from the conflicts in Northern Ireland to the Congo, the enemy women are reduced to vulnerable and suffering bodies, and in extreme examples, as Weil says, to ‘things’. But the violence is not only inflicted by enemy soldiers—the plays from Northern Ireland dramatize the local and domestic aspects of sexual violence and terror, in a situation where the main state focus is on combating paramilitary violence. Research by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies notes that wealthy societies also experience increases in gender-based violence in crisis situations. The research looks at natural disasters, since the societies under review are not experiencing conflict and have not done so for a long time: the USA, New Zealand and Australia (Ferris 2015, 11). Extrapolated to consider Northern Ireland, this research backs the representations of sexual violence and rape relating to the conflict and post-conflict society. Heightened rates of sexual violence attest to the continuing effects of living in a divided and recovering society, while the patriarchal nature of the state tends to discourage citizens from speaking publicly about domestic and sexual violence, which is still strongly associated with shame. In the case of Northern Ireland, the sectarian nature of the conflict has tended to isolate communities of religious practice, acting against secularization and promoting faith-based political identification. However, the increasing number of verbatim and community theatre representations of sexual violence is acting to uncover this recent history and to support victims’ resistance and access to the law. The vulnerability of women and children in wartime is a recurring motif in the works of Linden, Morrison, Nottage, and Visniec, captured in moments in devised work like The Conquest of Happiness or in the testimonies of the participants in the Theatre of Witness. Recently theorized by Judith Butler, Erinn Gilson and Ann Murphy, vulnerability poses a challenging opportunity for an ethical understanding of the Other and of the enemy, through an examination of the ontological vulnerability of human life. Historically, as Butler notes, vulnerability was a quality associated with women and with femininity. Feminist activism has often sought protection for women, emphasizing their smaller physical size and strength relative to men, in campaigns against violence and harassment. Vulnerability is often, 250 L. FITZPATRICK therefore, configured as normatively feminine and so as erotic, as it is by Bataille (2006). But dramatic texts that foreground the vulnerability of all human bodies to harm challenge such an understanding, emphasizing instead the horrors that can be inflicted upon the bodies of others, particularly on the helpless, when social norms break down. While the association of women with vulnerability risks identifying women essentially as victims, as April de Angelis fears, it also engages with contemporary feminist activism. Margaret Atwood recently summarized feminism as: ‘First wave, the vote. Second wave, the image. Now it’s about violence and rape and death: we’ve got down to the nitty-gritty’ (The Guardian, 15 October 2016). This is reflected in the plays examined in Chap. 6: in some of the most recent examples, the representation of rape has moved from mimetic enactment to access to the central character’s interiority—as in Freak, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing or Lela & Co. These texts don’t stage the rape, but draw in the audience through a first- person narration that seeks to convey the chaos and terror of unleashed violence through fragments of words in Girl, or—as in Lela & Co.— through blackouts that express the inexpressible. In this insistence upon individual experience there is an echo both of verbatim performance,3 and of grassroots movements like Laura Bates’s Everyday Sexism Project which publicizes women’s experiences in an online blog. Underlying grassroots feminist projects like Bates’s is a refusal to minimize sexual violence or to say, in the phrase of Kelly and Radford: ‘nothing really happened’ (1996). The insistence on individual experience is present in the work of these dramatists when they refuse to offer a consoling resolution, but leave the action open-ended. Against an increasingly ‘pornified’ Western culture, where women’s bodies are cosmetically and surgically shaped by images of desirability and the capacity to pay for treatments, these representations of rape stand brutally apart. They cannot be assimilated into the everyday, and yet they are representative of everyday abuses of human rights. Lela’s experiences of being trafficked are both apart from everyday urban life, and undeniably part of it; the text makes the normatively invisible suddenly visible to the audience. Girl’s pursuit of self-destruction responds to an ordinary though poisonous family dynamic, and her uncle’s rape of her is not spoken of and is never punished. In Freak, Leah and Georgie are each shaped by porn: by others’ imposition of pornographic tropes onto them, and by their own sexual fantasies in which they view themselves, from outside, as objects for male consumption and pleasure. CONCLUSION 251

Elizabeth Grosz challenges contemporary feminism to rethink its conceptions of gender, vulnerability and agency in response to poststructural- ist conceptions of the individual and of culture. She argues that poststructuralism does not disregard issues of oppression, power and control, but it does demand a rethinking of stereotypes of female passivity and helplessness in the face of patriarchal hegemony. Women, she argues, are not simply relegated to subordinate positions but also have the capacity to resist and respond actively and—at least sometimes—effectively; to seize power, and to create cultural change. The evidence for this is the feminist movement itself which demonstrates ‘women’s capacity to move beyond ressentiment and anger … to produce something new … women’s capaci- ties … to devise strategies, harnessing what they know about power, about their daily lives, their experiences, their positions’ (2003, 21). Although the female protagonists in the recent work reviewed here may be denied their physical freedom, or trade away their agency in return for male attention that they believe they want, they remain capable of acting and resisting—in the case of Lela, Leah, Georgie or Girl. And they retain their ability to speak their experience, which is also a kind of resistance, in the case of the women in Nirbhaya or I Once Knew a Girl. Grosz identifies the challenge to feminism as recognizing women’s power and seeking new ways to use it, even in limited circumstances, while eschewing models that portray women as victims of men. In her most recent work, Mardorossian argues that anti-rape activism and scholarship needs to change the focus of the investigation more radically still. She argues that the focus of the justice system and of activists has been on the victims, on the impact of rape upon women, and on strategies to avoid attack. This has ‘ghettoized’ rape, positioning it as a crime that mainly affects women rather than one than concerns the social body as a whole ‘unlike violent crimes that predominantly victimize men’ (2014, 1). Therefore, because rape functions as a discrete category of violence, ‘the profoundly sexualized dimension of all violence is rendered invisible’ (2). She clarifies this:

… irrespective of the gender of those involved in a violent interaction, the violation itself entails the mobilization of a relational and structural paradigm of masculinity / femininity that is not only operative in rape per se but of which one particular form is rape as we know it … even in cases of gang violence, which typically involve men, a structural relation between masculinity and femininity defines the relationship of the antagonists … each of 252 L. FITZPATRICK

the two actors is striving to occupy the dominant masculine position while casting the other in the subordinate feminine one. (5)

Mardorossian’s formulation here clearly recalls Foucault’s claim that rape should be understood only as physical violence. She is taking forward Foucault’s argument that rape should not be treated as exceptional because it is sexualized, as this ‘plays in the hands of power’ (7). But she departs from Foucault regarding the implications of this. While Foucault was calling for the criminal code to be reformed, Mardorossian’s focus is on the social and cultural. She argues that ‘violence is an inherently sexualized phenomenon of which rape is the extreme form’ and that the reason that women, children, and members of particular minority communities are targeted is because they normally occupy a structurally subordinate (feminine) position (2014, 8). She therefore proposes that instead of focusing on women’s alleged passivity and victimization, the focus should be on challenging ‘the meanings that have historically buttressed hegemonic masculinity and its association with agency’ and on ‘breaking masculinity’s violent hold on culture as a site of desire and agency’ (13). Turning to Judith Butler’s work on vulnerability and her formulation of vulnerability as an ontological quality of the human individual, she argues that this can help reframe conceptions of agency and of victimization, and avoid victim-blaming. ‘Victims are people whose vulnerability to others has been abused rather than people who, as they are now increasingly defined, let themselves fall prey to a condition (vulnerability) to which the rest of us are supposedly impermeable’ (Mardorossian, 15). Two recent examples of anti-rape, feminist performance perhaps offer a sense of the potential for adapting artistic and popular culture to challenge rape myths and stereotypes. In Australia, Aurora Murphy has responded to Sharon Marcus’s 1992 conception of the ‘rape script’ to argue that by invoking a theatrical metaphor Marcus opens the possibilities of transformation by changing the script or, even, the performance of the script. She toured Spreading the Love in suburban Adelaide in 2010 and 2011, in a series of fifteen one-hour performances. An installation that resembled a bedroom, decorated with red hearts and other icons of romantic love, was placed in a public area. Passers-by were invited to sit on or in the bed, to talk with the artist. The conversation was about love and sex. Murphy explains that the performance ‘differed from standard rape-prevention programmes, because it did not explicitly explore issues of sex and rape; instead it investigated people’s perceptions of love and relationships more CONCLUSION 253 broadly … The performance spontaneously engaged with people who do not ordinarily consider the ethical negotiation of sex as pertinent to their lives’ (2013, 137). The focus of the work was on developing a positive and joyful understanding of human sexuality. Meanwhile, American performance artist Adrienne Truscott’s Asking for It engages more aggressively, though humour, with rape in contemporary culture. Truscott performs her one-woman stand-up show about rape naked from the waist down. Reviewer Emma Brockes notes that this nudity is aggressive, rather than erotic (2014). The show has toured internationally, playing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2014 where it won the Foster’s Comedy Award. Her performance uses satirical humour to challenge rape culture. From victim-blaming to anti-abortion activists who label the resulting pregnancies ‘a gift from God’, her routine situates sexual violence in the context of a sexist culture that routinely denigrates women, and then ridi- cules its most prominent figureheads. Telling stories about rape is one long-standing method of anti-rape activism. The work of women playwrights and theatre-makers over the past thirty years has brought a wide range of nuanced and woman-focused representations to public audiences, to support effective and affective engagement and to raise awareness of the reality of rape, and its impact on the lives of individuals, families, communities and nations. As theatre practice experiments and innovates with plot, characterization, audience interaction and aesthetics, theatre-makers engage with verbatim performance, personal testimony, installation art, comedy and affective performance techniques to continue this dialogue with the audience and with society. To arrive at an understanding of rape as an act of violence requires the lengthy dismantling of a set of culturally embedded beliefs about women, men, and sexuality; but the work of the past three decades shows a process that is underway, and flourishing.

Notes 1. Charlotte Canning writes that part of the necessity of expressing rape in theatre is to create a discourse around it that allows women to speak their experiences. She argues that this can be empowering and activist. The belief that rape dishonours the woman, and that even naming the crime was shameful, was one means of controlling the discourse: ‘Making rape something shameful so that women would not dare voice their experiences’ led women to believe that ‘since they were the only ones suffering, they were responsible’ (1996, 152). 254 L. FITZPATRICK

2. Susan McKay, writing in 1985 during the conflict, states that ‘guns ostensibly used for the protection of communities are used in the rape of women from those communities’ (‘Rape and Incest in a Violent Male Society’. Fortnight, May–June 1985, pp. 9–10). The Belfast Rape Crisis and Sexual Abuse Centre reports in 2006 that rape at gunpoint was significantly more frequent in Northern Ireland than in the Republic of Ireland or Great Britain, and that these rapes ‘involve guns that are both legally and illegally held’ (www.rapecrisisni.com, 2006). This suggests that at least some of the guns are held by police officers and army personnel. 3. Lela & Co. was developed from interviews with a young woman who had been trafficked. Cordelia Lynn discusses the writing process in an audience Question and Answer session at the Royal Court, available online at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUg1UcIfaZ8.

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A Bataille, Georges, 58, 182–185, 189, Affect, 7, 18, 21, 24, 25, 31, 33, 202, 209, 245, 250 34n2, 69, 84, 85, 91, 95, 114, Eroticism, 5, 32, 69 129, 143, 174, 181, 186, 188, Brecht, v, 183, 201 190, 191, 207–209, 215, and Brechtian, 50, 51, 76, 93, 141 220–232, 237, 239–241, 253 Brenton, Howard, v, 194–196 and Ahmed, Sara, 28, 88, 112, 113, Romans in Britain, 4, 33, 193–196, 191–193, 220, 251 199, 208, 249 Agency, 10, 28, 32, 64, 77, 80, 88, Brownmiller, Susan, 3, 4, 27, 80 94, 98, 108, 121, 123, 127, 131, Butler, Judith 138, 175, 181, 182, 189, 197, and feminist theory, 185 229, 251, 252 and vulnerability, 32, 91, 181–209, and Grosz, Elisabeth, 251 249, 250, 252 Ahmed, Sara Byrne, Patricia, 169 affect, 28, 88, 112, 113, 191–193, Don’t Say A Word, 167–169, 171, 220, 251 175, 176 disgust, 88, 112, 113

C B Carr, Marina, 115 Bal, Mieke and Hecuba, 140 and hysterical poetics, 2, 25, 26, 32, and On Raftery’s Hill, 32, 81, 98, 34n1, 161–163 109–130, 156

1 Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes

Chaudhuri, Una, 56, 60 F and subaltern, 52 Farber, Yael Churchill, Caryl and Mies Julie, 31, 57, 58, 62, and Abortive, 98, 99, 184 64–71 and Top Girls, 98 and Nirbhaya, 143, 220, 232, and Vinegar Tom, 96, 97 234–236 Conflict, 2, 6, 27, 32, 70, 75, 76, 92, Feminist theatre 137–177, 193, 197, 200, 205, Aston, Elaine, 77 214, 247, 254n2 and Case, Sue-Ellen, 82 post-conflict, 30, 66, 151, 167–176, Diamond, Elin, 50, 77 249 and Goodman, Lizbeth, 76 Consent Monstrous Regiment, 77, 78, 96, 97 and implicit consent, 56 Red Ladder Theatre Company, 77, and justice system, 24–26, 31, 36n10, 78, 132n2 42, 49, 55, 79, 114, 162 Women’s Theatre Group, 77, 78, 101, 132n2 Feminist theory D construction of gender, 71 Dance gender, 50, 185 and DV8, Enter Achilles, 114, 197, Foot-Newton, Lara, 33 199 and Tshepang, 33, 204, 208, 210n5 and Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre, Freedom, 3, 6, 9–11, 24, 36n10, 44, Giselle, 114, 197 125, 131, 149, 151, 152, 168, and Macmillan, Kenneth, Judas 221, 226, 237–240, 251 Tree, 197, 198 Daniels, Sarah and Beside Herself, 80, 81, 98, 104, G 108, 248 Gender and Masterpieces, 80, 81, 98, 101, 105 and Butler, Judith, 32 Derry Frontline, 151, 163–167 and Das, Veena, 30 Threshold, 145, 163–165, 167, 171, and de Lauretis, Teresa, 9 247 and Mardorossian. Carine, v, 11, 80 Devlin, Anne, 151, 152, 155, 156, 175 Grosz, Elisabeth and Ourselves Alone, 155, 156 and agency, 251 Disgust and Ahmed, Sara, 88, 112, 113 and freedom, 10, 11, 251 Grotesque, 28, 119, 123, 128, 195, 203 E Guillaume Tell, Rossini, (2015), 213 Efficacy, 12, 27, 34, 169, 235, 236, 240, 246 and community drama, 247 H Eroticism and Bataille, Georges, 69, Human trafficking, 5, 33, 221, 226 182 and Lela & Co., 241, 254n3 INDEX 279

Hysterical performance, 93 and feminism, 11–14, 33, 194, 252 and Love, Lauren, 82 rape script, 11–15, 80, 81, 125, 252 Mardorossian, Carine and feminism, 11, 13, 14, 33, 194 J and Foucault, 8, 252 Jordan, Anna, 5, 220, 221, 225 and violence, 4, 8, 11, 13, 30, 33, Freak, 5, 221 194, 240, 252 and vulnerability, 241 McBride, Eimear, 220, 221, 229 K A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, 184, Kane, Sarah 221, 229, 231 and Blasted, 4, 33, 175, 196, 216, McPherson, Conor, 86 217 This Lime Tree Bower, 86 and Cleansed, 33, 216 Melodrama, vi, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 192 The Octoroon, 18, 21, 22 L The Shaughraun, 20, 22 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 188, 191, 201, Miss Julie, vi, 31, 43, 54, 56, 58–62, 236 71 Lewis, Eve, 29, 81, 91–95, 100, 109, Bergman, Ingmar, 31, 43, 45, 46, 123, 130, 184, 203, 229, 248 54, 55, 58–62 and Ficky Stingers, 29, 52, 81, 91, Farber, Yael, 31, 43, 57, 58, 62, 64, 92, 123, 184, 229 66, 68, 70, 71, 233 Linden, Sonja, 140, 146–149, 158, film adaptations, 54–71 249 Marber, Patrick, 31, 43, 47, 56, 58, I Have Before Me A Remarkable 62, 63, 72n3, 248 Document Given To Me By A Sjöberg, Alf, 31, 43, 54–71 Young Lady From Rwanda, Strindberg, August, vi, 31, 41, 140, 146 43–45, 47, 48, 51, 55–61, Lynn, Cordelia 63–65, 68, 71 human trafficking, 220 Ullmann, Liv, 31, 54–71 Lela & Co., 220, 221, 225, 229, Morrison, Bill 241, 250, 254n3 A Lovesong for Ulster, 215 and The Marriage, 146, 157 Murphy, Ann V., 30–32, 252 M and vulnerability, 32, 185, 190, 249 Male/male rape, 4, 33, 187, 196, 218 Murphy, Aurora, 249, 252 Howard Brenton Romans in Britaini, 4, 193 Sarah Kane Blasted, 4, 33, 175, 196, N 216–220 Neoliberalism and Bumiller, Kristin, 10 Marcus, Sharon, v, 11–15, 30, 80, 81, Nirbhaya, 143, 200, 220, 221, 252 232–238, 241, 247, 251 280 INDEX

Northern Ireland, 32, 54, 140, Mardorossian, Carine, 4, 8, 11, 13, 149–151, 153, 155–159, 161, 14, 30, 80, 194, 240, 251, 252 163, 166, 168–170, 172–176, and Murphy, Aurora, 252 176–177n2, 177n3, 193, 205, Reid, Christina, 132n4, 151, 152, 249, 254n2 156, 175, 222 Nottage, Lynn, 141, 144, 149 Tea in a China Cup, 132n4, 152, and Ruined, 104, 140, 143, 249 156, 167, 175, 222 Restoration Theatre, 15 Revenge, 5, 24, 42, 63, 68, 162, 200, O 217 Objects on stage Romans in Britain, Brenton, Howard, and The Love of the Nightingale, 4, 193–196 33 and puppets, 204 and Tshepang, 33, 203, 204 S Oliver, Kelly Silencing and response-ability, 25, 188, 192 and inarticulacy, 100, 194 and witnessing, 31, 189, 190, 192 and On Raftery’s Hill, 112, 114, 126 Romans in Britain, 194 victims, 173, 184 P Spallen, Abbie, 151, 171 Pain and Pumpgirl, 167, 169 and McCauley, Robbie, 75 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 137 and Scarry, Elaine, 189, 231 Stephenson, Shelagh, 122 and Stoddard, Christine, 189 Five Kinds of Silence, 120 Pornography and Campaign Against Pornography, 4, 5, 34n2 T and Dworkin, Andrea, 100, 218 Theatre of Witness and McGlynn, Claire, 4 and I Once Knew A Girl, 247 Puppets, 81, 126, 128, 129, 198, Sepunick, Teya, 172, 177n8 200–204, 208 Thompson, Judith, 76 Lion in the Streets, 99, 184 Threshold and Frontline, Derry, 163, R 247 Rame, Franca and The Rape, 32, 81, Trojan Women, 32, 138, 140, 249 82, 84, 86, 126, 215 Carr, Marina, 140 Rao, Maya and Walk, 220, 221, 236, Euripides, 138, 139 237, 241 Hecuba, 138, 140 Rape script Kennelly, Brendan, 140 and Marcus, Sharon, 11, 80, 194 Truscott, Adrienne, 253 INDEX 281

V and The Body of a Woman as a Verbatim theatre, 236 Battlefield in the Bosnian War, Violence 144, 175 and Bataille, Georges, 182 Vulnerability Cavarero, Adriana, 185, 190, 208, and Butler, Judith, 32, 184, 185, 215 249, 252 gender, 4, 5, 11, 30, 71, 76, 81, 87, and Caverero, Adriana, 185, 190 97, 98, 102, 118, 152, 157, and Gilson, Erinn, 32, 185, 186, 220, 221 249 and gender construction, 4, 5, and Mardorossian, Carine, 14 8–10, 13, 30, 69, 71, 76, 81, and Murphy, Ann V., 185, 190, 249 92, 97, 98, 102, 118, 130, 137, 149, 151, 152, 157, 161, 163, 164, 167, 168, 172, 174, W 175, 186, 187, 199, 207, 220, War, 2, 31, 57, 62, 104, 129, 221, 249, 251 137–141, 144–146, 148, 149, Murphy, Ann V., 30, 31, 185, 190 152, 163, 171, 174, 175, 190, subjective violence, 29, 118, 181 194, 195, 200, 213–218, 227, and symbolic violence, 29–31, 76, 247 96, 119, 152, 175, 181, 208 War crime, 34, 137, 148, 163, 176n1 and systemic violence, 3, 29, 118, 156 Wertenbaker, Timberlake and Weil, Simone, 28, 197 and The Grace of Mary Traverse, 81, and Žižek, Slavoj, 28, 29, 31, 181 123, 184 Visniec, Matei, 140, 144, 149, 214, and The Love of the Nightingale, 33, 249 81, 123, 200, 203