Representations of Children, Families and Neo-Families in British Theatre 1993-2001

Representations of Children, Families and Neo-families in British Theatre 1993-2001 “…It’s not an ordinary family” (Phaedra’s Love: Kane 2001) Selina Busby Royal Holloway, University of London PhD Declaration of Authorship I Selina Busby hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Date: 30 September 2013. ii Abstract In this thesis, I argue that a number of new British plays written in the period between 1993 and 2001 demonstrate that the ‘normalised’ family unit, which has been taken as “common sense,” is a social construct. I will outline how plays written during this period invite audiences to reconsider family structures and provide critical perspectives on the dominant ideology of ‘family’ life. I suggest that this critical perspective paves the way for the conceiving of alternative structures, and in so doing, argue that these plays offer a utopic vision. This thesis considers the family as a “mythical entity” that works as a unit of social control, political aspiration and regulation. I argue that British plays written during this time period represent an alternative in the form of what I shall call a neo-family structure. I suggest that the plays discussed in this thesis are inherently political in nature, in that they frame contemporary issues associated with family and neo-family structures and invite a reading of them that displays the social structures of governmentality. I outline the ways in which adherence to this traditional family structure can be seen as dangerous to its individual members, especially the children, who live within these arrangements. I also propose that these British plays demonstrate that this governmentality, or self-regulation, when taken to an extreme, results in the loss of feelings for both the self and others, ultimately leading to a complete global breakdown involving a personal passive acceptance of violence that will perpetuate both mental and physical abuse. I argue that the form and content of these plays work synergistically to enable the audience to link representation of personal or domestic situations directly to the deployment of ideology and state power. I consider the way in which British playwrights represent the boundaries created by the family home, while simultaneously analysing the utopian endeavours of escape from these spaces. I use Edward Bond’s plays for young people as an exemplar for a theatre that poses questions and invites audiences to conceive alternative ways of living. iii Contents Acknowledgements vi Section 1: Setting the Scene 1. Introduction: ‘It’s not an ordinary family’. 1 Family Terms 2 The ‘State of Play’ or Political Theatre in the Nineties 7 2. The Nineties: ‘A thousand families...self-contained flats....connecting walkways...public galleries and space...structure...A family in each flat’. 18 Thatcher’s Children 18 British Brutalism 24 The Political Climate of the Nineties 32 3. Reflexive Theatre: ‘Like it’s got gaps. You make the pictures up in the gaps’. 36 Reader Response Theory: The Audience as ‘Meaning Makers’ 40 The Political Potential of Distance 48 The Imagination and its Potential for Social Change 59 4. Deconstructing the Family Unit: ‘…It’s not an ordinary family’. 65 The Family as a Social Construct 66 Troubling the Family – Heart’s Desire 69 In Search of the Perfect Mother – Blue Heart 82 In Search of a Father Figure - Shopping and Fucking 86 The Troublesome Family – A Number 88 The Invisible ‘Alternative’ Family - Phaedra’s Love 97 Section 2: Children 5. Nineties Stage Babies: ‘So what’s the price of a baby? And do babies get cheaper the less they cry?’ 106 The Need for Babies - Mother Clap’s Molly House 107 Babies as Personal Aspirations and Commodities - Handbag 114 The Neo-family and Optimism – Blasted 129 iv 6. Adolescents and Their Place in the World: ‘See, I’m the kind of person who can stand in the middle of an earthquake and I’m just like ‘whoa’, neat earthquake.’ And I wonder what made me that way’. 140 The Disconnection of Integrity - Far Away 142 The Family as a Microcosm of the Globe - This is A Chair 155 A State-of-the-Globe Play - Far Away 163 Section 3 The Family and Neo-family Home 7. Danger in the Home: ‘After a while I stop howling. No one ever comes’. 167 Circles of Abuse - Five Kinds of Silence, Fair Game and Bruises 169 Finding Hope 180 Utopian Longings - The Beauty Queen of Leenane 184 Dreaming of Utopia - Sliding with Suzanne 193 The Neo-family – The Madness of Esme and Shaz 199 8. Safe Spaces and Neo-Families: ‘the roof is not your private property’. 203 The Myth of the Home-space as a Safe Place - Ghosts From a Perfect Place 205 Geographies of Resistance - Sparkleshark 209 The Girl Gang as Neo-family – Yard Gal 219 The Family Gang – Mojo 224 Mark Ravenhill’s Neo-family – Shopping and Fucking 232 9. Edward Bond and Using Theatre to Prompt Social Responsibility: ‘You Have to Learn to be on Your Own’. 238 Theatre and Social Justice 241 Theatre as an Antidote to the Commodified Cultural Industries 245 The Dramatic Child 250 Children as Docile Bodies 260 Social Optimism 267 Children as Agents of Change 276 10. Conclusion: ‘It was a strange family’. 281 Bibliography 290 v Acknowledgements I would like to warmly thank RCSSD and particularly Sally Mackey and Robin Nelson for their encouragement and the sabbatical leave that made completing this thesis possible. I should also like to thank the staff at Royal Holloway whose guidance was invaluable. Lastly I would like to thank the two people who have travelled this journey with me, Helen Nicholson and Graeme Monk. In different ways your support, encouragement, patience, persistence and faith has made this possible. vi Chapter One: Introduction ‘…It’s not an ordinary family’ (Phaedra’s Love: Kane 2001) On February 12th, 1993, two year old James Bulger was led out of a shopping centre in Merseyside by two primary school children. The following day, CCTV footage was released showing that Bulger had been taken by the hand by two older boys to his death. The two boys were arrested for Bulger’s murder on the 18th of February and, on the 24th of November, 1993, after a 17-day trial, the two 11 year olds were convicted and sentenced to the juvenile equivalent of life imprisonment. In June of 2001, both boys were released with new identities. The CCTV images released at the time of Bugler’s disappearance became iconic, both of the crime itself and of broader concerns about childhood and the institution of the family in Britain during the Nineties. The Bulger trial and the subsequent exposure of both the Thompson and Venables families thrust the private family into the public sphere and opened up the institution of the family for public scrutiny at a new heightened level. This thesis will be framed by the period between the year of James Bugler’s kidnapping in 1993 and the year 2001, when the two boys who killed him were released. This time period coincides with a controversial era of British theatre during which many playwrights wrote provocative and confrontational plays. Here, I will argue that a significant number of these plays focused on representations of both childhood and families that invited a reading of them as being social constructs in need of a critical perspective. The concept of the family, which has been featured both as context and subject on the British stage, has long been a topic of debate in the history of British theatre, from the pre-second world war drawing room dramas, to the kitchen sink dramas of the Fifties and Sixties, to the state- of–nation plays of the Seventies and to plays that centred on identity politics in the Eighties. I believe that during the Nineties following the 1 Bulger murder, the family, with its heightened media visibility, became a focus of more intense scrutiny on the British stage. In this thesis, I will explore the way that family units are represented and interrogated in the plays of the period and consider how they raise questions about the ‘normal’ family. Many of the plays of this period demonstrate that the nuclear family remains an ideal; however, one that may bring disastrous consequences for the individuals. These plays question the nuclear family unit, and I suggest that when this family model is accepted as the norm or where it is naturalised, a number of issues regarding the safety of children are raised. I found that each play deconstructs the family unit by providing a critique and inviting a reconsideration of the unit. Here, I demonstrate that the plays of this period emphasise and implicitly critique the construct of the family. The thesis will therefore consider the political nature of theatre and its commentary on the nature of family. I will provide a reading of a number of British plays suggesting that a new form of family, or a neo-family, is conceived as a utopian alternative to the widely adopted nuclear family structure. Family Terms In the following chapters, this thesis examines five types of family units: the nuclear family, the single lone parent family, the core family, the blended family and the neo-family. The nuclear family is a household comprised of two parents and their dependent children living together. Shelagh Stephenson’s play, Five Kinds of Silence (2000), as discussed in Chapter Seven of this thesis, is an example of the nuclear family. In this play, Billy and Susan are the parents living with their two daughters.

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