Violence and the Queer Subject in the Plays of David Rudkin and Mark Ravenhill Aaron C

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2008 Violence and the Queer Subject in the Plays of David Rudkin and Mark Ravenhill Aaron C. Thomas

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FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF VISUAL ARTS, THEATRE & DANCE

VIOLENCE AND THE QUEER SUBJECT

IN THE PLAYS OF DAVID RUDKIN AND MARK RAVENHILL

AARON C. THOMAS

A Thesis submitted to the School of Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2008

The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Aaron C. Thomas defended on 26 March 2008.

______Dr. Mary Karen Dahl Professor Directing Thesis

______Dr. Carrie Sandahl Committee Member

______Dr. Natalya Baldyga Committee Member

______Dr. T. Lynn Hogan Committee Member

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract...... iv

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

1. RUDKIN: SACRIFICE AND THE QUEER SUBJECT...... 14

2. RUDKIN & RAVENHILL: MALE RAPE AND THE QUEER SUBJECT...... 25

3. RAVENHILL: THE CONSUMER AND THE QUEER SUBJECT...... 39

CONCLUSION...... 51

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 53

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 57

iii ABSTRACT

This thesis is focused on the intersections of queer theory and violence. Specifically, I look at how acts of violation define and inform queer subjectivity in theatrical representation. Many theatre artists and practitioners use violence to describe gay, lesbian, and queer people on stage. This document examines two queer playwrights from Great Britain, David Rudkin and Mark Ravenhill, and the ways in which they use violence to define and constitute the queer characters in their plays. I am interested in violence as a single but important determining component of the ways in which audiences perceive queer characters. I will focus on how Rudkin and Ravenhill create characters through a dramaturgy that uses both sexuality and violence to formulate subjectivity. The thesis is comprised of three chapters, each of which covers different acts of violence. The first chapter is focused on the queer body as a combative force against acts of violation in David Rudkin’s plays Afore Night Come and The Sons of Light. Chapter two is an examination of male/male rape in Rudkin’s The Sons of Light and Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking. Chapter three continues to look at Mark Ravenhill, this time discussing violence against women in Some Explicit Polaroids and Mother Clap’s Molly House. For better or worse playwrights, filmmakers, and other artists continually use violence to speak about and define gay, lesbian, and other queer bodies. One of the purposes of this document is to show just how much influence theatrical representations of acts of violence have on representations of the queer subject in the theatre.

iv INTRODUCTION

Sex and violence—that indiscreet pair of topics—comprise the subject matter of the pages that follow. Specifically, I am interested in investigating the collisions and links between acts of violation and people who identify with queer sexualities. It is my belief that queer theory as a discipline has so far only scratched the surface of the topic of violence and has yet to commit fully to a discussion of how acts of violation shape gay, lesbian, and other non- heteronormative identities. For our society, sexual desire has become one of the most important definitional components of identity, public and private. In a society as saturated with violence and as obsessed with sex as ours is, and with the proliferation of queer figures in dominant media, I see a need to explore how acts of violence shape these few (but increasingly more visible) representations of those who identify with sexual desires that fall outside of the norm. Though the association of queer sexualities with violence is pervasive in literature and in the popular consciousness, this study will focus on David Rudkin and Mark Ravenhill, two British queer-identified playwrights who write queer-identified characters that commit, observe, and collude with acts of violence on stage. The dramaturgy of both playwrights is concerned fundamentally with exploring subjectivity, and both playwrights frequently use violence and sexuality in their plays as sites for this exploration. My interest is in how representations of violence inform and influence queer sexuality and queer identity, and how queer sexuality has an effect on representations of acts of violation. I am most concerned with the interconnectedness of the two: how playwrights and other makers of art use sexuality to influence popular understandings of violence and how they use violence as a dramatic tool to shape popular conceptions of queer sexualities. Identity The words “gay,” “homosexual,” and “queer” are used virtually interchangeably in popular discourse and in dominant media. In this study, however, each of these words will be used much more judiciously. The purpose of this is specificity. All queer people are not the same. We have different bodies, energies, and desires, and though queer sexualities are non- normative from the perspective of heterosexuality, neither is there a normative, fixed homosexual identity that can easily be contrasted with the heteronormative. The adjective “homosexual” describes female sexual activity with other women as well as male sexual activity with other men. As a noun, the word has the ability to define a person who engages in homosexual activities as possessing an identity based on these activities. The noun “homosexual,” then, is defined by its difference from the noun “heterosexual.” Anyone who engages in sexual activity with someone of his or her own gender may be considered a homosexual in popular discourse. I will use the word almost exclusively as an adjective. When I reference a “homosexual subculture,” I describe a subculture of homosexual sexual relationships, not a culture of men who understand homosexuality as their identity. I understand homosexuality as activity and not identity. Though the term is popular as a description of identity, as the plays this document

1 discusses will attest, the noun “homosexual” (like the noun “heterosexual”) does a rather poor job of describing a human being who possesses a range of sexual desires and whose body is capable of any number of (sexual) activities. “Gay,” for the purposes of this study, refers only to women and men who subscribe to the identity of the noun “homosexual,” women and men who see their identities as inextricably attached to their sexuality and have come to see themselves as part of a (minority) community of homosexually-identified “gay” people. I intend to use the word “gay” as a description used exclusively for people who see themselves as a part of this minority community defined by their sexuality. The term excludes men and women who consider themselves heterosexual but have engaged in sexual activity with members of their own gender, as well as transgendered men and women. The term is also restricted to a time period where gay people understand themselves as a minority group. To use “gay,” then, as a descriptor for historical figures such as Cleopatra or Socrates or William Shakespeare is anachronistic, a projection of a twentieth and twenty-first- century understanding of sexuality onto time periods that understood sexuality in a different way than we do. When research shows that historical figures long assumed to be heterosexual actually engaged in homosexual activity, scholars often employ the word “queer” to describe their sexuality. This is not to say that James I or Sappho or Alexander understood their sexual lives as deviant in any way, but that we understand their sexualities now as deviant from a heterosexual norm. To acknowledge the sexual practices of these men and women as queer is to rescue their activities from the hegemony of assumed heterosexuality and place each of them within a larger picture of sexual practices that do not always fit into the homosexual/heterosexual binary so prominent in popular discourse. An act of criticism that troubles the assumed heterosexuality of an historical figure or finds queer elements in a heteronormative text is often referred to by scholars as “queering.” Carrie Sandahl defines the technique in a 2003 article for the journal GLQ: “Queering describes the practices of putting a spin on mainstream representations to reveal latent queer subtexts; of appropriating a representation for one’s own purposes, forcing it to signify differently; or of deconstructing a representation’s heterosexism.”1 The technique has been widely used by lesbians and gay men who work in film, theatre, and other media studies. These scholars and artists queer texts and performances by reading them through queer eyes and re-interpreting them from a queer perspective. The word “queer” is, then, both pre-gay and post-gay. It can be used to describe men and women who engaged in sexual activity before the rise of “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality” and also as a description of men and women in today’s society who find both “heterosexual” and “homosexual” to be inadequate descriptions of their identities. As we shall see, “queer” is also a convenient descriptor for both playwrights in this study, as well as many of the characters they create in their plays. As mentioned above, popular discourse often conflates gay, lesbian, bisexual, transvestite, transgendered, and other queer persons into a single identity. Images and representations of queer people are constantly being produced in various media and come from numerous sources. These fictional queer figures represent living gay men in popular discourse, leading the philosopher Didier Eribon to state that “a gay man finds himself confronted with a

1 Carrie Sandahl, “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer?,” GLQ: a Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9 (2003): 37.

2 ‘composite portrait’ of himself, proposed by a set of images, representations, and discourses, all providing him with a degrading or inferiorizing image of himself.”2 As Eribon states it, figures of gay men in public discourse work together to constitute an idea of a gay man. Throughout this document, I refer to the “composite portrait” that interpellates living gay men as “the queer subject.” The subject is an object of discourse; it is created by discourse and exists as a discursive representation of an actual queer body. In this study, I will address the queer subject as he exists onstage in the plays of David Rudkin and Mark Ravenhill. Characters in plays represent and stand in for actual queer lives, and these representations both exist within and shape discourse about queer people. The queer subject, then, is what Eribon calls a “contested space, a space of political and cultural conflict” (75). These representations of queer figures have the power to shape popular (heteronormative) conceptions of actual queer lives, and the production of these images is, therefore, a crucially important site for exploration. Representations of Queer Killers The history of homosexual acts—and of non-normative sexual acts more generally—is inextricably bound to a history of violence repressing and controlling those acts. There exists “a history of the mortal suppression, legal or subjudicial, of gay acts and gay people, through burning, hounding, physical and chemical castration, concentration camps, bashing,” says Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “whose supposed eugenic motive becomes only the more colorable with the emergence of a distinct, naturalized gay minority identity in the nineteenth century.”3 Violent persecution of queer people (called by various names at various times) is also a veritable staple of repressive regimes throughout history. The list includes—but is by no means limited to— Spain during the Inquisition, the Holocaust in Germany, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, as well as regimes not traditionally accused of using violence to control their people such as Edwardian England and the United States under Dwight D. Eisenhower. A history of violence directed toward homosexuals is, of course, outside the scope of this document. Further, this history is still to be written and necessarily incomplete; violent oppression of homosexual acts and queer-identified people continues worldwide, both by homophobic criminals acting extralegally and by heterosexist governments acting within their laws. The reality of existence, then, for many queer-identified people has been a life lived under a constant threat of violence. Theatrical representations of queer people, with very few exceptions, have only recently begun to reflect the reality of this situation.4 In fact, in the first plays to feature homosexuality as a topic, dramatists adopted a project quite different from (realistic) depictions of the queer body under threat. In Britain and the United States, playwrights and filmmakers indeed chose to link homosexual characters with violence from their first appearance on the stage. But the early onstage homosexual’s relationship to violent acts was of a nature entirely different from the reality lived by most queer-identified people on both sides of the pond, for the queer character was not introduced to the theatre as under threat of violation but as a violator.

2 Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self (Durham: Duke UP, 2004) 71. Further citations in this chapter from Insult and the Making of the Gay Self will be given by page number in the text. 3 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990) 128. Further citations in this chapter from Epistemology of the Closet will be given by page number in the text. 4 One notable exception is the treatment of the young girl in Sholom Asch’s The God of Vengeance (1910).

3 Jordan Schildcrout dates the stage debut of the queer killer as early as 1927 with Mae West’s play The Drag, a sensational murder mystery drama that caused a legal uproar5 in New York at the time of its opening.6 In The Drag, newly married and attractive New York socialite Rolly Kingsbury is murdered after making sexual advances toward his close friend Allen Grayson. At the end of act three, Rolly’s murderer is revealed to be not the noble Grayson but Rolly’s rejected homosexual lover David Caldwell. David, who first appears in act one, calls himself “one of those damned creatures who are called degenerates and moral lepers for a thing they cannot help—a thing that has made me suffer.”7 At play’s end, David is hauled off to prison and the men in Rolly’s family decide to cover up any hint of Rolly’s non-normative sexuality and label his death a suicide. Homosexuality, as you might surmise from the passage just quoted, is the topic at issue in the play. In act one, Rolly’s father, Judge Kingsbury, argues with his friend Dr. Richmond about a “sexual invert” (107). “People like that should be herded together on some desert isle—” says the Judge. The doctor responds generously: “You’d need a large island, Judge. And again, why? What have they done? Their crime isn’t one of commission or omission. It is a misfortune for which they are not to blame” (107). The Drag is a play about homosexuality and West’s attitudes toward queer sexuality are forward-looking and accepting for the 1920s, if they seem dated now. But if West’s play was groundbreaking in its ideas about the attitudes people ought to take about the sexual lives of New York men, it is important to note how she portrays her queer characters. The Drag is not a coming-out drama set around the kitchen sink.8 It is a coming-out murder mystery. There are numerous characters who have homosexual relationships in The Drag; the play, in fact, paints a picture of an entire subculture of homosexual activity. However, though West uses the queer men who take part in the eponymous “drag” to extraordinary comic and theatrical effect, these characters are drag performers and night club patrons (one is known only as the Duchess!) and they have no ambitions toward middle-class society. In the world of the play these men touch the bourgeoisie only tangentially. Not everyone in the play who participates in gay culture is violent; the only violent queers in The Drag are men from the middle class. Indeed, both the victim and his murderer in the play are queer. The violence in New York society is introduced only when one of Wall Street’s own is discovered to be “one of those damned creatures.” In other words, homosexuality itself, in the person of Rolly Kingsbury, is a palpably violent threat to normative society. And for society to be righted, this threat must be neutralized. Conveniently for the heterosexual characters, the other middle-class homosexual in the play commits this purgative act of violence and the threat to New York society is quelled.

5 Lillian Schlissel argues that though Mae West’s Sex “was prosecuted [for obscenity], The Drag was the play under attack.” West eventually served 10 days in jail and was fined $500 by the court. See Lillian Schlissel, introduction, Three Plays by Mae West, by Mae West, ed. Schlissel (New York: Routledge, 1997) 14. 6 Jordan Schildcrout, This Thing of Darkness: Reclaiming the Queer Killer in Contemporary Drama, diss., City U of New York, 2005 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 2005) 26. 7 Mae West, The Drag: a Homosexual Comedy in Three Acts, Three Plays by Mae West, ed. Lillian Schlissel (New York: Routledge, 1997) 102. Further citations in this chapter from this edition will be given by page number in the text. 8 Such coming-out dramas certainly existed. Laurence Senelick cites Jo M. Ĳessell’s Wat Niet Mag… (1922) as the first. See Laurence Senelick, “Out Came the First Coming Out Play,” Gay & Lesbian Review 14.3 (2007): 13-6.

4 The Drag is certainly important as an early onstage intersection of homosexuality and violence, but Mae West’s play is an even more intriguing study precisely because West was such an outspoken and highly visible pro-gay political figure, writing plays that featured gay characters and casting over fifty gay men to play in The Drag, allowing them take a large part in crafting the show. Lillian Schlissel reports that West became “the Joan of Arc of gay audiences” and that “[j]ust as boxers came to Mae West when they needed a new match or a new manager or a few bucks, gay actors or Mae West impersonators knew her as a friend.9 But though the message of The Drag is one that claims to be in support of queer people and that endorses their struggle with society’s acceptance—the doctor’s defense of David is generous if medicalized— West imagines that struggle as a violent clash. She conceptualizes the conflict between deviant sexuality and the bourgeoisie as one that necessarily involves acts of violation. Though West has an ostensibly gay-positive project, the conventions of the genre—murder mystery drama— demand a criminalized other who must be excised from the world of the play by play’s end. The queer killer continues as a dramatic trope in our contemporary theatre. For the homophobic mind, the mere presence of the queer body always threatens the heteronormative body with (sexual) violence. In The Drag, West represents this violence in the person of Rolly Kingsbury. He threatens The Drag’s leading man and his female (normative) partner by attempting to seduce him. The queer killer is also a projection of this imagined threat. In dramas with queer killers, this heterosexist fear of the queer other is instantiated as the queer perpetrates an act of violence on the non-queer body. Thus the queer killer works in service of a specific ideological project, obfuscating the lived history of the violent oppression of homosexuals, by propagating images of homosexuals, not who are violently treated, but who treat others violently. The queer murderer is obviously criminally deviant from the societal norm. This deviance can be explained through ideological means: by combining homicidal difference with homosexual difference. The two are combined overtly in The Drag. At the play’s end, when David finally confesses to the murder, he confesses his queerness and his criminality at the same time, coming out as both a homosexual and a murderer: “I killed him because I loved him” (139). He tells the judge, “[Y]our son was the same as I. Yes, I killed him. [. . .] A judge’s son can be just the same as another man’s son” (139). The sexually deviant character is thus equated with the criminally deviant, and criminality is linked to the closet. Because of this deviance, the killer—and by extension the homosexual—is represented as needing to be punished and excised from society as a whole.10 In this case, both the murderer and his victim are revealed as criminal (and exposed as queer) at the end of the play; the murder and his victim are “the same”: both of them are sexually deviant and potentially violent. The murderer is then carted off to prison. The playwright somehow eliminates both sexually deviant characters by the end of the play, restoring order to a heteronormative world. The sexual threat is criminalized and then contained.

9 Lillian Schlissel, introduction, Three Plays by Mae West, by Mae West, ed. Schlissel (New York: Routledge, 1997) 24. Other critics disagree with Schlissel’s assessment of West as a pro-gay figure, notably Nicholas de Jongh in his book Not in Front of the Audience: Homosexuality on Stage (London: Routledge, 1992.) 10 In cinema this trope is even more prevalent. Queer killers are seemingly everywhere. Though in Patrick Hamilton’s play Rope (1929) the killers are not specifically named as queer, in Alfred Hitchcock’s film of Rope (1948) the murderers’ sexuality is overt. Hitchcock’s Murder (1930) and Psycho (1960) each also features a queer killer. The trope extends to cinema contemporaneous with this document: The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Basic Instinct (1992), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Monster (2001), I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead (2003), 3:10 to Yuma (2007) and numerous other films.

5 Even more frequently in theatrical representation, the homosexual is criminalized and contained by committing suicide, perpetrating an act of violence on his or her own body. Martha, the lesbian character in Lillian Hellman’s seminal 1934 play The Children’s Hour shoots herself at play’s end.11 “I’ve ruined your life. I’ve ruined my own,”12 she tells Karen, her best friend and the object of her queer desire. Martha then describes herself with “I feel all dirty and—” (72). She does not finish her sentence. The two exchange a few more words and then Martha stands at the door with a long look at Karen and then exits. The next sound the audience hears is the (offstage) gunshot as Martha kills herself. Lillian Hellman solves the problem of the play by eliminating the sexually deviant character, and again the queer is the perpetrator of the violence; this time, though, the site of the violation is her own body. I refer to The Children’s Hour because it is representative of so much of the gay drama that follows it. Hellman writes Martha as both sinner and saint. The character does not actually realize that she is queer until the very end of the play. “It’s funny; it’s all mixed up,” she tells Karen. “There’s something in you, and you don’t know it and don’t do anything about it. Suddenly a child gets bored and lies—and there you are, seeing it for the first time. [. . .] It all seems to come back to me. [. . .] I didn’t even know” (72). Martha finally realizes her own queer desire, projecting all that is wrong and “dirty” onto her own body, and then she cleanses the play of that dirt through self-murder. She commits the ultimate self-sacrifice (her death has a Christ- like significance) by accepting her own guilt and then ruthlessly executing its sentence.13 It is important here to see that Martha is a noble, self-sacrificing character precisely because she assesses her position in the play as a physical threat to the other characters. She does not know what her own body is capable of. As a part of the morality of the play, her actions are heroic because she diagnoses her own body as criminal, threatening, and potentially violent. Martha’s queer body is something that must be removed for the good of society, and she redeems herself by selflessly perpetrating that removal. Plays as late as John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation (1991) contain gay characters who restore normative society to its status quo through acts of violence directed toward themselves. This violent queer character is, without doubt, a homophobic ideological projection onto the queer body. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick says, “the whole point of ideology is to negotiate invisibly between contradictory elements in the status quo, concealing the very existence of contradictions.”14 It is in this way that the violent queer works: as an ideological construct. In contemporary real life, and at various times throughout the history of homosexuality, the relationship of the queer body toward violence is as its object. Heterosexist legal systems, governments, and homophobic society in general physically threaten the queer body with violent action. It is the queer who must, in order to survive, learn to be afraid of the larger society in

11 The Children’s Hour is properly a realist social drama in the tradition of Ibsen, Dumas fils, and Boucicault. Though Hellman, like Mae West is sympathetic with the queer position in society, she is constrained by her choice of genre. Also like West, Hellman imagines the confrontation between mainstream society and homosexuality as a violent one. 12 Lillian Hellman, The Children’s Hour, Six Plays by Lillian Hellman (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) 72. Further citations in this chapter from this edition will be given by page number in the text. 13 For an even more literal iteration of the trope, see Joshua in Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi. 14 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 119. Further citations in this chapter from Between Men will be given by page number in the text.

6 which he or she lives. He or she must live under threat within that society or leave it altogether.15 But in theatrical and cinematic representation, the queer is frequently crafted and represented as the perpetrator of violent acts. Onstage, homosexuality is constructed as a threat to normative society, and this threat is embodied in the queer character who commits acts of violation. The queer body as victim of violence is a tragic, historical reality. Yet representations of queers who are themselves violent, have proliferated in fiction, in cinema and in the theatre. I have described this theatrical tradition of violent queers as working in a specific, heterosexist way. Rather than providing sincere representations of queer people, these plays work, more often than not, in service of a homophobic project. Though a playwright such as Mae West may see herself as advancing the cause of gay people in the United States by putting queer characters onstage with whom an audience can sympathize, her dramaturgy casts the gay men in the play at violent odds with their heterosexual counterparts. The gay men in West’s play and the lesbian woman in Lillian Hellman’s are certainly in relationship with heteronormative society but the terms are violent. Because violence and sexuality are both such an important part of society, and because so many philosophers and artists see sexuality as constitutive of identity, I am interested in dramatists who see themselves as outside of heteronormativity but who continue to use violence side-by-side with sexuality as a tactic for exploring subjectivity. For this study, I have singled out British dramatists Mark Ravenhill and David Rudkin.16 The differences between the two dramatists are numerous, as will become apparent from the following chapters, but I have selected them for their commonalities. Both playwrights use acts of violation in their plays in order to explore identity. Indeed, the work of both dramatists sees violence as constitutive of identity itself. Though both artists are deeply invested in the dramatization of violence and sexuality and both write plays that are ostensibly about violence, neither writes plays where “being homosexual” is the play’s issue. David Ian Rabey, for instance, offers the following: [David] Rudkin’s drama is unique in its compulsive poeticization of abjection and traversing of the symbolic boundaries where the human is conveniently separated from the animal, where sex and murder offer forms of definition against neo- maternal oblivion, where language and other forms of symbolic light become matters of life or death in the battle towards individuation into subjecthood.17 Both violence and sex are at issue—are, in fact, intricately interwoven—in Rudkin’s theatre, but the topic (at least according to Rabey) is a possible definition of the self.

15 This is what Walter decides to do in Ĳessell’s Wat Niet Mag…. Like the Biblical Cain, he decides he must go somewhere where no one will recognize him. 16 So far in this document, my major examples have been female playwrights (West and Hellman). However, my study’s main focus, as will become clear late in the introduction, is not directed toward female playwrights but queer male playwrights. I explain my selection of both Rudkin and Ravenhill later in this introduction; I have included discussions of West and Hellman because of their importance to the history of lesbians and gay men as they have been represented onstage. Both plays are seminal works by famous figures, and both plays became cultural touchstones. A conversation about queer killers onstage is incomplete without The Drag, and any discussion of queer suicides without The Children’s Hour would be almost unthinkable. I do not mean to imply anything about women’s dramaturgy in the 1920s, and I would consider any totalization of women’s writing unhelpful at best. 17 David Ian Rabey, David Rudkin – Sacred Disobedience: an Expository Study of His Drama 1959-96 (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997) 6. Further citations in this chapter from Sacred Disobedience will be given by page number in the text.

7 Ravenhill’s drama is similarly focused away from sexual orientation as a topic. Aleks Sierz quotes the playwright in this analysis: Shopping and Fucking [1996] was one of the first plays where the sexual orientation of the characters was rarely mentioned in reviews. ‘A couple of years earlier, it would have been perceived much more as a gay play, simply because it put gay sex onstage.’ So while Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing was seen in 1994 as part of a ‘plague of pink plays,’ Ravenhill’s work caused no such hysteria.18 It is not the sexuality of Ravenhill’s characters that Sierz finds remarkable but the larger topic of the play. Like Rudkin, for Ravenhill this topic is also queer subjectivity, though his plays are much more heavily influenced by post-structuralist philosophy. Another important element connecting the two men is their sexual identities. Neither self- identifies as a gay man. Rudkin identifies as bisexual and Ravenhill as queer. Both denominations are decidedly outside heteronormative culture but more importantly, both are also, I would argue, outside what we might call homonormative culture, or what Michael Warner sardonically refers to as “the good and acceptable face of the movement.”19 What he means by this is that the mobilized and corporate gay and lesbian movement seeks to gain political power by convincing straight people that gay people are just like them. They do this by advancing portraits of “[t]hose whose sex is least threatening, along with those whose gender profiles seem the least queer” (67). This strategy is most harmful to those who need the most political support because it simply creates a new normativity that includes only the queer people who are least offensive to straight people, while pushing other queer bodies further beyond the pale. According to Aleks Sierz, Ravenhill holds a similar political point of view: Ravenhill ‘is not keen on being a “gay man”’ because, he argues, the label has been appropriated by consumer culture. He has been more attracted to ‘being queer, a sexual outlaw’ than ‘being gay, in the sense of assimilationist’. The ‘agenda of much gay drama tries to prove that gay people are just like straight people but with better soft furnishings’, but ‘the notion of queer is much more about being a radically different person’ (151). Ravenhill recognizes this corporatization of non-normative sexuality and rejects it. David Rudkin also rejects the common heterosexual/homosexual binary both personally and with the characters he creates. “My emotional growth was slow,” he said in a late 1990s interview, “and I did not fall in love until the age of 21, and then with another man. [. . .] In the 1950s, this emotion—the most lovely feeling I had ever had—made a criminal of me. To experience that your most central drive and very nature criminalizes you, is something that has to be experienced to be believed.”20 Rudkin goes on to describe his work with a “Reichian psychotherapist” and what he calls a “process of self-resurrection and transmutation” (98). Most intriguing, though, is the effect of this transmutation. Rudkin tells us:

18 Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber & Faber, 2001) 151. Further citations in this chapter from In-Yer-Face Theatre will be given by page number in the text. 19 Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999) 67. Further citations in this chapter from The Trouble with Normal will be given by page number in the text. 20 David Rudkin, “Burning Alone in the Dark: David Rudkin Talks to David Ian Rabey,” Planet: the Welsh Internationalist 114 (1995-6): 98. Further citations in this chapter from this issue will be given by page number in the text.

8 I emerged not only as a self-acknowledged homosexual, but as a pansexual creature, and within two years I was married. [. . .] I became a father of four, and recently a grandfather. I don’t feel I should call myself a gay dramatist any more than an English or an Irish one. My paradoxical sexuality is an educative thing, but I would not wish to be categorized in any way that is limiting or prescriptive. (98) Rudkin embodies a reconciliation between the supposed incompatibilities of homosexuality and heterosexuality. The binary simply does not work for him. So Rudkin becomes politically active in what he calls “gay liberation movements” while at the same time he and his wife are adopting children (99). Thus, both playwrights repudiate the heteronormative while, at the same time, rejecting what has come to be known as gay culture. It is from this point of view that we can use queer theory as a discipline to engage the work of both Ravenhill and Rudkin. Queerness Questioning the validity of this heterosexual/homosexual binary is one of the fundamental projects of queer theory. In Epistemology of the Closet, one of queer theory’s foundational texts, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick dates the binary’s reification as a turn-of-the-century phenomenon: The word “homosexual” entered Euro-American discourse during the last third of the nineteenth century—its popularization preceding, as it happens, even that of the word “heterosexual.” It seems clear that the sexual behaviors, and even for some people the conscious identities denoted by the new term “homosexual” and its contemporary variants already had a long, rich history. So, indeed, did a wide range of other sexual behaviors and behavioral clusters. What was new from the turn of the century was the world-mapping by which every given person, just as he or she was necessarily assignable to a male or female gender, was now considered necessarily assignable as well to a homo- or a hetero-sexuality, a binarized identity that was full of implications, however confusing, for even the ostensibly least sexual aspects of personal existence.21 Sedgwick’s ideas about the instability of the heterosexual/homosexual binary are, of course, rooted in concepts pioneered by philosopher Michel Foucault, who said that “[t]he nineteenth century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology.”22 A reminder that the homosexual as a transhistorical identity is a fallacy might seem unnecessary at this late date in queer studies, but the constant equation in popular media of “homosexuality” with criminality (and, by extension, of heterosexuality with normativity), which we have seen above, seems to justify it. Let me take another, even more important reminder from Epistemology of the Closet: “People are different from each other” (22). This is “axiom one” in the introduction to Sedgwick’s book. She writes, “A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of categorization have been painstakingly inscribed in current critical and political thought: gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation are pretty much the available distinctions” (22). But Sedgwick reminds us that even a person who is very close to us—a best friend, a lover, a family member— who, in fact, may share most of our same positionalities, is usually also someone very different

21 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990) 2. 22 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality – Volume 1: an Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) 43.

9 from us. This has applications broader than nonce taxonomy as well: it is helpful to remember that our desires also vary widely, even from people we consider very similar to ourselves. Elizabeth Grosz takes the point further in her book Space, Time, and Perversion, though she would jettison equality as a goal altogether. I find Grosz’s ideas particularly attractive: “difference is seen not as difference from a pregiven norm, but as pure difference, difference in itself, difference with no identity. Difference, viewed as distinction, implies the pre-evaluation of one of the terms from which the difference of the other is drawn; pure difference refuses to privilege either term.”23 Grosz does not use the word, but her concept of pure difference is a fundamentally queer one. My conception of queer theory is also heavily influenced by Michael Warner. His book The Trouble with Normal sets up a new paradigm for thinking about sexual preference. Warner believes that society should celebrate sexual difference and (as his title suggests) dispense with the concept of normal. He sees queer aesthetics as a kind of new moral model: “In those circles where queerness has been most cultivated, the ground rule is that one doesn’t pretend to be above the indignity of sex. And although this usually isn’t announced as an ethical vision, that’s what it perversely is” (35). Warner believes that a concept of shame and an acceptance of the messiness of sex are assets that queer people have cultivated over time and are consequently able to offer to the heterosexual world. His ideas are worth quoting at length: In queer circles, [. . .] [s]ex is understood to be as various as the people who have it. It is not required to be tidy, normal, uniform, or authorized by the government. This kind of culture is often denounced as relativist, self-indulgent, or merely libertine. In fact, it has its own norms, its own way of keeping people in line. I call its way of life an ethic not only because it is understood as a better kind of self- relation, but because it is the premise of the special kind of sociability that holds queer culture together. A relation to others, in these contexts, begins in an acknowledgment of all that is most abject and least reputable in oneself. Shame is bedrock. [. . .] The rule is: Get over yourself. Put a wig on before you judge. And the corollary is that you stand to learn most from the people you think are beneath you. At its best, this ethic cuts against every form of hierarchy you could bring into the room. (35) Warner does not propose that self-defining as queer is the panacea for all of the planet’s ills, but his reconceptualization of queer identity as a method for creating equality (“Shame is bedrock”) through difference is significant. It is from this perspective of queerness as a kind of solution that I wish to approach the topic of violence. I believe it is a distinct possibility that by writing characters who can be fixed as neither homosexual nor heterosexual, Rudkin and Ravenhill find ways to escape the heteronormative trope of the violent queer provided by dominant media. Instead of seeing sexual difference as a cause of aggression or violent activity, both artists explore how violence itself works to form the queer subject. These questions are especially interesting in Rudkin and Ravenhill because both use queer characters to explore identity. Sexuality is fixed in the dramaturgy of neither playwright, and this lack of a fixed sexual identity—this exploration of difference—enables both to see violence in their plays as helping to form what it means to be queer.

23 Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995) 53.

10 Violation I have referred to various acts of what I am calling queer violence throughout the foregoing pages. It would perhaps be helpful, however, to explicate more clearly what I mean by the term violence. I am using the word carefully and specifically, and I believe this specificity is important. First, let us consider the following description from Aleks Sierz about the importance of onstage violence: Violence becomes impossible to ignore when it confronts you by showing pain, humiliation and degradation. Sometimes this is a question of showing violent acts literally; at other times, the suggestion of extreme mental cruelty is enough to disturb. Violent acts are shocking because they break the rules of debate; they go beyond words and thus can get out of control. Violence feels primitive, irrational and destructive. (8-9) What Sierz obliquely points out here is that audiences are frequently able to discount violence onstage. Acts of violence are certainly commonplace on television and at the movies, and the talking-head debate about violent children’s video games shows no signs of abating. We ought to say, in fact, that our society is a violent one, and that our own exposure to images of violence is likely an everyday occurrence. Sierz identifies our tendency not to deal with the violence to which we are exposed. It is only through attending directly to the pain and destructiveness that an act of violation causes—by putting it onstage, in close proximity to a live audience—that a playwright (or screenwriter, as the case may be) forces an audience to grapple with violence as such. I wish to address two of Sierz’s other points, as well, because they speak to new ways in which we are able to think about staged violence. He argues that portraying acts of violence onstage can be shocking, and includes in this the “suggestion of extreme mental cruelty” as equally capable of producing shock. What Sierz does not mention is that some of the most extreme acts of onstage violence do not take place on a stage at all. In the most disturbing scene of Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking, for instance, the rent-boy Gary is not penetrated by a knife onstage. Instead, he describes this violation to the other characters and to the audience. This final act of violence takes place between scenes, offstage, far from the eyes of paying spectators. Of course, to be literal, the final violation in Shopping and Fucking does not occur at all. The violence exists, in fact, only in the language onstage and in our imaginations. We, as audience members, bring the act of violence into being, for an act of violence onstage is always an act of theatre. 24 There is not space to deal with this idea here, but I will tease this concept out when I discuss that play more specifically. The other point Sierz makes that intrigues me is that “[v]iolence feels primitive, irrational and destructive.” Violence is certainly destructive—definitionally so—but it is frequently rational, often planned in advance, and regularly sanctioned by people in positions of power. As to his word “primitive,” some distinctions need to be made as to the alleged evolutionary causes of our violent activities as humans that Sierz appears to take for granted. I have found Erich Fromm’s exhaustive study The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness to be particularly illuminating on the topic. He is worth quoting at length: We must distinguish in man two entirely different kinds of aggression. The first, which he shares with all animals, is a phylogenetically programmed impulse to

24 This concept comes out of a conversation with my advisor on this project, Dr. Mary Karen Dahl, and also partly from her article “The Body in Extremis: Exercises in Self-Creation and Citizenship” Theatre of Catastrophe: New Essays on Howard Barker, ed. Karoline Gritzner and David Ian Rabey (London: Oberon, 2006) 95-108.

11 attack (or to flee) when vital interests are threatened. This defensive, “benign” aggression is in the service of the survival of the individual and the species, is biologically adaptive, and ceases when the threat has ceased to exist. The other type, “malignant” aggression, i.e., destructiveness and cruelty, is specific to the human species and virtually absent in most mammals; it is not phylogenetically programmed and not biologically adaptive; it has no purpose, and its satisfaction is lustful.25 Fromm argues that human destructiveness and cruelty are not comparable and do not derive from either animal aggression or aggression in primitive hominid societies. Indeed, Fromm goes on to point out that violence is linked to culture and not to an evolutionary model of destructive behavior: that “aggressiveness is not just one trait, but part of a syndrome; that we find aggression regularly together with other traits in the system, such as strict hierarchy, dominance, class division, etc. In other words, aggression is to be understood as part of the social character, not as an isolated behavior trait” (167). Following Fromm, then, I understand violence to be an impulse of destructive aggression that culminates in an act of violation committed on the body of the subject or the body of another. On a stage, this violence is always simulated, whether performed realistically for the audience or created through language. These representations of violence, of damage to bodies, hold considerable power and, as Sierz says, have the ability to “go beyond words.” So this is not a study about queer killers, per se.26 I am much more interested in violence as a single but important determining component of the ways in which we perceive queer characters. The impact of violence on queer subjectivity is not restricted to queer killers or queer characters who commit violent acts. Instead I will focus on how Rudkin and Ravenhill create characters through a dramaturgy that uses both sexuality and violence to formulate subjectivity. The plays I have chosen for this study certainly portray queers who commit acts of violence, but I am interested in how these queer characters are represented as interacting in the matrix of their violent societies; how violence is constitutive of queerness. The question in each chapter, therefore, is how violence in the plays functions to shape the queer subject. Chapter one will discuss David Rudkin and explore his play The Sons of Light (1976) in depth, using Afore Night Come (1963) as a reference point. Rudkin creates worlds that are horrific, repressive and violent. Within these worlds, I see his queer characters serving as positive forces for change and rebirth. The queer as the only unsullied, pure character would seem most apparent in Afore Night Come, where Johnny, teased and derided by the other men, attempts to save Larry from the ritual murder about to take place. (Alan Sinfield even calls Johnny a “holy fool.”)27 But all of Rudkin’s plays cover violent subject matter, and I believe that

25 Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973) 4. Emphases in the original. Further citations in this chapter from The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness will be given by page number in the text. 26 I am indebted to Jordan Schildcrout’s work on queer killers, particularly his dissertation This Thing of Darkness: Reclaiming the Queer Killer. Schildcrout’s project is a vast one, and describes numerous stage representations of gay murderers, attempting to see them as more important than a stereotype. Though I will probably rarely quote it, I have found his work enormously useful. Other books I have found helpful are Vito Russo’s influential and popular book The Celluloid Closet, as well as David Bergman’s Gaiety Transfigured and David Savran’s Taking It Like a Man. I have also looked at numerous plays with violent queers as well as David Wojnarowicz’s powerful book Close to the Knives: a Memoir of Disintegration. 27 Alan Sinfield, Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999) 256.

12 for Rudkin queerness functions as a space for hope in each. Chapter one looks at violence and the queer subject in Afore Night Come and The Sons of Light, and how Rudkin uses violence to speak about his queer characters in those plays. Chapter two will cover the function of male rape in Rudkin’s The Sons of Light as well as Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking. I am interested in how audiences read male rape as an act that queers the perpetrator of the violation as well as his victim. Both plays contain imagery of men being penetrated anally by instruments of violence, a recurrent trope in British drama since—at least—Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second (c. 1592) and continuing through Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain (1980), Rudkin’s The Triumph of Death (1981) and Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) and Cleansed (1998). I will compare The Sons of Light and Shopping and Fucking with Brenton’s The Romans in Britain and I will explore how this violence works in these plays. The question here is how rape among men, whether as victim or perpetrator, can be constitutive of queer subjectivity. This chapter looks at how playwrights have historically used the dramaturgy of male rape to do precisely this and how Rudkin and Ravenhill invert or change the image of the raped male and the male rapist. The chapter closes by exploring how Rudkin and Ravenhill use the violence of male rape to speak about the queer subject. Chapter three will offer readings of two Ravenhill plays, Some Explicit Polaroids (1999) and Mother Clap’s Molly House (2001). Both plays address post-modern culture and the impact of capitalism on our society today. Ravenhill critiques post-modern society through the lens of the queer subject, finding contemporary gay culture as the most hedonistic and irresponsible instantiation of post-modern society. As in his other work, Ravenhill describes the queer subject in Some Explicit Polaroids and in Mother Clap’s Molly House by portraying him in relationship with acts of violence. In these plays, however, the acts of violence that characterize the queer subject are not centered around the gay male body but directed toward the bodies of heterosexual women. The queer men’s responses to these violated female bodies define them as queer subjects and also serve to critique post-modern culture. The conclusion of this document will point toward ways in which the readings of these texts can be used as a model for the exploration of violence as constitutive of queer subjectivity in theatrical representation. For better or worse playwrights, filmmakers, and other artists continually use violence to speak about and define the queer body. One of the purposes of this document is to show just how much influence acts of violence have on the constitution of the queer subject. Approaching this topic with David Rudkin and Mark Ravenhill is important precisely because they are queer playwrights who consistently write about violence and use it to speak both intelligently and beautifully about queer subjectivity. The first playwright this document will examine, then, is David Rudkin, a dramatist whose work has been explored far too little by critics but whose stage images are striking and profound. Rudkin is an ideal starting point for a study of violence and queer subjectivity because Johnny in Afore Night Come is one of the first positive images of a queer character on the British stage. Rudkin’s positive representation of a queer character predates the decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain (in 1967) by four years and precedes the removal (in 1968) of the Lord Chamberlain as Britain’s theatre censor by five years.28 The reading that follows focuses on the redemptive function of Rudkin’s queer characters. In both Afore Night Come and The Sons of Light Rudkin audaciously links homosexual desire with purity and then contrasts the purity of his queer characters with the cruel, oppressive, and violent worlds he creates in his plays. It is with this antagonistic relationship between violence and the queer subject that we begin.

28 See Dominic Shellard, British Theatre Since the War (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999) 136-46.

13 RUDKIN: SACRIFICE AND THE QUEER SUBJECT

In David Rudkin’s first play, Afore Night Come, Johnny ‘Hobnails’ Carter is able to chase the day-laborer Larry away from the site of a ritual murder in Britain’s Black Country. The play follows a single day where three day-laborers arrive in the Black Country looking for work picking fruit in an orchard. As the day progresses, the orchard’s regular workers harass and isolate the new workers, in particular a middle-aged Irishman whom they call Shakespeare. At play’s end, they ritually murder Shakespeare and dispose of his body. Johnny, who is a kind of apprentice at the orchard, has already witnessed at least one, but perhaps many more, of these ritualized killings, and he attempts to spare Larry not only from becoming the victim of murder but even from the knowledge of the murder. Though Johnny represents a queer other in Afore Night Come (“Never know with you types. Go bonkers, sometimes, your kind,” the orchard’s owner tells him), Rudkin has him perform the play’s only acts of kindness.29 Critic John Russell Taylor describes Johnny as having “sexual designs on the student [Larry] and want[ing] to corrupt him,” a description that implies violence or force of some kind.30 The equation of “sexual designs” and corruption, however, is Taylor’s, not Rudkin’s. The playwright, in fact, implies in the relationship between the young men precisely the opposite of violence. Johnny’s relationship with Larry is original and, in its time, totally unique to British theatre. Furthermore, the creation of this homosocial connection forms the backbone of Rudkin’s ingenious use— throughout the majority of his oeuvre—of queer characters and their interactions with violence. Initially, both Johnny and his friend Tiny decide to save the student Larry, but when the time comes to tell Larry the truth about the ritual murders, Tiny balks at the idea and would rather leave without Larry. Johnny persists. The following sequence is quoted at length because it demonstrates the risks of this relationship both to Larry and Johnny, as well as Johnny’s desire for the young college student: LARRY (at last). What would they do to you? When they found out you’d taken your victim away? What would they do to you then? JOHNNY (catching a menace in Larry’s tone: uneasy). I won’t come back no more. LARRY. Where will you go? JOHNNY. Out the tar road. Miles away. (LARRY approaches Johnny.) LARRY. Why do you want to make me afraid? Of something that isn’t real? Something only inside your head? It’s all some dream inside your head…! JOHNNY. Larry, Larry, Larry, come away…. LARRY. I’m not – JOHNNY. Larry –

29 David Rudkin, Afore Night Come (New York: Grove Press, 1963) 62. Further citations in this chapter from Afore Night Come will be given by page number in the text. 30 John Russell Taylor, The Angry Theatre: New British Drama, Revised ed. (New York: Hill & Wang, 1969) 307.

14 LARRY. Not with you – JOHNNY. Why? LARRY. Mad! (Pause. LARRY is struggling in himself. JOHNNY comes to him; folds his arms around him protectively. LARRY relaxes a moment, begins to enjoy the embrace, then with a violent gesture of repudiation and repugnance, thrusts him away, and makes to exit, trying to find words with which to answer Johnny’s speech.) JOHNNY (destroyed). Don’t think I care what happens to you (49). Johnny risks his life in order to spare Larry the horror of the killing in the orchard, and is obviously devastated both by Larry’s refusal to be rescued and by his rejection of Johnny. One snub stands in for both in the above sequence. Though John Russell Taylor may find irony in the combination of Johnny’s sexual desire for Larry and his desire to keep the student pure, Rudkin has made the two parallel each other: in Afore Night Come sexual desire for Larry and a desire to save the young man are the same thing. This, for David Rudkin, is neither a contradiction nor an irony. Johnny Hobnails, as the solitary queer in the play, performs a selfless, redemptive act— one inextricably linked to sexual desire—that has the capacity for positive change in the play. Johnny and Larry’s embrace is a moment of transcendence in Afore Night Come, a silence in the eye of the play’s storm. There are no words for the violence that Johnny needs to describe to Larry, so he chooses a hug instead, in the hope that a touch will have the power to save him. Johnny’s queer embrace indeed carries the power to save the young man, though it scares Larry and he rejects it. In Afore Night Come, salvation and purity reside in the abject, the queer. At the end of the play, Johnny is taken back to the mental institution where he is kept, but he has given the gift of life to Larry, and Larry has reciprocated with the gift of a pen, which Johnny may treasure just as much as his own life. Rudkin significantly expands the concept of the queer as redemptive in his second play, The Sons of Light. In this play he creates a world filled with violence, anality, slavery, torture and bondage. Rudkin, however, is still able to find hope for this world, as he finds hope for the Black Country of Afore Night Come, and in a similar location: he places the power to change the dark world of The Sons of Light, to disrupt its terrifying patterns, in the bodies of his queer characters. The Sons of Light begins with the quintessential image of family and parenthood: Pastor Bengry carries his young son Samuel in his arms as they describe their travel to the outlying Scottish island of Out Skanaray. They are followed by Bengry’s other two sons, Samuel’s twin Michael and their older brother John.31 Their mother, we are told, has died, and the younger boys have had their father and John as their teachers. Greeting Pastor Bengry and his sons on their arrival at the island are the elders of Out Skanaray. Bengry is to replace their old pastor, who we learn has disappeared under unfortunate circumstances: they believe he has drowned himself, waded out into the deep of the ocean, tormented by the voices of dead children. The islanders are frightened, sad, and suspicious of their new pastor and his intelligent sons.

31 Note the Biblical origin of the boys’ names. Michael, one of the archangels, is mentioned twice in the Bible. See Jude 1:9 and Revelations 12:7. Samuel, the Old Testament prophet, is an important figure in the stories of King Saul and (more importantly) King David, one of Christ’s ancestors. At least three important Biblical characters bear the name of John including John the Baptist, Christ’s cousin, who was beheaded by King Herod. The other two Johns were both disciples of Christ: John the son of Zebedee (brother of James) and John called the beloved, who sat next to Christ at the Last Supper.

15 The island’s deaconess tells Bengry another story, one even more haunting than the previous pastor’s disappearance. Nine years prior, all of the children of the island were drowned in the sea during a session of cross-gendered play. Sister Duinhead describes the event as though it were a divine punishment. “An boat: move out: toward the open Sound: all childer aboard, wild, coloury, Babalonish-dreissed, faces painted; masks, crowns; sexes crossed; [. . .] His – Furyhammer fell. Bolt glorious, pitying nuir beauty nuir no youthfulness.” 32 What remains is an island of people seemingly purged of queer elements, a bastion of normativity. Sister Duinhead’s tale of the children’s death is a narrative of (eugenic) cleansing, and she believes herself saved because of her own purity: “I, through mine guid dread, spared” (12). The other children have been punished with death because of their sacrilegious disrespect for Christian gender laws and their mockery of the Sabbath. Sister Duinhead’s description of the island as having been cleansed of sexual impurities is one we find to be untrue, however, through the introduction of two starkly different characters. Scenes in The Sons of Light shift with Shakespearean rapidity and clarity. The play moves with ease from the Bengry family’s arrival on the island to the islanders’ greeting to Sister Duinhead’s tale. Rudkin initially focuses the play’s action on Bengry himself and then shifts attention to another part of the stage without pause. In one of these shifts in the play’s first scene, Rudkin introduces “A subhuman shape there, no-one has noticed till now” (5). Michael and Samuel describe the shape as a “poor creature” and a “lump of flesh” (6). Indeed, when the poor creature speaks for the first time, its speech is nearly incomprehensible: “Whui is these like stars appearen’? Shaik-Et, Maik-Et ahn’ Tui-Baid-Ye-Go… Intil mine fiery furness: tss, tss… (Rails after with a mad crowing)” (6).33 This creature is Child Manatond, whose real name is Sheela Manatond, daughter of one of the island’s elders. She is a schizophrenic, splintered personality, encompassing the possibilities of both male and female genders, that Samuel can only describe using another Biblical reference: “Like him who said ‘My name is Legion for I is many.’ Five or six souls, in the one poor shell of mortal clay” (9).34 Within her single infrahuman body, she houses the potential of every human being. Not yet—and possibly not ever to be—male or female, Child Manatond’s presence gives the lie to the myth of the island’s religious and sexual cleanness proffered by Sister Duinhead. The only other young person in the Out Skanaray community is strikingly similar to Child Manatond in his non-normativity. He is Stephen Yescanab,35 the son of another of the villagers, and when Pastor Bengry chooses him to be the “steward” who will hold the chalice as each member of the community partakes in the sacrament of communion, they react in horror (13). “Pastor, the lad’s forever strayin’ in some – furnace in the head,” one of the elders says, and

32 David Rudkin, The Sons of Light (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981) 12. Further citations in this chapter from The Sons of Light will be given by page number in the text. 33 The creature’s conception of Samuel, Michael, and John is a frightening, Biblical one from the book of Daniel chapter three: the Hebrew prophets Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, are thrown into a “fiery furnace” by the evil king Nebuchadnezzar, but emerge from the flames unharmed and protected by the Hebrew god. 34 Samuel’s reference is to a person inhabited by a demonic presence called Legion. Jesus casts the demon into a herd of swine in Mark chapter five and in Luke chapter eight. 35 Rudkin reminds us of the significance of the name Stephen by having the twins explicate the name’s origin. Michael offers that Stephen was the “[f]irst Christian martyr, Da. Put to death with cruel stones,” and Samuel adds that “Stèphanos is the Greek for a crown” (7). Stephen’s roles as both a sacrifice and as a king are notable. For more on the significance of the martyrdom of the Biblical Stephen see Mary Karen Dahl, Political Violence in Drama: Classical Models, Contemporary Variation (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984) 49-51.

16 Stephen himself begs to be exempted from the duty (14). We find out about this furnace in the head from Stephen himself in a monologue that ends the scene: [A]m A such a glass, ye see mine secret Sodom heart? [. . .] When what Chalice A dreims for, of an night, is of a… husband… enter me… Ram, cleave mine afters open: stretch… See that, Welsh Bengry? In mine ‘deep well’? Oh Stephen, handmaid of the Lord indeed. That A am wrongshapen as an mahn… Oh… An holy image now A see all right. Maself: on mine back, lie, eyes ti’ Heaven, mine afters up, up over above ma very face, arse of me, an table spreid baneath God’s sky, an anvil for his Gannet’s dive – (15). Stephen fantasizes about a husband, and sees himself as very different from the other members of the community, but despite the villagers’ hatred and fear of him, this image of anal penetration is a holy one. He speaks of himself with eyes gazing at Heaven, lying on his back awaiting a sacred kind of sexual union: a penetration as natural as a bird diving into the water. Stephen Yescanab and Child Manatond are linked in their lack of cohesive identity, as well. Asked to say his name, Stephen responds with: “(own name tangling in throat). Y– Ye– Sc– Nab… Sir” and “S– T– Phn. S–stephen sir” (7). This stuttered response is echoed minutes later by Child Manatond’s response to the same prompt: “convulsive noises form dark, slow, ugly in throat: become a voice, black, void,” emerging into “N–… N–… Nun” (9). It takes her some time to make these noises into language, but Sheela is finally able to say, not her name but “N– N– Nobody” (9). Both of the queer bodies onstage have been stripped of their very identity by the strictures of the island society. Ostracized and classified as abnormal by the village, both have lost the ability even to speak their own names. None of Bengry’s sons has the crisis of self that Stephen Yescanab and Child Manatond have, but Rudkin presents each of them, too, as exceeding the boundaries of the island society’s gender restrictions. All three sons are delightfully cosmopolitan and well-educated. Michael and Samuel’s reaction when they first encounter Child Manatond, for instance, is one of curiosity and playfulness rather than judgment. “Is weemen has beards. Like thon at Limavady Fair. One breast an’ half a beard. Hermaffeydite” (5). The boys try to engage with her even before they recognize her to be gendered as female. They also play at cross-dressing, to the apparent horror of Sister Duinhead: “Nor any road is this,” she scolds the boys, “His Sabbath, to be dreissed. Coloury, wild an’ Babalonish dreissed. Twins of ye, an mockery of lad uir lass. ‘Male and female created He them!’” (10). Elsewhere, too, the twins’ male gender is confused. Child Manatond says “Michael’s an naughty girl” at one point and Sister Duinhead accuses Samuel of being a “[s]ick child. Daub yuir boyface like an lass” (29, 56). John does not play dress-up with the twins in their first confrontation with Sister Duinhead, but she scolds him too, saying he, as the eldest, ought to know better. But John exceeds the gender role of eldest son of the Bengry family. “John is our mother too,” Samuel tells the elders of the island when they first meet (4). Indeed, John does appear to fill in the gaps in Pastor Bengry’s parenting, offering compassion and care for the sick Samuel in the first scene and (later in the play) providing the eulogy for Michael’s death when Bengry is unable. In all of his interactions with his father he is more like a helpmeet than a son, the longsuffering partner of this mysterious and driven minister. Through the end of act one, the play appears to be a kind of salt-of-the-earth drama where an isolated community has created its own culture independent of larger movements in Britain. This tiny world is then intruded upon by a protagonist (four in The Sons of Light) and the world is disrupted and permanently changed by the newcomers. Afore Night Come works in this way,

17 as does Edward Bond’s The Sea (1973). But the feeling that something darker and more sinister lurks beneath the islanders’ frightened exteriors never abates in The Sons of Light, and in act two, the subterranean finally comes roiling to the surface. In Sacred Disobedience, David Ian Rabey’s study of Rudkin’s work, Rabey describes the end of act one as having “established an unusual but apparently consistent world of Syngian characters and setting. With breathtaking audacity, Rudkin reveals the interpenetration of this world and a gothic underworld burgeoning with imagery associated with German Expressionist film, Jean Genet, James Bond thrillers, science fiction and graphic novels: frightening but tempting”(80). This drama about a pastor and his sons exploring an isolated island and helping its xenophobic villagers explodes from the inside out. Act two changes everything, and The Sons of Light becomes something less out of Synge and more out of Ernst Toller or even Derek Jarman. Fog descends onto the island, and through the fog, we watch along with Stephen Yescanab as a man escapes from a group of soldiers and is then caught and nearly raped by the soldiers and their leader, “a pornographic ‘black angel’, ikon of bestial malehood” (22). The captured man, who is never named, is saved from the rape (perhaps only temporarily) because he has accidentally defecated out of terror. The soldiers and Holst, the pornographic angel, then take the man “into the gloom to be about some obscure business there” (25). Rudkin next introduces us to Dr. Nebewohl and Miss Wemwood, he the architect of the violent scenario we have just witnessed, and she a kind of researcher or bureaucrat, asking him questions about his experiments. Stephen has witnessed part of a schema of discipline and control that Dr. Nebewohl has engineered. The doctor has created an underground universe. It is a rock quarry, but Nebewohl’s laborers are all undergoing a vast experiment. His workers live as automatous underground slaves and never see the light of the sun. Nebewohl has conditioned them to respond to his own voice (over a loudspeaker) and to think of him as their father. The men (there do not appear to be any female laborers in Nebewohl’s experiment) work shifts together in groups and then, after working, go immediately to sleep, embedded in the underground rock. He has completely brainwashed the men through a process of sexual humiliation and physical subjugation. His men do precisely what he says, experience their labor as joy, and have no impulses other than obedience to his voice. Nebewohl even claims that they no longer dream: “It would seem that the old image-factory is quite empty: even of schema,” he explains to Miss Wemwood. “Only one dream in them now: the one same dream between them all. One they carry, while they wake” (37). It is these workers, these hidden, sun-starved men that the island’s surface covers. As the play progresses, Bengry’s twin sons explore the island more and more, discovering that the children thought drowned by Sister Duinhead never died and were instead rescued and experimented on by the maniacal Nebewohl. The boys begin to have a powerful effect on Child Manatond; she starts to play with them and also to find a kind of psychic integration of her personalities. Both Michael and Samuel are eventually killed by Nebewohl as they wander the beaches exploring. Pastor Bengry responds stoically, but their brother John seems enraged by their deaths, finding a new power within him. Stephen finds a way into the pit and descends, bringing Gower, one of the laborers, back with him to the surface. Gower recoils from the sun’s light, runs from Stephen and is captured by the soldiers and by Holst, the ikon of bestial malehood. Gower is then punished and finally murdered through torture and evisceration. The play ends with the workers in Nebewohl’s quarry finally released from their underground prison by John, Bengry’s remaining son. Stephen tells him everything he has

18 discovered about the pit and John liberates the men by telling them a story of a white bird (an echo of Stephen’s gannet?) and the light of Paradise. He instructs the workers to tell their fellows, and so the men are freed by the power of language. The workers revolt against Nebewohl, dismantling the caverns, the rocks caving in on the underground quarry and crushing John in the process. Nebewohl and Wemwood are forced to flee the island in Flemingesque fashion, Stephen leaves the island for Glasgow and a life of his own, and the play ends with Sheela Manatond finding a voice and speaking an elegy for Bengry’s three sons: Pastor…? John your son has brought the tower of death to dust. I come to thank you for him: and for his young brothers too, who have been – more than sons… Oh… Oh… What is this I am…? Flesh? Hand? Breast? Eye…? [. . .] Oh I was asleep. And dreamed. Three stars of light came down a while, and danced among these stones. Oh, brightest and best of all the morning’s sons, was I asleep? and did yous waken – me…? (78). With Sheela’s monologue, the fissures in her psyche seem to have healed, and the final, interrogative word of the play (“me…?”) testifies that she has finally discovered, amidst the play’s carnage and death, a secure and valuable subjecthood. Through the labor and the sacrifice of the three sons of light, something unified has emerged from Sheela’s fractured and tormented psyche. The Sons of Light, like Afore Night Come, is certainly a play about psychic pain and emotional scarring. Rudkin reports that the play “was mirroring an impending psychological crisis of my own: to go into the play was to go into that crisis head-on. [. . .] I was afraid to write The Sons of Light. Subsequent experience has shown how right I was to be afraid. If any one piece of mine has come near to destroying me as a man and as a dramatist, this was it.”36 This crisis and Rudkin’s emergence from it are replicated in the play’s clearest dramatic arc, Child Manatond’s story. She transforms over the course of the drama from a barely human creature without the capacity even to articulate a name for itself into a woman with the ability to recognize a self in her own body. And she is capable of naming that self: flesh, hand, breast, eye. In Sacred Disobedience, Rabey reads The Sons of Light as a play about emergence from psychic trauma and attaining selfhood. He sees the characters as stemming from the allegory of the cave passage in Plato’s Republic: The basic, if variously manifested, state of the characters in The Sons of Light is that of involution; of being involved in constructing realities through dissociation [. . .]. To this extent they are all ideologues, firmly convinced of the necessity of their strategies, struggling to protect their neighbors from opposing realities. Thus, the characters — particularly Nebewohl, Wemwood and Stephen Yescanab — are semi-ironic versions of the self-styled elite of philosopher-kings. On the other hand, the characters Bengry and John are self-consciously and literally Promethean in the sense of possessing foresight. (76) For Rabey, the play is about abjection and the creation of the self through “transformative experience” (89). He sees John as promulgating a kind of salvation where subjects are free to choose their own way. “John Bengry seems to effect the leap from Platonic to Promethean paradigm through being, ultimately, the least control-oriented in his own chosen technology of salvation: some workers, and indeed islanders, are presumably left to, or confirmed in, their

36 David Rudkin, “Seeing the Light,” Plays and Players 23.8 (1976): 24. Further citations in this chapter from “Seeing the Light” will be given by page number in the text.

19 essential state of abjectness” (76). Rabey does not address the issues of queerness present in The Sons of Light, focused as he is on a psychoanalytic reading of the play. He reminds us, though, that the audience is not simply left with positive images of rebirth, but must “remain aware of the distinctly human cost of such a denouement” (92). This invocation of death and sacrifice as two of the play’s central themes is an important one, for the play does not simply end with the awakening of Child Manatond and the freedom of Nebewohl’s slaves. The price of this redemption is death. The sons of light must be sacrificed so that others may live. The Sons of Light is deeply concerned with sacrifice. Rudkin articulates the play’s basic conceit in a 1976 Plays and Players article: “From the very beginning the basic idea was of a new nonconformist pastor coming, to redeem a ‘damned’ island: his three sons were to dive down into the island like seeds of resurrection, and bring it to life; this broader process was also to take place, in human terms, in the psyche of the central schizophrenic character [Child Manatond]” (24). Rudkin describes Bengry’s sons having a positive effect on the island, redeeming it by diving into its soil and germinating there, but in the play, of course, the boys die. Pastor Bengry seems resigned to the sacrifice of his sons and to understand their redemptive function for the island. He explains his quiescence in a conversation with Child Manatond’s father at the beginning of act five, before the death of John, his eldest: MANATOND. I – I’m sorry Pastor. What an stony home to you our island have been. And crueller, to yuir princes of sons. Devouring them… BENGRY. Why Brother: I rejoice. If Death devour them, as you say. A seed will split a rock. Also I have still one son, haven’t I? To feed this Death? (73) The pastor articulates both his children’s purpose and their deaths. And he echoes a belief he shared with us in act one as well: “Our sons are never altogether ours. Angels only, loaned us a little while: for our mean fathering. Strangers: from some further shore” (17). Bengry believes that they serve a redemptive function for the island and like a latter day Abraham, he is willing to sacrifice his boys in service of an end larger than himself. Unlike Abraham, however, Bengry’s god—or rather, whatever force it is that drives Pastor Bengry—provides no ram as a substitute for the boys. No angel stops the sacrifice of Bengry’s sons. In effect, there are four sacrifices in The Sons of Light. The twins are each sacrificed to the island in order that its soil, which John calls “an abomination of deformity” might bring forth new life (27). The allegory is a Biblical one: “And some [seeds] fell on stony ground, where it had not much earth; and immediately it sprang up, [. . .] But when the sun was up, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away.”37 Child Manatond is such a seedling, un-nurtured and so unable to take root in the island’s stony ground. It is only after the boys have been killed that Child Manatond—as David Ian Rabey describes it—can “achieve imaginative transference to someone beyond her internalised demonic ‘family,’ namely the twins” (86). Michael and Samuel’s deaths transform Child Manatond, the embodiment of the future (the harvest) of Out Skanaray, into what the Bible calls “fruit that sprang up and increased.”38 By her final monologue, this phrase is certainly an apt description of the now-gendered, newly awakened Sheela Manatond.39

37 King James Bible, Mark 4:5-6. 38 King James Bible, Mark 4:8. 39 Child Manatond’s gender becomes clearer to herself and the audience as the play progresses. This gendering and awakening have to do with emerging from psychic trauma and recognizing herself for who she is. The awakening, as I see it, is not about a fixing of gender, or a disavowing of (male) gender, but an ability to acknowledge what is

20 The island’s other two young men, Stephen and John, perform sacrificial actions similar to one another, descending deep into the subterraneous landscapes of the island and bringing life up from below the surface. The circumstances and results of these two actions are markedly different, however. In The Sons of Light, Rudkin takes Afore Night Come’s association of sexual desire with redemption much further. This can most clearly be seen in Stephen Yescanab’s relationship with Gower, the golden soldier. Gower is only able to understand Stephen as an angel. He has no concept of men from the surface, or indeed any concept of the surface at all. Stephen resolves, then, to play the role of an angel in his interactions with Gower in order to liberate him from his subterranean bondage: “If thon’s the only road ye’ll understand me by, angel of this king I’ll be. Up, to bring you: careful of you: to where yuir living shuid be done” (43). This salvific act is not removed from sexual desire. On the contrary; desire in The Sons of Light is indelibly bound up with freedom. Gower’s description of his longing for the angel is strikingly similar to Stephen’s description of his desire for a husband, a dark, forbidden need: “I have only to think of the angel, and there comes this reaching in me… Angel…? I lie in the rock. I sleep. The angel comes to me. I – reach to him: so – full for him – I wake: and he is gone. [. . .] Angel. What have you done? Cruel angel, to a poor good soldier. Trouble is in Gower now. And you are gone…!” (45- 6). Later in the play, after Gower has been killed, Stephen also equates his desire for Gower with freedom: “Gower… What have I done…? Mine ye were… Real ye were… Needing me… Not in some dream o’ the night but out, real, other: self yuirself: reachin’ out toward me from real darkness to be given life… Mahn, real, self, other, real” (62). The two have a tragic miscommunication that results in Gower running in fear from Stephen back to the pit and toward his own horrific death. But like Orpheus—or perhaps more like Christ’s triumphant descent into Hell—Stephen has descended into the earth to save Gower, to lead him across the distance from darkness into light, from bondage to freedom. It is this redemptive act that is the paradigm for John’s final liberation of the subterranean workers at the end of the play, and its salvific component cannot be divorced from the sexual desire with which it is associated. John Bengry, in contrast with Stephen, is willing to be an offering, to give his own body to save the men who live below the island. Possessing some kind of foresight, some metaphysical knowledge to which the audience has no access, he understands his own function in life as a sacrifice. After his brothers are murdered, he describes himself to Stephen as “[a]n angel: sent down into this world: flame, to walk among mankind, in shape of man himself: deluded that he is a man himself. Poor angel: when deep in him the knowledge now begins to rise: he is not man like these; he is here but, only to burn” (63). In this scene, John “has magnified before” Stephen, and the two begin to work together to free the men in the underground quarry (64). It is their collaboration that is able to achieve the final result in The Sons of Light. The play’s final, powerful sacrifice—John’s descent into the pit—can only end in death. Here “only to burn,” John climbs down knowing this end. Just prior to this final redemptive act, Stephen and John share a moving and beautiful farewell scene, which Rudkin sets amid an aural backdrop of “gentle seasound”: YESCANAB. Well John. JOHN. Well Stephen. YESCANAB (pause). Me to the ship then. And not to loss me road this second time. JOHN. Ye never lost it the first time. Ye found it. What’ll ye do?

present and to find a name for it. She speaks herself. Certainly this fixing of gender should not be confused with a fixing of sexuality.

21 YESCANAB. No doubt it’ll be some – delinquency, in the cities of the world. The landfall’s likely to be Glasgow. Well. Thank your father. And you. I burn a candle in my head. For your – ministry. And everything. JOHN (pause). Look after yourself. Suddenly YESCANAB is touching him; then gone. JOHN stands, astonished at the gift. Then: JOHN. On. (69-70) The sequence is simple and serves the dramaturgical function of the standard tragic farewell scene. One of the characters will die nobly and the other will live on.40 In Rudkin’s version of the farewell scene, though, the characters parting are both male. It is a tiny love scene that cannot help but recall the scenes between Johnny and Larry in Afore Night Come. In Rudkin’s earlier play, Johnny’s embrace is refused by Larry. The student (after a moment of enjoying being held) responds with “repudiation and repugnance” and violently “thrusts” Johnny away from him (49). Though Larry rejects Johnny’s touch and runs off, the embrace still saves his life. In The Sons of Light, John is not expecting Stephen’s touch but does not resist it like Larry in Afore Night Come does. Instead, John recognizes the touch as a gift and allows it to propel him into action.41 This touch in The Sons of Light—because it is gratefully received instead of repudiated—creates, not a moment of confusion but a beautiful display of physicality that works to redefine Stephen’s function in the play into one that is redemptive for the entire island. The queer, in the person of Stephen Yescanab, has the power to effect liberation. Part three of The Sons of Light is entitled “Surrection” and though the title is not properly a word, it implies both resurrection and insurrection. More accurately, the Derridean exercise with which Rudkin titles part three equates the two words with one another; in this play, resurrection is insurrection. The rebirth of the island is only possible through an act of rebellion. Rudkin, thus, implicates sexual desire in the act of creation, if the two were ever severed by religion. Rudkin’s concept of insurrection/resurrection is an ideal way to read the all-important final action of the play. John’s descent into the pit is a sacrifice, certainly, but it is also an act of surrection, of rebellion against the island’s society (insurrection) and salvation for the men of the underground work camps (resurrection). The model in the play for John’s descent and surrection is Stephen’s similar journey earlier in the play, down into the darkness and then up into the light with Gower trailing him. Rudkin also models John’s descent into the pit on Christ’s descent into Hell after his crucifixion and before his ascension into Heaven. Christian tradition says that after his burial Christ went to Hell carrying the sins of the human race; then “[w]hen he ascended up on high, [he] led captivity captive.”42 Christ descends into the pit to set free Hell’s captives and lead them triumphantly to Heaven with his resurrection. “Sacrifice is the performative act which brings a new social order into being,” says Marxist scholar Terry Eagleton. “This, to be sure, is the way the epistles of St Paul and the letter to the Hebrews seem to understand Christ’s sacrifice, as one which has rendered the old cultic kind of sacrifice redundant, relegated it to the antique order.”43

40Cf. Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserv’d or William Shakespeare’s Othello. 41 Cf. Judas’s kiss, which betrays Christ to the Roman soldiers in Mark 14:43-52. 42 King James Bible, Ephesians 4:8. The belief in Christ’s descent into Hell does not come directly from the Bible but from a document called The Apostle’s Creed, in use by Christians as a statement of faith as early as the third century CE. 43 Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: the Idea of the Tragic (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003) 276.

22 This is, of course, precisely what John does by sacrificing himself for Nebewohl’s subterranean workers. He dismantles the system of enslavement and torture created by Dr. Nebewohl and “brings a new social order into being.” John, however, is not a deity like Jesus Christ, and cannot overcome his own death by rising from the pit. There is no resurrection for John, but the men below begin to dismantle their stone prison, and the rock becomes so unstable that Nebewohl and Miss Wemwood are forced to flee for their lives. Pastor Bengry’s first prayer for the islanders at Out Skanaray is a surprisingly brief one. After a pause, he simply says: “Let there be light” (8). This is a powerful phrase, though. The Christian god created the world with the same words, and the Biblical act of creation is echoed by the play’s final sacrifice.44 Stephen, in his own act of resurrection/insurrection leads the nearly blind Gower, who has “walked in darkness so long,” up to the Earth’s surface to experience the light of the sun (50). The queer, again, serves a redemptive, salvific function. This act of surrection is repeated on a larger scale by John, who sacrifices himself for the workers in the pit. Like the god of the Bible, John, too, effects this re-birth through the power of language. He echoes “let there be light” when, with his final words, he cries “UP! UP! Up, all of you! Out, over the wall! Out, upon the earth! Let all the morning hear you! Cry to it: ‘a-Alleluia!’” (77). It is a magnificent, powerful, and sacred gesture of freedom, and the impact of his sacrifice on the island is terrific. Conclusion In the introduction to this study, I described the dramatic trope of criminalizing and containing the queer body. In plays such as Mae West’s The Drag, Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, and John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, queer characters are defined as deviant, criminalized, and then eliminated through imprisonment or death. This elimination serves to restore and reinforce the status quo. The society sacrifices the sexually deviant other in order to define and strengthen itself. It is here, however, where Rudkin deviates from others who write queer characters. Rudkin has created a dark, terrifying world filled with violence, torture, and death. The play ends with this world destroyed. But instead of a return to the play’s status quo, Rudkin ends The Sons of Light with parallel sequences of rebirth. Child Manatond describes the men’s escape from the pit: “Hear them: pour outward, out, from the belly of the rock. Hear them, run out upon the earth; hurl themselves upon the wall, tear with their hands at the stone” (78). This is the penultimate image in the play, and it is this resurrection that John’s death has created: not a return to normativity but life, new and exciting, for hundreds of Nebewhol’s slaves. Significantly, it is Stephen, the play’s queer other, who makes this rebirth possible. Rudkin has re-imagined the queer body as a life-force for positive change in a violent universe. Rudkin rejects convention merely by allowing his queer character to live. Unlike Martha from The Children’s Hour or Rolly from The Drag—homosexual characters who solve the problems of their plays by dying—Stephen Yescanab is able to have a lasting effect on the island, and he also seems to find something akin to love before he leaves. “I burn a candle in my head. For your – ministry. And everything,” he tells John (69). The playwright gives no specifics about the touch that Stephen and John share, but however this touch manifests itself physically, Rudkin refers to it as a gift. Stephen provides this gift to John and then leaves the island to find a new life. With The Sons of Light, Rudkin is able to achieve a reversal of dramatic convention. Rudkin does not punish his queer character with death. Instead, the redemptive power of the

44 King James Bible, Genesis 1:3.

23 queer body is magnified. Stephen and John share an important physical moment and this queer touch, a gesture of purity and generosity, has the ability to set the island free. The men do not procreate, but they do create. Their simple touch contains the power of surrection: the earth bursts open, and the captive workers pour out of its surface into the sun; the island will never be the same again. The chapter that follows will continue to explore the links between violence and the queer subject by examining further the imagery of violation in The Sons of Light. We will look more closely at the two acts of rape in the play, discussing how Rudkin again deviates from typical representations of the queer body as it relates to acts of violence. The second chapter ends with a reading of the infinitely more complicated representations of male/male rape in Mark Ravenhill’s 1996 play Shopping and Fucking. We begin, however, by looking at the public scandal that followed the act of male rape staged in Howard Brenton’s 1980 epic The Romans in Britain. We will pay particular attention to the reading of this act of rape by the public and in British media. Significantly, each representation of rape in these three plays is also a portrait of a queer subject. The queer body in these plays is described and defined by acts of violation. Chapter two, then, explores representations of male rape in order to further investigate how these playwrights use acts of violence to speak about and constitute queer subjectivity.

24 RUDKIN & RAVENHILL: MALE RAPE AND THE QUEER SUBJECT

In 1980, the National Theatre in London produced Howard Brenton’s new play The Romans in Britain; this resulted in an immediate and public scandal. Brenton’s play is a depiction of the brutality of the Roman conquest in Great Britain. Thematically, Brenton is interested in the legacy of violence on the island itself, and in exploring the imperialism and colonialist actions of Augustus Caesar in 54 BCE. He juxtaposes them with the modern British government’s neo-colonialist activities in 1980 Ulster (Northern Ireland). Reviews of the play were uniformly bad, but the scandal that the play created ensured a sold-out run.45 Audiences flocked to the play. The legal and media fracas over the play had nothing to do, of course, with the play’s formal innovations (which happen to be fascinating), and everything to do with the subject matter of the play. The Romans in Britain, you see, features a scene where two (male) Roman soldiers rape a young druid man on the shores of the river Thames. Brenton explains the sequence in his preface to the 1989 edition of the play: I tried to imagine what it must have been like for three young Celts, seeing Roman soldiers for the first time. I titled the scene ‘Two Worlds Touch’. The Celts had been swimming on a fine summer’s day. On the river bank they fool about, brag and laugh, then stretch out in the sun. From out of the trees come three Roman soldiers. They have had a bad day, losing touch with their platoon in a confused skirmish in the trees, and want a swim. The Celts are between them and the river. To the Romans it’s nothing, there are three natives, three ‘wogs,’ between them and their needed swim. The Romans kill two of the Celts and grossly abuse the third, who runs off. To the soldiers it is nothing, nothing at all. To the Celts it is worse than death, it is the end of their world.46 Brenton’s description of the passage is not inaccurate, but his words “grossly abuse” euphemize some rather grisly events. I will describe the sequence, a scene of male/male rape, in detail in the following paragraph. While the first soldier is interested in having a swim, the second and third soldiers (all unnamed in the text) are more interested in sexually abusing Marban, the young druid. Using the Celt’s knife, the two Romans lacerate Marban on his shoulder blade and then make an incision on his buttocks. These cuts are said to be “funny little ways” the third soldier/rapist has picked up on his travels in Persia, presumably some kind of obscure fetish.47 Their young victim then begins to defecate out of terror. The third soldier, undeterred by this, anally rapes him but stops after a minute or two when he loses his erection. He blames Marban’s hygiene: “Arseful of piles.

45 Bernard Weiner, “The Romans in Britain Controversy,” TDR: the Drama Review 25.1 (1981): 57-68. 46 Howard Brenton, preface, Plays: 2 (London: Methuen Drama, 1989) vii-viii. 47 Howard Brenton, The Romans in Britain, Plays: 2 (London: Methuen Drama, 1989) 34. Further citations in this chapter from this edition will be given by page number in the text.

25 Like fucking a fistful of marbles. I mean, what do they do in this island, sit with their bums in puddles of mud all year long? [. . .] And I’m covered in shit.” (36). The third soldier then goes off to wash in the Thames. The second soldier then caresses Marban’s naked body, telling him the story of how he joined the Roman army. Marban, in turn, attempts to communicate with the soldier, speaking to him in Latin. The second soldier, amused by this, rapes the young man again, this time forcing Marban to fellate him in front of the other two soldiers (38). The scene is certainly shocking, and the public outcry was energetic. Sir Horace Cutler, who was leader of the Greater London Council at the time, and Geoffrey Seaton, also a member of the Council, both attended the first night’s performance, and both gave outraged interviews to the press. Mary Whitehouse, the founder of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association— now called mediawatch-uk—opened a private prosecution of the play’s director, though it was ultimately unsuccessful. Bernard Weiner details the political end of the controversy in a 1981 article for TDR: “[T]he topic even surfaced during Question Time in Parliament when the Minister for the Arts, Norman St. John-Stevas, was asked, in effect, why the government didn’t cut back its grants to the Arts Council because some of that body’s monies went to the National, which had produced such an ‘outrage.’”48 The reading of this (staged) act of violence became public fodder for Britain’s media. Weiner’s piece on the media brouhaha is an important one, particularly because he records the specific rhetoric used to condemn The Romans in Britain for its depictions. I described the rape sequence from The Romans in Britain in detail because I believe it is important to be specific about the activities represented in the play. Some of Brenton’s critics, however, were decidedly less discriminating with their semantic choices. Weiner quotes Sir Horace Cutler as saying “My wife covered her head during the sodomy scene” (59). The British National Front actually protested the production with signs that Weiner says read “smut” and “keep queers off our stages” (61). Weiner credits Mrs. Whitehouse—who never saw the production—with what is perhaps the most egregious statement made about the play’s content: “One is concerned,” she said, “about protecting the citizens, and in particular young people. I’m talking about men being so stimulated by the play that they will commit attacks on young boys” (59-60). Significantly, none of these comments deals with the violence Brenton calls for in his play. Each remark is a (homophobic) response to an imagined homosexual sex act rather than a response to an act of rape. Instead of focusing on the acts of violation in the scene, the play’s critics use the violence as evidence of the characters’ homosexuality and then proceed to condemn it. Michael Scarce, in his seminal book Male on Male Rape: The Hidden Toll of Stigma and Shame, describes this response as one typical of Western societies. “The cultural confusion of where sex ends and rape begins,” says Scarce, “places sexual preference at the center of insensitivity, injustice, and disbelief directed at survivors of same-sex rape.”49 Scarce is, strangely, a little vague about how he believes Western society understands rape: “The tenuous dichotomy of ‘rape is not sex’ makes sexual orientation an issue of primary concern in male rape, especially given the level of societal homophobia and complexity of sexual identities” (6). The authors of The Joy of Gay Sex are equally vague in their discussion of rape. “‘Rape is about

48 Bernard Weiner, “The Romans in Britain Controversy,” TDR: the Drama Review 25.1 (1981): 60. Further citations in this chapter from this issue will be given by page number in the text. 49 Michael Scarce, Male on Male Rape: the Hidden Toll of Stigma and Shame (New York: Insight Books, 1997) 57. Further citations in this chapter from Male on Male Rape will be given by page number in the text.

26 power, not about sex’ has become a commonly heard statement. Yet sex and power are intimately related,” they say in the 2006 edition of the book.50 Richie J. McMullen, who wrote the first book on male/male rape, sees the dichotomy as much less tenuous and the lines between sex and violence as much more defined. This, he explains, is due to the numerous reasons that rapists have given for committing acts of rape on other men: “The heterogeneous motivating nature of rapists seems, nonetheless, to have little to do with sexual gratification and everything to do with issues more related to negative aspects of power and aggression.”51 McMullen’s point is that rape and sex are only related insofar as sex and shame are related and the purpose of violent acts is frequently the subjugation of the victim through the infliction of shame. It would seem, however, that it does not matter that rape in real life is more about power than it is about sex. As media communicate rape to audiences, rape often becomes an event that ceases to be about rape and instead begins to serve the dramatic needs of narrative structures. In her book Reading Rape, Sabine Sielke takes this slightly further when she says that “talk about rape does not necessarily denote rape, just as talk about love hardly ever hits its target.”52 Sielke seems to be referring to wider uses of the term “rape,” where the act of rape becomes a linguistic metaphor for the control or destruction of anything. “Rape” as a term denoting pillage or plunder of some kind allows a single rape depicted in a play or film to become synecdochical for the destruction of a society as a whole or the despoiling of nature. Howard Brenton, of course, is using just such a narrative device with the rape sequence in The Romans in Britain. The passage quoted above from his introduction attests to this. The ruin and pillage of the ancient Celtic culture by the Roman Empire is embodied in the sexual violation of the druidic priest Marban by the Roman soldiers who rape him.53 So though the male/male rape in Brenton’s play is ostensibly about violence—wider than the topic of rape—the critical readings of the play that are disseminated by media are not about violence at all but are all about sex and by extension sexual orientation. Michael Scarce argues that in the rhetoric of rape, sexual orientation is fundamentally important because rape and other acts of violence are often used to define and categorize the sexual subject. Scarce’s book is about real-life victims and survivors of male/male rape. It is important to note, however, that actual rape and staged scenes of rape that occur in the theatre or cinema are comparable only to a limited extent. Again, Sabine Sielke argues precisely this point:

50 Charles Silverstein and Felice Picano, The Joy of Gay Sex, fully revised and expanded 3rd ed. (New York: Collins, 2006) 206. 51 Richie J. McMullen, Male Rape: Breaking the Silence on the Last Taboo (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1990) 26. Further citations in this chapter from Male Rape: Breaking the Silence on the Last Taboo will be given by page number in the text. 52 Sabine Sielke, Reading Rape: the Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American Literature and Culture 1790-1990 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002) 2. Further citations in this chapter from Reading Rape will be given by page number in the text. 53 This metaphor is most apparent in John Boorman’s film Deliverance, where in the opening credit sequence the character Lewis says “You push a little more power into Atlanta, a little more air conditioners for your smug little suburb, and you know what’s going to happen? We’re gonna rape this whole goddamn landscape. We’re gonna rape it.” (Quoted in Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.]) The metaphorical rape of the untamed landscape by the city is not left unanswered in Deliverance. Traveling down the river, three men from the city are assaulted and one of them is raped by a man who lives in the “raped” landscape.

27 [R]ape narratives relate to real rape incidents in highly mediated ways only. They are first and foremost interpretations, readings of rape that, as they seem to make sense of socially deviant behavior, oftentimes limit our understanding of sexual violence while producing norms of sexuality in the process. As they have evolved in historically specific contexts, these narratives moreover interrelate with, produce, and subsequently reproduce a cultural symbology that employs sexual deviance for the formation of cultural identities. (2-3) As we have seen, sexual deviance is often employed by playwrights to create cultural identities and establish norms. The rapist whose victim is another man is unique as a character because the act of male/male rape effectively renders the rapist different from his society in two distinct ways. The rapist is at once a combination of the criminally deviant and the sexually deviant and is, therefore, irredeemably queer. The staged act of rape that the rapist commits performs a similar function for the rape victim. As with the rapist, the male victim of a rape is also defined by both sexual deviance and violence. Michael Scarce’s reading of James Dickey’s novel Deliverance (1970) and John Boorman’s film of the book illuminates the point: after Bobby is raped by a man in the Georgia woods, “[h]is comrades cannot stop thinking of Bobby’s ‘willingness’ to be raped, as is common treatment for many male rape survivors. We like to believe that men are capable of defending themselves physically, and if a man is raped, he must have somehow allowed it to happen. This classic blame-the-victim mentality is accompanied by a feminization of Bobby” (115). A willingness to be penetrated by another man is unquestionably a component of contemporary gay male identity.54 The men in Deliverance come to see Bobby as feminized because of the violation committed against him. The act of rape queers Bobby for them. His sexual preferences and proclivities have, of course, not changed in the moment of this act of violence, but the men (and the audience) see him differently because of it. The assumption or accusation of homosexuality in this case of male rape is an ideological tactic designed to minimize the vulnerability of all males to acts of (sexual) violence. The men in Deliverance read rape as homosexuality in order to exempt themselves from the very real possibility of similar violation. Sexual Violence in The Sons of Light As described in the previous chapter, David Rudkin’s The Sons of Light is a play where the identity of an entire group of characters (the subterranean workers) is defined by sexual, physical and economic submission to an “ikon of bestial malehood” (22). Doctor Nebewohl has engineered the minds of his laborers, focusing on their anality and subjugating them somehow by creating psychic schema that train them to identify themselves, though completely enslaved, as subjects. Though the world that Rudkin has created in The Sons of Light contains numerous acts of violence that include frequent sexual violation, the play itself contains two acts of rape. Mary Karen Dahl describes what we know of Nebewohl’s methods in her essay “Stage Violence as Thaumaturgic Technique”: Nebewohl’s technique is never explicated in the play. Instead, we see it in practice, erupting into the on-stage action. [. . .] In each instance, an escapee from the underworld is apprehended, and Nebewohl’s creatures search out the flaw that made him defect. The searching is physical and pornographic. The first victim (who remains anonymous) is reamed, that is, raped, with a guard’s truncheon.

54 Obviously all gay men are not willing to be penetrated by other men. Gay identity does not automatically denote a willingness to be penetrated by another man, but a willingness to be penetrated by another man necessarily denotes contemporary gay identity.

28 Although the act takes place off stage, the actors’ gestures and aspects make clear the nature of the violation.55 The aspects and gestures to which Dahl refers—what the audience effectively does see of the rape—are clearly described by Rudkin. The stage directions are very explicit. Rudkin describes three of Nebewohl’s guards, one of whom is the “pornographic black angel” Holst (22), as they “dangerously encircle” the defector from the camps (24). Holst “twists the defector’s head round into wrenched unnatural postures to gasp up at each leering GUARD, their hands stroking hidden truncheons in their pockets” (24). They speak to him, then we see that the guards “have soundlessly wrested the defector onto his back, forcing his legs up, up, over his face, grouped tight around him. Grunts, gasps, as his spine is hooped and his legs yanked apart” (24-5). The guards then take the man off into the shadows. When they return, the men help the defector onto his feet, his “eyes dazed in an incredulity that such an agony was possible as he has just endured” (26). The officer, then, “masklike jaw blankly smiling, wipes his truncheon on a handkerchief” (26). It is a miniscule, almost invisible gesture that communicates the horror of what the men have done to their captive during the time when the audience was watching other onstage activities. During this period of time where the unnamed escapee is raped offstage by the guard’s truncheon, Dr. Nebewohl and Miss Wemwood discuss what is happening. They speak about identity, about control, and about training the subject to behave in a desired way. Nebewohl describes how the rape victim creates an identity based upon being sexually violated, “experiencing his dysfunction: till what we strive for in him…” (25). It is not until later in the play that we discover that Nebewohl is using the men as automatous laborers in his underground rock quarry. Here Nebewohl does not explicate his exact wishes for those in his thrall but instead trails off, wondering if they ought to tell the young men how they might save themselves from the violation. He decides against it, fearing that their identities, constructed so precariously on the violence to which they are subjected, would collapse without it. The rape scene, then, which happens offstage, is discussed onstage while it is occurring. In this way, Rudkin keeps the onstage action focused on the violence of rape and about the rape victim’s subjectivity. In Brenton’s The Romans in Britain, the Romans’ violation of Marban stands in for the Romans’ desecration of the Celtic lands that is happening offstage. In The Sons of Light, a discussion of rape between Nebewohl and Wemwood stands in for an actual rape that is happening offstage. I describe here a curious paradox. Brenton’s rape sequence, though it is performed graphically for the play’s audience, is not really a scene about rape. On the other hand, though each of David Rudkin’s rape sequences happens offstage in The Sons of Light, each is unquestionably about the violence, power dynamics and the lasting effect of male/male rape. Rudkin accomplishes this focus on violence by removing sexuality from the acts of rape in The Sons of Light. He does this by 1) focusing his dialogue on violence while at the same time 2) removing the act of rape itself from the stage, by 3) focusing on weapons instead of male/male penetration, and by 4) turning the audience’s attention to the experience of the victim. Displacing the staged act of rape with something else—analysis of the violence in the first instance and Samuel’s murder in the second—also has the effect of desexualizing the violence. Though Holst or the other torturers may indeed enjoy assaulting and murdering defectors, the playwright never allows the audience to see them enjoying it. Instead, the audience

55 Mary Karen Dahl, “Violence as Thaumaturgic Technique,” Themes in Drama Vol. 13: Violence in Drama, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991) 252.

29 may only imagine the violation. Rudkin refuses to satisfy his audience’s voyeuristic curiosities. He chooses instead to communicate the atrocity of sexual violation through language. Members of the audience then create the images of the rape for themselves, if they so choose. Rudkin’s use of weapons, too, serves to deflect focus away from sex and toward considerations of violence. Though both are raped by other men, neither man in The Sons of Light is penetrated by the male sexual organ. A policeman’s club or truncheon substitutes for the penis when the first man is raped and during the second rape the men use a “searing implement,” perhaps a red-hot spit, in a nod toward Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second.56 This technique in Rudkin’s dramaturgy allows the audience to focus on a weapon as the means of violation rather than a penis. There is no question, then, of the man being raped finding sexual pleasure in the act of rape. Rudkin displaces the male erection with a weapon, and in doing so characterizes the raped man as a victim of an act of violence rather than a desiring sexual subject. In short, Rudkin unquestionably represents the act of rape as an act of violence and reduces the likelihood that it will be read as a sex act. The second rape in The Sons of Light is an enactment of the same schema that violated the first (unnamed) man. This time, though, the victim is a character we know: Gower, the golden soldier whom Stephen Yescanab brought up from the depths. In an echo of the previous rape, Gower is set upon by Holst, and again the violation takes place offstage. After the rape, Gower is brought back onstage only as “[a]n illegible human charnel, smoking still” (57). Holst then exits the scene. Rudkin’s next stage direction is one that exploits the powerful magic of theatre: “In terrible silence, amid the charnel ruiny: white, goldenheaded, pure, the primal essence, GOWER himself” (57). Gower emerges from the ruins of his own body to tell us the story of his death and to end act three of the play. Though stunned and quieted by his ordeal, Gower (or rather his primal essence) describes his rape in extremely graphic detail: “My legs raised up before me, up, over my face, to bend me like a hoop: there into me… with a searing implement, opening me and pumping into me such scalding shocks – how could I endure this?” (58). He also describes being flayed with white-hot knives, and his attackers pour pitch and lard over his body. They rip the flesh off of his belly and his chest. They then attempt to quarter him, but his body will not come apart until they saw into his joints and hack him to pieces: “and while he sawed me through my armpits and my groin, I uttered not one cry. Why was that? I came apart quite easy then” (58). This description of what is unquestionably a rape scene is also a grisly tale of what we might call medieval horror, representing not just rape but numerous acts of violation committed against this soldier. This particular sequence in The Sons of Light cannot help but recall Michel Foucault’s description of the torture and punishment of the regicide Damiens at the Place de Grève in Discipline and Punish. The acts of torture done to Gower’s body by Holst and his guards are strikingly similar to the atrocities to which the murderer Damiens is (publicly) subjected. Foucault cites the order which sentenced the prisoner: On 2 March 1757 Damiens the regicide was condemned “to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris” [. . .] then, [. . .] “the flesh

56 It occurred to me early on while working on this chapter that Gower, Holst’s second victim, died in a manner reminiscent of the death of Edward II in Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth century play. I had remembered that King Edward was murdered by being anally raped with a red hot spit. I remember being taught this in my theatre history class, as well. Upon revisiting Marlowe’s text, however, I found that neither his stage directions nor his text call for the king to be murdered in such a fashion. As far as I can tell, Edward is suffocated or crushed by a table that somehow manages to leave his body unbruised.

30 will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers [. . .] and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulfur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds.”57 Damiens, like Gower, must also be hacked apart because his body refuses to be quartered. Rudkin’s play takes the violation even further than the Parisian government by adding an act of rape to these atrocities. Gower’s rape, though, is only a single act of violence in a list of horrific activities. As with Holst’s first victim, Rudkin again focuses his audience’s attention not on a staged act of rape but on violence. Gower’s assault and murder are displaced by the staging of Samuel Bengry’s murder at the hands of Dr. Nebewohl. Both Gower’s monologue and the stage action that substitutes for the rape sequence serve to continually remind the audience they are watching an act of violence and not a sex act. Though Gower’s rape occurs offstage in The Sons of Light, we hear the details of the assault from Gower himself. Instead of understanding the violence from the perpetrators’ point of view as in Brenton, Rudkin gives us detail after painful detail of the victim’s experience of the rape. Certainly to Gower this is no sex act, and an audience can never mistake his torture and murder for one either motivated by queer sexuality or somehow desired by a queer victim. Rudkin’s staging takes full advantage of this technique of focusing attention on the victim of the sexual assault. As mentioned above, the Rudkin has crafted a powerfully theatrical moment. The image of Gower emerging from his own ruined and burned body is also a beautiful one. Rudkin’s stage directions bear repeating: “In terrible silence, amid the charnel ruiny: white, goldenheaded, pure, the primal essence, GOWER himself” (57). Gower rises like a phoenix from his own ashes and speaks to the audience as the embodiment of his spiritual essence. He appears before the audience to describe the violation he has suffered, but Rudkin has him appear as beautiful as possible. He appears radiant and unsullied before the audience, in stark contrast to the abuse he describes. This image is stunning for two reasons. First, the image of a pure Gower is a reminder of possibilities. Gower appears before us as he could have been had he not been enslaved by Nebewohl and then tortured and killed by Holst. This beautiful, goldenheaded Gower emerges from his own charred carcass and Rudkin contrasts the two Gowers intentionally. The audience is presented with the luminous essence of a beautiful human being while it is simultaneously reminded that Gower’s light has forever gone out, destroyed completely by Holst and Nebewohl’s violence. Secondly, Rudkin’s image also gives his audience the possibility of hope. Gower physically appears before the audience onstage. His very presence attests to the fact that violence has not completely destroyed him. He has been transformed into a spirit but, dead though we know him to be, he is still with us somehow. Gower’s monologue concludes part two of the show, after which the audience is released from the theatre for a second intermission. Rudkin’s final image in the second part of The Sons of Light, then, is a devastating one, surely, but— defiantly—also one of resilience, hope, and beauty.

57 Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: the Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) 3.

31 Sexual Violence in S****ing and Fucking Hope and beauty are in very short supply in Mark Ravenhill’s first play Shopping and Fucking, an exemplar of what critic Aleks Sierz has called “in-yer-face theatre.”58 The play’s title itself calls for censorship and its content is shocking and often brutal.59 Shopping and Fucking is a play written for a very small number of actors and its neo-realist, pared-down style and lack of large set pieces add to the play’s intimate feel. Ravenhill’s play is the story of a kind of queer family comprised of two young men, Mark and Robbie, and a young woman, Lulu, who live together in London at the end of the twentieth century. As the play begins, Robbie and Lulu are trying to get Mark, who is a drug addict, to eat something. They are unsuccessful and the first action Mark takes onstage is to vomit. It is a repugnant device with which to begin a show but effective preparation for what is to come. As the show progresses Mark checks into rehab but is kicked out when he has sex with another patient. Returning home, Mark resists Robbie’s welcome, saying that he needs to try not becoming attached or dependent on other people. Lulu becomes involved with a drug-dealer named Brian, who gives her three hundred Ecstasy tablets to sell.60 Mark, meanwhile, meets Gary, a rent-boy. On his quest to have only meaningless sexual contact, Mark believes that if he transforms sex from a relationship into a transaction, he can avoid becoming dependent on others. In Gary’s apartment Mark and Gary bargain over an acceptable price; Mark then begins to perform anilingus on Gary but stops almost immediately. The following risqué exchange became an iconic snapshot of the in-yer-face genre: MARK pulls away. There’s blood on his mouth. MARK. There’s blood. Pause. You’re bleeding. GARY. Didn’t think that happened anymore. Thought I’d healed, OK? That’s not supposed to happen. I’m not infected, 61 OK? Critic Leslie A. Wade has remarked that this sequence “may take its place alongside the baby- stoning scene in Edward Bond’s Saved as one of the most grisly dramatic enactments in recent British theatre history.”62 Ribald though the scene may be, it is an important reminder of the vulnerability of the human body, and an introduction to one of the play’s main topics: sexual violation and its effect on queer subjectivity.

58 Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber & Faber, 2001). 59 The phrase “shopping and fucking” cannot even seem to find its way onto the covers of published editions of the text. Both of my USAmerican editions call the play Shopping and F***ing. 60 In case you are unfamiliar, Ecstasy is the drug Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, also known as MDMA, or simply by the letters E or X. Ecstasy is frequently taken at dance parties called raves. The drug heightens sensation and increases heart rate, sociability, and the user’s sense of well-being. 61 Mark Ravenhill, Shopping and Fucking, Plays: 1 (London: Methuen, 2001) 26. Further citations in this chapter from this edition will be given by page number in the text. 62 Leslie A. Wade, “Postmodern Violence and Human Solidarity: Sex and Forks in Shopping and Fucking,” Theatre Symposium 7 (1999): 109. Dr. Wade exaggerates slightly. There are much more shocking sequences—done less tastefully—in several other plays from the in-yer-face generation. Further citations from this article will be given by page number in the text.

32 Gary is bleeding, we find out, because he has been raped repeatedly by his mother’s boyfriend. Ravenhill’s technique for revealing this information is important. Just as Rudkin focused on Gower’s point of view to describe the violence to which he was subjected, Ravenhill has Gary relate the details of his stepfather’s brutality: This bloke, my mum’s bloke… [. . .] I tried to fight him off, but I think he gets off on that. [. . .] Whatever, you lie back, you fight, he still… I started to bleed. [. . .] He comes into my room after News at Ten… every night after News at Ten and it’s, son. Come here, son. I fucking hate that, ’cos I’m not his son. [. . .] But I thought… now… I… got… away. (32) Mark, who is attempting to keep his distance, trying not to get involved with this young man, begs him to stop telling the story. But he cannot hold out for long; once Gary begins to cry, Mark “makes a decision. He takes GARY in his arms” (33). While Gary is telling Mark about his stepfather, Ravenhill continues to center the onstage action on acts of violation. Lulu tells Robbie about a violent incident at a convenience store; she is in a Seven-Eleven buying a bar of chocolate when a wino begins to argue with the young girl behind the counter at the store. Suddenly the man begins to stab the clerk repeatedly with a knife. Instead of helping the girl or calling the police, though, Lulu and the store’s other patron leave as quickly as possible; she even takes the chocolate bar she wanted. In the subsequent scene with Robbie and Lulu, it is Robbie who has just experienced a violent confrontation. Instead of selling the Ecstasy tablets, Robbie goes to a rave and begins to give the drugs away to anyone who asks for them. He realizes he enjoys the act of giving and in what is, perhaps, the most hopeful moment in the play, Robbie describes an out-of-body experience where he rejects buying and selling and embraces generosity. Eventually, of course, he runs out of tablets he can give away and someone starts to beat him up. Ravenhill continues to focus the scenes with Gary and Mark on rape. Gary tells a story of going to a clinic to ask for help with his stepfather. The woman at the clinic has no idea how to respond. She ridiculously asks Gary, “Would you like to give him a leaflet?” (41). Gary then tells Mark about a fantasy he has: “Gonna find something else. Because there’s this bloke. Looking out for me. He’ll come and collect me. Take me to this big house” (42). “I want a dad,” Gary says. “I want to be watched. All the time, someone watching me” (33). Mark makes sure that Gary knows that that someone is not him. Mark is not going to take care of anyone. Gary’s desire for a “dad” is obviously a re-enactment of his relationship with his stepfather. Ravenhill makes this completely clear in a scene where Mark and Gary go shopping with credit cards stolen from Gary’s clients. Mark, quickly becoming dependent on Gary, tells Gary that he loves him. Gary rejects the idea completely: MARK. You see, if you’ve never actually been loved – GARY. I’m not after love. I want to be owned. I want someone to look after me. And I want him to fuck me. Really fuck me. Not like that, not like him. And, yeah, it’ll hurt. But a good hurt. (56) He denies that what he wants is at any way like the abuse he received from his stepfather, but his fantasy is uncannily similar to a rape fantasy. Gary has completely equated sex with violence. His rape experience has come to define him as a character. Mark returns to Lulu and Robbie’s apartment, bringing Gary with him. Lulu and Robbie have been making the money they need to pay for the missing three hundred Ecstasy tablets by operating a phone-sex business out of the apartment. Lulu, horrified to discover that one of her phone-sex clients is masturbating to the surveillance video of the stabbing she witnessed at the

33 Seven-Eleven, unplugs all of the phones. When Mark and Gary enter, the scene is awkward. Robbie is very antagonistic toward Gary, but eventually they calm down and Gary, again, begins to talk about his fantasy of a violent caretaker, where “[y]ou think he’s cruel but he’s really looking out for you. I’m going to be somewhere. I’ll be dancing. Shopping. Whatever. And he’ll fetch me. Take me away” (66). Robbie offers—for a fee—to help Gary act out his desires. Robbie and Lulu will craft a game around selling Gary’s sexual fantasy to him. The penultimate scene of the play begins with Gary unable to go through with Robbie and Lulu’s game. He cannot find the words to describe his fantasy. Mark, in a protective gesture, begs Robbie and Lulu to stop playing. He turns their attention toward the story of “the most famous person you’ve ever fucked” instead (69). It is a short reprieve, though, as Robbie (understandably) refuses to believe that Mark had sex with Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York and Diana, Princess of Wales in a nightclub bathroom in Jermyn Street in the mid-1980s. Gary seems infuriated that Mark has had sex with women and he, Robbie and Lulu eagerly return to enacting Gary’s sexual fantasy The three progress through the scenario methodically, performing it as they go. Gary is purchased by an unknown man, blindfolded, and taken to a large mansion with a security gate. Mark intervenes in their game: MARK pushes LULU away and puts his arms around GARY. MARK. Alright. Stop now. See? You can choose this instead. You must like that. Just to be loved. GARY. What are you doing? MARK. Just holding you. GARY. You’ve not even fucked me. He pushes MARK away. You’re taking the piss aren’t you? MARK. I’m trying to show you. Because, I don’t think that you have ever actually been loved and if the world has offered us no practical… GARY. What are you? MARK. I can take care of you. GARY. You’re nobody. You’re not what I want. (81) Gary rejects Mark’s embrace and the three return to the fantasy, where Lulu blindfolds Gary and they spin him around. Entirely with Gary’s consent, they begin to enact a rape sequence, where Robbie begins to penetrate Gary from behind, while the young man is blindfolded. Gary says nothing. The scene is silent except for the sex act onstage. Then Robbie offers Gary to Mark. He assents and begins to silently penetrate the young man. Ravenhill’s stage directions say “He fucks him viciously” (83). Gary (still blindfolded) then asks Mark, “Are you my dad?” (83). Mark says no, but Gary persists until Mark hits him. Gary responds: GARY. See. See. I know who you are. So finish it. MARK. No. He hits GARY repeatedly. I’m. Not. Your. Dad. LULU. Leave him. Leave him now. Finished. It’s over. GARY. No. Don’t stop now. ROBBIE. No? ROBBIE gets into position to continue fucking GARY.

34 GARY. Because – look – this bit. It doesn’t end like this. He’s always got something. He gets me in the room, blindfolds me. But he doesn’t fuck me. Well not him, not his dick. It’s the knife. He fucks me – yeah – but with a knife. So… (83-4) The young man asks to be penetrated with a knife or any other sharp object. He wants to end his own life. Robbie and Lulu cannot go through with this; the fantasy is no longer a game. All four know that as a result Gary will bleed to death. It will be an act of suicide. Gary describes it as a kind of euthanasia. “Are you gonna do it? I want you to do it. Come on. You can do it. / Because he’s not out there. / I’ve got this unhappiness. This big sadness swelling like it’s gonna burst. / I’m sick and I’m never going to be well. [. . .] I want it over. And there’s only one ending” (85). Though Robbie and Lulu balk at this, Mark asks them to leave him alone with the boy. He agrees to complete Gary’s fantasy. As the scene ends, Mark begins the fantasy again: “Alright. You’re dancing and I take you away” (85). The play’s final scene sees Lulu, Robbie and Mark back in the apartment. Mark tells a story from the future where he buys a mutant slave but then takes him home and sets him free. The mutant begs to be kept as a slave, afraid that he will not be able to support himself on his own, that freedom will kill him. Mark says that he is prepared to take that risk and lets the slave go. Then, completing the action they are unable to perform at the play’s beginning, Robbie and Lulu take turns helping Mark to eat. The scene fades to black and Shopping and Fucking ends with this tiny gesture of hope.63 Does Mark actually go through with the act of assisted suicide for which Gary begs? The end of the scene is inconclusive, and the scene that follows is equally ambiguous. As in Rudkin, the final act of violence that kills Gary happens offstage in Shopping and Fucking—if, indeed, it happens at all in the world of the play.64 The young man being penetrated with a knife until he bleeds to death exists only in the audience’s imagination. Audience members are not allowed to derive aesthetic or voyeuristic pleasure from the sexual violence in the play. Ravenhill provides only images of pain. Numerous reviewers of Shopping and Fucking have characterized the play as shocking or disgusting. The USAmerican gay- and lesbian-interest magazine The Advocate accused the play of portraying “a raunchy butt licking, a department-store blow job, and an S/M gang rape as the sum total of gay sexual experience.”65 Even a few critics who champion Ravenhill, find this first play to be rather shallow. Caridad Svich says that “the character’s interactions and power games remain steadfastly on the surface of the dramatic action, and deeper, more complex truths of human existence are untapped in favor of shocking theatrical gestures.”66 David Ian Rabey is much more generous to the play, arguing that Shopping and Fucking’s “studied observations of resolute superficiality, which rebrands love as dependency, show up the reductivity of 1990s

63 Edward Bond’s Saved also ends two hours of bleakness with a miniscule gesture of hope as the main character repairs a broken chair. 64 Ravenhill has been equally ambiguous about the play’s end. When referring to the play’s penultimate scene he says: “a young rent boy - after having violent sex with two young men - asks to be penetrated with a ‘knife or screwdriver or something.’” See Mark Ravenhill, “The Bottom Line,” Guardian 20 June 2001: 15. 65 Don Shewey, “Cheap Thrills,” Advocate 17 March 1998: 54. 66 Caridad Svich, “Commerce and Morality in the Theatre of Mark Ravenhill,” Contemporary Theatre Review 13.1 (2003): 82.

35 consumerism as both blackly humorous and ultimately lethal.”67 None of these critics, however, addresses the play as a drama about a rape victim who chooses suicide over survival. Ravenhill’s play, of course, covers a lot of thematic ground. Critiques of capitalism and the mediation of human connection appear constantly in the playwright’s work, including this first play. Dan Rebellato, for instance, says that Shopping and Fucking is “not just about fucking, but crucially about shopping too. [. . .] Again and again, the play asks how these activities came to overlap so consistently, whether there is anything left in our lives together that cannot be bought and sold.”68 Shopping and Fucking is also profoundly interested in those “deeper, more complex truths of human existence” that Caridad Svich cannot find in the play. Other critics see the play asking those questions. In “Postmodern Violence and Human Solidarity,” Leslie A. Wade finds in the play a message of moral responsibility and a kind of postmodern ethical schematics, “one that valorizes freedom, rejects external social or moral claims, and esteems self-actualization above all else” (114). Still, the prevalence of rape as a topic of discussion in Shopping and Fucking and the crucial positioning of Gary’s violent death in the play’s penultimate scene, ask for the play to be read as a drama about sexual violence. As a play about male rape, Ravenhill is able to focus on the act of rape itself as a social problem and the effect of sexual violence on the psyche of the young rent-boy Gary. I have already pointed to how Shopping and Fucking utilizes many of the same techniques as David Rudkin does in the rape sequences in The Sons of Light. Notably, Ravenhill never focuses on the experience of the rapist in the play. The play always takes the point of view of Gary, the victim of the sexual assault. Discussion of rape in Shopping and Fucking becomes even more complicated, though, with Gary’s final suicide/sex act. Here Ravenhill diverges considerably from Rudkin’s use of male rape in The Sons of Light and indeed from his own use of male rape earlier on in the play. I have argued that Rudkin’s technique of having his characters use weapons to penetrate their victims creates a disconnect between sexuality and violence, often linked in less sensitive readings of rape. Rudkin’s focus on truncheons and other weapons emphasizes that rape is an act of violence and not one born out of sexual desire. The final act of penetration in Shopping and Fucking also involves, of course, an unspecified sharp implement, but Gary’s death is not precisely a rape, nor is it exclusively an act of violence. Ravenhill portrays it, in fact, as an act of mercy. “I understand,” Mark tells the boy, and Gary responds with “Do it. Do it and I’ll say ‘I love you’” (85). Gary’s suicide is undeniably an act of violence but it is also a consensual homosexual sex act where the dynamics of power are complicated by Gary’s control of the situation and his manipulation of the other three characters.69 The ostensible victim in this case is the architect of his own death. Mark helps Gary kill himself, but if ending his psychic pain is Gary’s only desire, why could Mark not find some other—much less gruesome—way of euthanizing him? Violent anal penetration is Gary’s fantasy, not Mark’s. For Gary, sexual gratification and violence are inextricably bound together. The violence he has endured has created Gary’s subjectivity. He relates early on in the play that his fantasy is for a man “to fuck me. Really fuck me. [. . .] And, yeah, it’ll hurt. But a good hurt” (56). The young man has been so traumatized by sexual abuse that he identifies affection only with pain. Gary’s plan to extinguish his torment is an act that

67 David Ian Rabey, English Drama Since 1940 (London: Longman, 2003) 202. 68 Dan Rebellato, introduction, Plays: 1, by Mark Ravenhill (London: Methuen, 2001) x-xi. 69 See Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber & Faber, 2001) 131.

36 combines death and sex. But Gary is no Martha from The Children’s Hour or Rick from Six Degrees of Separation. He does not commit suicide because of sexual desires that need to be hidden or squelched. He kills himself because there is no future for him that is not linked with torment: “I’ve got this unhappiness. This big sadness swelling like it’s gonna burst. / I’m sick and I’m never going to be well” (85). Ravenhill also displaces the final fatal act of penetration with a conversation between Lulu, Robbie and Brian, the drug dealer. “[T]he first few words in the Bible,” Brian says, are “get the money first. Get. The Money. First” (87). He goes on: “It’s not perfect. I don’t deny it. We haven’t reached perfection. But it’s the closest we’ve come to meaning, Civilisation is money. Money is civilization. And civilisation – how did we get here? By war, by struggle, kill or be killed. And money – it’s the same thing, you understand? The getting is cruel, is hard, but the having is civilisation. Then we are civilised” (87). In place of voyeuristically witnessing Gary’s death, the audience watches as Brian expounds on the value and inevitability of capitalism. The discussion onstage never leaves the topic of violence. Gary’s pain, in fact, is linked to capitalism and what Brian keeps calling “civilisation.” Richie J. McMullen ends his book’s section on prostitution by saying, “How effective and caring a society we have in the future should be measured, in part, by how we have both discovered and responded to the various needs of one of the most neglected yet oldest at-risk groups in the country today, rent boys” (48). The support systems in place to help Gary are ineffectual and patronizing. The social worker whom he visits for protection even asks him if he’d like to give his rapist a leaflet! By displacing Gary’s suicide with a discussion of global capitalism and civilization, Ravenhill makes clear that contemporary society, whatever its benefits may be, is unable to cope with and protect a young man like Gary whose need for the care and social services a civilized society could provide is greatest. Ravenhill places the blame for Gary’s suicide squarely in the lap of a late-twentieth- century consumption-obsessed society whose only answer to the young man’s suffering is the suggestion that he give his attacker a pamphlet. Shopping and Fucking is much more than a play intended only to shock. It is also a rare portrait of the long-term effects of male rape on the human psyche and a powerful indictment of society’s inability to cope with male rape victims. Ravenhill ends Shopping and Fucking with an image of hope, however small: Lulu and Robbie are finally able to feed Mark. The three are able to depend on one another. The possibility of hope is not so apparent for the character of Gary, though. Whereas Gower in The Sons of Light emerges from his own charred corpse and lives for the audience as a kind of spiritual essence, Gary is absent from the final scene of Shopping and Fucking, even as an avatar. Ravenhill provides no finality about whether or not the boy has been killed. Rudkin’s play ends with a triumphant conquering of death and a powerful sacrifice as the workers from the pit climb to the surface and set themselves free from their prison. For Rudkin, queerness is a positive force. Stephen, Michael, Samuel, and John create a new world through their actions. John’s sacrifice, in particular, is a force for change in The Sons of Light and a solution to some of the problems of the island of Out Skanaray. His death gives the men their freedom. The notion of freedom also appears in Mark’s final monologue in Shopping and Fucking, but Ravenhill is much more ambivalent about freedom than David Rudkin. For Ravenhill, queerness solves few of the world’s problems. When Mark, in his story about the mutant slave, sets him free, the mutant tells him: “Please. I’ll die. I don’t know how to… I can’t feed myself. I’ve been a slave all my life. I’ve never had a thought of my own. I’ll be dead in a week” (90). In

37 the story Mark sets him free anyway, but freedom is not unequivocally positive in Shopping and Fucking. Freedom in this play means running the risk of death. The world of Shopping and Fucking is dangerous and violent, and the only hope Ravenhill offers is the tiny human connection at his play’s end. The plays that follow Shopping and Fucking in Mark Ravenhill’s oeuvre—Faust Is Dead (1997), Handbag (1998), Sleeping Around (1998)—continue to explore consumer culture in twentieth and twenty-first century Britain. With these plays, Ravenhill uses violence as characteristic of contemporary society. Ravenhill’s subsequent plays also address the possibility of queerness as a solution or positive force in response to this violence. The next chapter looks at two more Mark Ravenhill plays, Some Explicit Polaroids and Mother Clap’s Molly House, and investigates the playwright’s continued use of violence as constitutive of queer subjectivity. Leaving behind plays where men are subjected to violence at the hands of other men, the third chapter addresses plays in which Ravenhill uses violent acts directed at women to constitute the queer subject. In Some Explicit Polaroids and Mother Clap’s Molly House the female body is beaten, abused, and bleeding. Ravenhill then measures his queer characters based on their responses to these injured female bodies. Chapter three explores in depth the world about which Ravenhill writes and, finally, the links between queerness, normativity, and combating acts of violence.

38 RAVENHILL: THE CONSUMER AND THE QUEER SUBJECT

In November 2007, Mark Ravenhill told readers of London’s The Guardian newspaper that he is fed up with telling stories about gay people. The playwright is scripting a new television series and has decided that he is not really interested in writing gay characters anymore, or at least he would have us believe so if we are to take his article “My Pink Fountain Pen Has Run Dry” seriously: I’m surprised to say, I’m happy never to write another gay character again. It feels as though every aspect of the gay experience has been narrated, performed and picked over in the past 30 years. It has left us with some brilliant work. Alongside all the bad generic gay work, artists such as Derek Jarman, Alan Hollinghurst, Tony Kushner and others have left a body of work that is both gay and great. But that work seems over now.70 Ravenhill’s statement is surprising not because he has decided to stop writing gay plays (an indefinable genre if ever there were one) but because his words imply that at some point he actually wrote them. If writing gay plays means scripting characters who struggle with gay identity or fight for gay equality, then Mark Ravenhill has never bothered to write gay plays. Ravenhill makes precisely this point in an interview with Enric Monforte in British Theatre of the 1990s: “My plays have included gay and lesbian characters because writing about those characters always comes easily to me, especially in the case of gay male characters.”71 He immediately, however, disavows any intention of writing what might be termed “gay theatre.” Ravenhill’s thinking on this subject is studied and intriguing: There are probably three forms of gay/lesbian theatre: theatre for specific audiences, which I’m definitely not interested in; theatre which has gay characters and represents gay narratives, and there have been elements of that in my writing; and a theatre which has got a fundamentally different aesthetic, which is gay. If there are elements of that in my writing I haven’t got a clue. (91-2) I am still unsure what a gay narrative is. Coming-out stories can certainly claim to be gay narratives, but can any plot-line with a gay main character be considered a gay narrative? Characters who perform homosexual acts appear in numerous genres and in every medium: mystery novels, science fiction and fantasy stories, Shakespearean drama, the Bible, and television sitcoms. Recently, J.K. Rowling even revealed that Professor Albus Dumbledore in her Harry Potter series was gay. One of the main characters of David Rudkin’s The Sons of Light

70 Mark Ravenhill, “My Pink Fountain Pen Has Run Dry,” Guardian 12 November 2007. 71 Mark Ravenhill, British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics, ed. Mireia Aragay, Hildegard Klein, Enric Monforte and Pilar Zozaya (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 91. Further citations in this chapter from British Theatre of the 1990s will be given by page number in the text.

39 clearly sees himself as a homosexual, but is Rudkin’s play gay theatre? Is Stephen Yescanab’s story a gay narrative? Surely the answer to both questions is no. I have been using the word “queer” to describe Mark Ravenhill’s dramaturgy and I find the term a more accurate one than “gay.” Ravenhill’s characters—even in plays like Some Explicit Polaroids, where a man is living with the AIDS virus—are always too large for homosexuality as an institution and rarely exclusively gay. Mark in Shopping and Fucking, for instance, lives with both Robbie and Lulu. The sexual practices of the three flatmates with one another are not specified, but in addition to having sex onstage with Gary, Mark also describes a ménage à trois with the Duchess of York. Similarly, we know Victor in Some Explicit Polaroids is in a sexual relationship with his boyfriend Tim, but he also performs cunnilingus on Nadia onstage late in the play. Far from being a playwright who tells exclusively gay stories, Ravenhill’s characters frequently point to the artificiality of homosexuality as a stable category of identity. His plays follow characters who, more often than not, exceed classification as gay, and his narratives critique the homonormative as well as the heteronormative. Ravenhill does write what appear to be exclusively gay characters, certainly. In British Theatre of the 1990s he calls Mother Clap’s Molly House “probably the most gay of all [my] plays” (94). But even in this play, Ravenhill’s concept of sexuality is an amorphous one. In act two, scene seven, a transvestite named Princess professes his love for Mrs. Tull, the “Mother Clap” of the molly house. She seems a little baffled by his profession: TULL. What would I be kissing? Man, woman or hermaphrodite? [. . .] PRINCESS. Close your eyes and see what pictures come into your head. Alright? TULL. Alright. PRINCESS kisses her. PRINCESS. What do you see now? TULL. Man. (He kisses her neck.) Woman. (He kisses her breasts.) Hermaphrodite. 72 PRINCESS. And which do you want? Princess’s gender is an unstable quantity. As Mrs. Tull and Princess begin their sexual relationship, it is not gender that is important but their desire for one another. Mrs. Tull and Princess’s relationship is unquestionably a queer one but one that could never be reduced enough that it would fit comfortably into a genre such as gay theatre. Ravenhill’s distaste for writing gay theatre is certainly not a new development. As early as 1999, Ravenhill said in print that he does not “want to write gay plays, because I’m not that keen on being a ‘gay man.’ As a construct, ‘gay’ has now been wholly appropriated as a consumer label, not as a political definition of oneself.”73 The playwright’s critique of gay theatre is more broadly a critique of mainstream consumer culture. Instead of writing gay plays, Ravenhill’s plays and characters are more influenced by what he calls, in British Theatre of the 1990s, “radical western capitalism” than by the homonormative or an embrace of mainstream gay culture (95). Because of his interest in critiquing radical western capitalism and its effect on society, it is understandable, then, that violence is a significant component of the constitution of the queer

72 Mark Ravenhill and Matthew Scott, Mother Clap’s Molly House (London: Methuen, 2001) 77-8. Further citations in this chapter from Mother Clap’s Molly House will be given by page number in the text. 73 Mark Ravenhill, “Plays about Men,” State of Play Issue I: Playwrights on Playwriting, ed. David Edgar (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1999) 51.

40 subject in Ravenhill’s work. His characters, as we have seen from Robbie and Lulu’s adventures in Shopping and Fucking, are surrounded—bombarded on all sides—by violent activity. Ravenhill’s characters are blasé about knife attacks in convenience stores and sexual assault, and even react philosophically when Robbie is badly beaten after giving away all the Ecstasy tablets. “Some people a bruise, a wound, doesn’t suit them,” Lulu tells Robbie, “But you – it fits. It belongs” (34). They ludicrously imagine his wounds as aesthetically pleasing battle-scars, making Robbie more sexually attractive (presumably to both men and women). Violence so defines these characters’ lives that it has become almost invisible. It takes a viciously brutal, shockingly violent act like beating someone senseless or raping someone with a knife for Ravenhill’s characters to react with any kind of trepidation. This cavalier attitude toward violence begun in Shopping and Fucking is continued with Ravenhill’s plays Faust Is Dead, Handbag, Some Explicit Polaroids, and Mother Clap’s Molly House. The characters in these plays are defined by the violence which surrounds them. Faust Is Dead is a play with particularly brutal imagery; its characters lacerate themselves in an effort to connect with something real. Handbag, too, contains violent onstage action. In the play’s final minutes Lady Bracknell from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest gay-bashes Mr. Cardew, the “invert” of the play’s Victorian segments, while Phil, the queer drifter of Handbag’s twentieth century sequences blinds a baby with a cigarette butt. Rather than looking at Ravenhill’s more overt representations of violent stage action in Handbag and Faust Is Dead, I’d like, instead, to look at the other two plays from this period in Ravenhill’s writing, Some Explicit Polaroids and Mother Clap’s Molly House. As mentioned previously, both plays contain characters who are queer, and in both Ravenhill uses staged acts of violence to define his characters. The playwright’s use of violence in these plays is unique, however. In Polaroids and Mother Clap, Ravenhill exempts the queer male body from being the object of acts of violence. Neither does Ravenhill craft the queer male as the perpetrator of acts of violence. Instead of either of these more typical configurations, Ravenhill juxtaposes the queer male subject with acts of aggression where an ostensibly heterosexual female body must bear the brunt of the violation. These acts of violence—though not centered on or around the male body—nevertheless work to define the queer subject. The queer male characters’ responses to violence in Some Explicit Polaroids and Mother Clap’s Molly House are at the heart of Ravenhill’s critiques of contemporary society. Queer Responses to Violence in Some Explicit Polaroids Mark Ravenhill’s Some Explicit Polaroids is a kind of loose adaptation of Ernst Toller’s 1927 play Hoppla Wir Leben. Toller’s play is the story of Karl Thomas, who is imprisoned for radical politics in 1919 and then released in 1927 into a Germany he no longer recognizes. Hoppla Wir Leben is about contemporary German politics in 1927, and the audience sees the political ideologies of their time from the perspective of Karl Thomas. The play’s critique works by filtering the contemporary moment through more idealized eyes, bringing the perspective of history to the political compromises of the time. Some Explicit Polaroids follows Nick, a radical leftist who was incarcerated in 1984—for the attempted political assassination of Jonathan, whom we meet later—as he is released from prison in 1999. Nick returns to his ex-lover’s house hoping for somewhere to stay and for a re- introduction to the world from which he has been absent for fifteen years. Helen, Nick’s former lover, who was also a radical leftist, has become a “councillor,” a bureaucrat on the local level who, instead of making a difference in the world, has settled for “trying to make the buses run on

41 time.”74 Of course, it is not just Helen that has changed since Nick’s incarceration. To Nick, the entire world appears to have gone crazy: “Kid in the lift tried to sell me smack,” He tells Helen in the play’s first couple of minutes, “Must have been about seven. I said: ‘You shouldn’t be selling drugs at your age.’ And he said: ‘How else am I gonna buy a PlayStation?’ [. . .] What the fuck is a PlayStation?” (231-2). Helen glibly responds with “There’s a lot of that goes on” (232). This brief, rather comic, introduction to 1999 sets up the way that Some Explicit Polaroids works. The play is a bleak comedy that uses a kind of hyper-realistic style in service of its social commentary. Polaroids continues in this glibly comedic mode, always offering two views on twentieth-century culture: one embedded in contemporary ideology, the other critiquing it from the perspective of history. In addition to Nick and Helen, Some Explicit Polaroids also follows three much younger characters, Tim, a man who is living with HIV, his best friend Nadia, who makes a living as a go- go dancer, and Victor, a young man from a formerly socialist country in Eastern Europe. Tim has paid Victor’s airfare to London after seeing Victor’s explicit pictures on the internet, and so has effectively purchased him. “I paid for you. I own you,” he tells Victor in their first scene (245). These three characters are immediately recognizable as creatures from contemporary culture. Nadia ludicrously spouts watered-down new age philosophy: “Each of us has our own path and, of course, we can’t always see the path, sometimes it seems like there’s no sense in anything, you know? But of course there is. Everything makes sense” (238). And Tim and Victor are exemplars of 1990s gay culture. They dance and shop and every once in a while Tim has to take his anti-viral medication, but their lives are unbelievably shallow and Tim and Victor revel in this superficiality, eating “trash” and taking Ecstasy with reckless abandon (242). The play jumps back and forth between these two perspectives on late-twentieth-century capitalism, and the playwright’s focus is as much on the compromises made by the older generation as it is on the superficiality of the younger. Ravenhill describes the differences between these two perspectives in his interview in British Theatre of the 1990s: Some Explicit Polaroids is defined as much by the older characters, by Helen and Nick, as it is by the younger ones. Helen and Nick remember history, remember politics, have experienced both and still have some sense of them. And because they define the world of the play as much as the younger characters, the play has less of a texture of postmodernism about it [than Shopping and Fucking]. The existence of Helen, Nick and Jonathan has quite a different feel to the younger characters, Victor, Nadia and Tim, who don’t have a sense of history or cultural politics. (93) These two worlds collide in Some Explicit Polaroids when Nick saves Nadia from a violent attack by her sometime lover Simon and Nick is introduced to the play’s younger characters. Ravenhill contrasts Nick’s reaction to the violence Nadia has endured with Nadia’s own response. Nick physically defends Nadia from Simon and then helps her up to her apartment. Nick has recognized Simon for what he is and is, therefore, able to deal with him and help Nadia defend against him. “I think Simon is a person who hates women,” he tells her. “I think Simon is the sort of bastard who likes to beat up women” (252). Nadia equivocates and defends Simon, calling him “frightened” and a “child inside” (253-4). She even seems unable to recognize the physical effects of Simon’s violent attack on her body:

74 Mark Ravenhill, Some Explicit Polaroids, Plays: 1 (London: Methuen, 2001) 237. Further citations in this chapter from this edition will be given by page number in the text.

42 NADIA. Simon was expressing his fear in the only way he knows how. NICK. He cut your lip. NADIA. I don’t remember. NICK. You must remember. NADIA. That’s in the past. NICK. There was blood. NADIA. Was there? NICK. Of course there was. There was a lot of blood. NADIA. I’m not holding on to that. (253) Nick’s insistence on the material fact of Nadia’s bloody lip ridicules her refusal to recognize the physical realities of her boyfriend’s abuse. The older man’s perspective on the scene makes clear that Nadia’s coping mechanism is a complete detachment from reality. Nadia lives by quoting what sound like self-help books as though they are political points of view. Ravenhill contrasts this mode of thinking with the hedonistic, shallow viewpoints of Tim and Victor, the play’s queer men. In the play’s second scene, Nadia is speaking in her typical language of empty, feel-good nonsense and Victor responds with his typical shallowness: NADIA. I think you’re a very beautiful person. VICTOR. You like my body? NADIA. On the inside. Beautiful on the inside. VICTOR. You don’t like my body? (239) The silliness and similarities of both of these positions comes across as satire in this second scene of the play, but it is not until later that Ravenhill definitively describes both of these positions as untenable in modern society. As before, Ravenhill uses the character of Nick to question the political points of view of the younger characters. Nick cannot understand their resigned methods of dealing with problems and so asks them to explain. Ravenhill’s attitude toward the two positions articulated in the play’s second scene (“Beautiful on the inside.” / “You don’t like my body?”) can best be described as satirical or derisive. In the play’s fifth scene, however, Ravenhill draws the parallels between these two points of view, showing how similar they actually are to one another, and interrogates their efficacy as philosophies for life. Ravenhill again uses an act of violence to accomplish this inquiry. Acts of violation or bodily harm, as in his earlier plays Shopping and Fucking and Faust Is Dead, seem to be the only way that Ravenhill’s characters are able to connect with the reality of their own existence. For the second time in Some Explicit Polaroids, Nadia, the young woman in the play, is the object of a violent assault, and again, the perpetrator of the act of violence is her heterosexual sometime- boyfriend Simon, whom the audience hears but never sees. Nadia enters bruised and beaten into a conversation that the men in the play are having about socialism. Nick, the socialist in the room, is disagreeing with Victor who comes from a socialist country in Eastern Europe. Victor argues: “I hate socialist. [. . .] Everything falling to pieces. The buildings ugly and falling down. The shops ugly, empty. The ugly people following the rules and then mocking and complaining when they think that no one is listening” (270-1). Victor’s arguments against socialism are rooted not only in his own experience but in the consumerist culture he embodies. His critiques echo the twenty-first-century obsessions with beauty and sex; Victor is repulsed by all that is not superficially beautiful. Nick still believes in the principles of socialism, but Victor and Tim’s principles are based entirely on having fun and looking sexy while doing it.

43 The men’s quarrel is cut short by Nadia’s entrance into the scene with a bruised face. She immediately requests that the four go out dancing at a gay club. Once Nick realizes that she has been beaten up again, he is adamant that they treat her injuries, but Victor, Tim, and Nadia all insist that they deal with the violence by covering Nadia’s bruises with make-up and going out to a party. It is here where Ravenhill equates Nadia’s new-age philosophies with Tim and Victor’s hedonism: TIM. But we’re happy. NICK. Are you? VICTOR. Oh yes, happy. NICK. And what does that mean? TIM. It means we’re content with what we’ve got. NADIA. And we’re at peace with ourselves. TIM. And we take responsibility for ourselves. NADIA. And we’re our own people. TIM. And we’re not letting the world get to us. NICK. But she’s bruised, bleeding… NADIA. On the outside. TIM. Yeah, you can’t just look on the outside. (273) Nadia and Tim’s philosophies have merged completely in this sequence. Indeed, the two different points of view were always identical. Tim and Victor’s modus operandi of enjoying life completely and shirking life’s responsibilities necessitates the same refusal to acknowledge the materiality of violence that Nadia previously championed to Nick. It is in their differing responses to Simon’s violent treatment of Nadia where Nick, the straight male character, is shown in stark contrast to the two queer male characters in the play. The men in this scene are defined by their responses to Nadia’s bruises. All three characters profess to support Nadia, but only the straight male character sees Simon as abusive. Only Nick attempts to convince Nadia that she is not responsible for Simon’s violent actions. The queer men’s response to Nadia’s bruises is to go out to a gay club. They are unable to actually help the young woman at all. As is clear from the exchange above, they preach contentment, peace, happiness, and responsibility, but have no solution for her bruised and bleeding body except the fleeting happiness and eventual emptiness of a party. This queer response to violence defines Tim, Victor, and Nadia for Nick. He forces himself to leave them and goes back to Helen. The younger characters are unable to respond effectively to the violence to which they are subjected in their society. Their philosophies are shown to be worthless and ineffectual when confronted with reality. Instead of working toward solving problems, the younger characters choose as best as they can to ignore the existence of these problems. Tim, Nadia, and Victor’s decision to go to a gay club is no accident, either. Ravenhill sees homonormative gay culture as a distillation of society at the turn of the twenty-first century. “[I]n many ways the gay condition is something that all of society aspires to,” he says in British Theatre of the 1990s, “There’s a hedonistic, materialistic, selfish disposition in contemporary gay culture that all of contemporary Britain desires. Therefore, in many ways the gay narrative is the narrative that everybody wants” (92). Gay culture is, for Ravenhill, twenty-first-century consumerism par excellence. His criticisms of homonormative gay culture, therefore, work as a critique of the hedonism and selfishness of all of contemporary society.

44 The queer men in Some Explicit Polaroids react to the violence done to their friend with, what is for Ravenhill, a typically gay—homonormative—contemporary sensibility. Nadia cries and leaves the room, but Victor’s only response is to look at Tim and say: “You promised happy world” (278). Violence has no place in their lives, and neither of the queer men is capable of responding helpfully to it. Queer Responses to Violence in Mother Clap’s Molly House The contemporary queer world that Ravenhill critiques in Some Explicit Polaroids also makes an appearance in his 2001 play for the Royal National, Mother Clap’s Molly House. Mother Clap is, however, stylistically worlds away from Polaroids. For starters, Mother Clap, while not quite a musical, is subtitled “a play with songs,” and is intended for the large audience of the Royal National’s Lyttleton Theatre, which seats nearly nine hundred. Mother Clap is also a large show with a cast of fourteen, enormous when compared to Polaroids’ six. Ravenhill’s choice of time period is new for him, as well: the show begins with a (musical) production number, after which the scene fades to a London dress shop in the early eighteenth century. The main character in Mother Clap’s Molly House is the eponymous Mother Clap, called Mrs. Tull at the beginning of the play. She begins Mother Clap as a clueless woman, unable to understand the figures in Mr. Tull’s ledger and oblivious to the man’s philandering ways. She protests ignorance to her husband’s adultery even when he confesses to “hundreds of others” and even as he dies of syphilis (11). The dress shop that Mr. & Mrs. Tull run lends dresses, or more accurately, female costumes, to London’s prostitutes: “[w]ho but a whore’s gonna hire to dress up as shepherdess or nymph in glory or Queen of Spain?” (40). When Mr. Tull dies in the play’s first scene, Mrs. Tull is forced to take over the business. Though she thinks she has no head for business, she takes up her husband’s ledger and finds she can fill his shoes just as well as he could. Mrs. Tull is assisted in the dress shop by her apprentice, a boy named Martin who “wanders” (6). We learn in the third scene that this wandering is a euphemism for a kind of eighteenth-century cruising. Martin goes for long walks in a place called “Moorfields,” otherwise known as “Sodomite’s Walk” (30). Mrs. Tull’s other helper in the dress shop after her husband’s demise is a (homophobic) heterosexual man named Princess Seraphina who wears a dress: “I’m not a sodomite. [. . .] I’m a man as ever you are. [. . .] See, when I’m dressed in trousers I get awful vicious. I think the whole world’s against me and I strike out with my fists. But in a dress –” (9). The dress shop’s customers are all prostitutes. The newest and youngest of the bunch is Amy, who has arrived in London by coach from the country. Still a virgin at the play’s opening, Amy has looked forward to coming to London to be a whore for most of her life, and she is astounded when she realizes how much money she can make off of selling her body. “In’t it a marvel what a body’s worth?” she says in the play’s first scene (13). “It’s a grand day when a girl finds her body in’t just eating and shitting, in’t it? Day when a girl discovers she’s a commodity” (14). Amy takes to the oldest profession quickly but soon finds herself pregnant. She immediately asks the bawd Amelia to “fix her,” but Mrs. Tull, who has always wanted a child, objects (39). Amelia, business woman that she is, blackmails Mrs. Tull into renting the dresses to her for an extremely low price if Amy keeps the baby. Mrs. Tull reluctantly agrees to this, and as soon as the prostitutes leave, she complains to her apprentice Martin: “I can’t bargain with a whore. Whores is hard” (40). Martin and Mrs. Tull vow to find other customers for their dresses.

45 It is Martin who finds the new trade. Thomas, an apprentice to an upholsterer, follows Martin home from Moorfields one evening, and the two boys begin a tentative affair. Alone in the dress shop, Thomas playfully dresses up as a maid and calls himself Kitty Fisher. The two boys role-play, with Martin as a butcher who seduces Kitty, and soon Kitty asks Martin to dress up, as well. The two play at being sisters for a bit, until they are joined by Kedger and Philips, the two men to whom Thomas is apprenticed. These two men join in the boys’ games and eventually all four are in dresses, role-playing, and calling each other by female pet-names: Susan Guzzle, Miss Selina, and Hardware Nan.75 Act one of Mother Clap’s Molly House ends with Princess helping Amy into the dress shop. Amy is apparently drunk and Mrs. Tull and Princess start to undress her. What follows is one of Ravenhill’s trademark shocking scenes: TULL pulls away the dress to reveal the underskirt. It is drenched in blood. AMY. Blood wun’t stop. Told me: pain, blood at first. But then it’s over. But now won’t stop. Just wanted it out of me. Make it stop. (50) Amy has had an abortion and now she cannot stop bleeding. Mrs. Tull has no sympathy for the girl, but Princess leads Amy off to the rear of the shop to help her staunch the blood. Mrs. Tull, who says she wants to be a mother, cannot find it in her heart to help Amy. Princess points out this irony: PRINCESS. You say you wanted to be Mother. Can’t be Mother when it’s all stock and ledgers. TULL. Thass… Mother looks after her own. PRINCESS. Mother dun’t look on pain and confusion. Mother in’t body and babies. Mother’s in your acts. TULL. Easy for you. Playing at Mother. But me. I’m in the real world. And thass hard. So – can’t forgive. Can’t forget. Gotta look to my stock. (51) Obsessed with her wealth and her stock of dresses, Mrs. Tull is too judgmental to help Amy in her time of need. In this sequence, Ravenhill, again, uses violence to describe his characters. Amy has committed an act of violence on herself. She enters the scene faint, worried, and bleeding. How the characters respond to Amy in this moment of crisis defines them. Essentially, this scene is about motherhood. Amy, fleeing traditional heteronormative structures like marriage and driven by industry and capital, is willing to commit an act of violence on her own body in order to avoid the damage a baby would have on her ability to earn money. Amy does not want to be a mother; Mrs. Tull wants to be a mother very badly and Amy’s actions provide her with that opportunity. Amy is weak and bleeding and needs someone to take care of her. Mrs. Tull, however, has herself become so driven by industry and capital (“Gotta look to my stock”) that she finds herself unable to pity the girl or help her in any way. Princess, on the other hand, responds immediately by adopting the role of mother and assisting Amy to the back of the shop. “Mother’s in your acts,” he says, and his compassionate actions starkly contrast Mrs. Tull’s industry-focused refusal to help.

75 All of these names—Princess Seraphina, Kitty Fisher, Susan Guzzle, Miss Selina, and Hardware Nan—as well as all of the mollies’ names that appear in the play’s second act—China Mary, Primrose Mary, Garter Mary, Orange Mary, Pomegranate Moll, Young Fish Hannah, Old Fish Hannah, Thumbs-and-Elbows Jenny, etc.—are all names of actual mollies who lived in the eighteenth century. They are all cited in Rictor Norton’s Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700-1830, revised 2nd ed. (London: Chalford Press, 2006) 147-8.

46 The point is underlined by what happens next. Martin emerges (still in a dress) from his hiding place in the shop. Mrs. Tull looks at him and says: “Martin. Whatever are you wearing?” (51). Martin answers as Susan Guzzle. Mrs. Tull is taken aback but has no real time to respond before Thomas, Kedger, and Philips (all in dresses) come into the room. Mrs. Tull is shocked but suddenly gets an idea for a new base of customers for her dresses. “I’m moving out of whores,” she tells Princess. “Whores are finished and I’m moving into mollies” (54). Princess objects; he is repulsed by sodomites, but Mrs. Tull knows that hiring dresses to sodomites is good business. “And who are you to judge?” she asks Princess: For that is the beauty of business. It judges no one. Let your churchman send your wretch to Hell, let your judge send him to Tyburn or the colonies. A businesswoman will never judge – if your money is good. [. . .] And if your sodomite is a good customer, then that is where I shall do my business. [. . .] I shall turn my head away when prick goes into arse. And I shall look unto my purse. And all will be well. (54-5). Mrs. Tull changes her name to “Mother” and opens a molly house on the spot. The act ends with the appearance of more mollies and a musical number. “This is a marriage / Of purse and arse and heart,” they sing, and the act’s final words are “Shit on those who call this sodomy / Shit on those who call this sodomy / We call it fabulous” (56). The lyrics are anachronistic, but the tone is unmistakable. The number is a defiant affirmation of queerness. Act one is also an apparent resolution between motherhood and business. Mrs. Tull can be “mother” to a whole troupe of mollies and still make money. Here Ravenhill divorces motherhood from its traditional meaning as caretaker and giver of life. Mrs. Tull’s response to Amy’s injury has already proved that “Mother Clap” is much more interested in money than in motherhood. Because the sodomites are good customers, however, Mother Clap is happy to serve and help them. Economics has created a new queer space where the mollies can be free. Ravenhill juxtaposes this new freedom with the image of Amy’s wounded body, removed from the scene and taken to the back of the shop. Wounded, Amy’s body no longer has any use-value. She may no longer describe herself, as she did in the play’s first scene, as a “commodity” (14). Though Princess—the only heterosexual man in the scene—is able to help Amy, Amy herself, bereft of her ability to earn money with her body, is left out of act one’s celebratory finale. The molly dance at the end of the act is a complete erasure of the violence of the previous sequence. Providing an economic service takes the place of actual care and motherhood as Mrs. Tull takes the name of “Mother Clap.” The mollies—queer men in dresses—take the place of women as her customers. And instead of tending to Amy’s wounded body in the next room, the mollies end the act with a dance and a song. There is no room for violence in the new queer space of the molly house, even as there is no place for it in the lives of Tim and Victor in Some Explicit Polaroids. In Mother Clap’s Molly House this is echoed in act two, which begins, not in the eighteenth century but in 2001 London. Josh and Will are throwing a party in their loft apartment, a “sex-party-orgy-underwear sort of thing” (59). The orgy in the 2001 sequences includes only male characters, with a single exception. Amy, the whore from the molly house is re-imagined in the twenty-first century as Tina, the girlfriend of Josh and Will’s aptly named drug-dealer Charlie. Tina is a self-identified homophobe whom Ravenhill describes as “covered in piercings” (57). The act begins with a discussion of Tina and her piercings, and though the scene is properly an orgy populated with naked male bodies, it is Tina who drives these scenes in 2001.

47 Act two switches back and forth between the sex-party-orgy-underwear sort of thing in 2001 and a molly-house orgy in the eighteenth century. Mother Clap quickly becomes a play about monogamy and sex. Thomas and Martin (Kitty and Susan) in the molly house are unable to both find happiness in a monogamous relationship. The same problem exists at the 2001 sex- party. Josh and Will are no longer sexually active with one another, but they are in relationship that approximates a marriage and share a mortgage and depend on one another. For each of these men in 2001 sex has become a banal activity. They need cocaine, in fact, to get any enjoyment out of life. “Always going to need a bit of gear, aren’t we? Got to be something, make this bearable,” Will tells the coke dealer (102). Act two contains plenty of simulated onstage sex in both the molly house and the London flat, but the men in both locales are all miserable. Act two of Mother Clap echoes act one in other ways as well. Ravenhill’s play again critiques twenty-first-century consumer culture. In act one, the mollies find a place where they can be free, but only because they can afford to pay for it. In act two, the affluent gay male couple can afford to have a house “[l]ike in a magazine,” and so are afforded good service by their drug-dealer (61). Charlie sums it up nicely in scene one: “Not like before, is it? Now it’s your poofs know how to enjoy themselves, it’s your poofs with the money nowadays. Poofs running the country now, in’t there?” (60). The gay men are afforded a seat at the table in 2001 because they are a market. They have been welcomed into mainstream society, embraced by capitalism, but this acceptance has provided them nothing but boredom. As with Some Explicit Polaroids, Ravenhill uses violence in Mother Clap’s Molly House to point toward the inadequacies and shortcomings of contemporary queer existence. Echoing Amy’s self-inflicted violence in the play’s first act, Tina (played by the same actress) has committed similar violence on herself. Tina is obsessed with piercing herself whenever she gets bored. “Every time I come home she’s done another one,” Charlie complains. “Fucking blood everywhere. [. . .] Yesterday I come home, she’s got the mirror on the floor and she’s stood over it – starkers – blood – drip, drip, drip – and she’s doing her… whassis [. . .] her labia” (57). Tina, like Amy, has also transformed the traditional reproductive function of her body. Charlie complains about this, as well: “I mean, how the fuck is she gonna have a kid? Poor fucker would have to fight through half a ton of ironwork just to get out of her. [. . .] And she couldn’t feed it. There’s more metal than nipple” (58). Tina does not want to be a mother, though. “I just wanna pierce myself,” she says. “To pass the time. And it doesn’t mean anything. Nothing means anything, does it?” (100). Her method of dealing with ennui takes the form of violence or self-mutilation. Tina’s latest piercing has caused serious damage, however, and she has not been able to stop the bleeding. She begins to bleed again while at Josh and Will’s house and the men quickly direct her offstage toward the bathroom. Amazingly, though Tina is “bleeding badly” the orgy continues undeterred (65). The remainder of act two alternates between men performing various sex acts onstage (with little enjoyment) and reminders that Tina has injured herself. Charlie enters the scene with a bloody towel and asks for another one. The men continue having sex. Tina even comes back into the room to try to lie down, but Will, afraid of staining the sofa, quickly pulls her away from it. Charlie pilots Tina offstage and into the bathroom, and still the orgy continues. At one point, Charlie finds himself watching awkwardly while two men have sex on the sofa. The two men continue having sex while Charlie waits for towels to help Tina. The image is a ridiculous but poignant one. The gay men, only interested in sex, have no interest in helping Tina, who cannot stop bleeding. Tina continues to bleed and the men continue to have sex for the bulk of the play’s

48 second act. The orgy is only interrupted when Charlie finally rushes onstage to apologetically tell the men that Tina has stopped breathing. The men in this sequence are again defined by their response to a violent action. As in Some Explicit Polaroids, the queer men in act two of Mother Clap’s Molly House are unable or unwilling to assist the injured woman in their orbit. Instead, they busy themselves having meaningless and rather boring sex with one another. Violence has no place in their world and they ignore the bleeding woman as best they can. Ravenhill resolves little at play’s end. Tina finally stops bleeding and one of the older gay men at the party revives her by performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Most of the men in the twenty-first century leave the flat to go to a gay club. In the eighteenth century, Mrs. Tull, Princess, Martin, and Amy leave the molly house and move to the country, forming a new queer family. They also leave Mrs. Tull’s ledger, the symbol of her business, with the new owner of the molly house. Mrs. Tull, Princess, Martin, and Amy make a new life for themselves away from industry and the urban hub of London. Hope in Mother Clap’s Molly House lies in these four characters and their new way of life. They create a new, alternate (queer) space for freedom that is not centered on buying and selling. Thomas and most of the other men, on the other hand, stay in London at the molly house and start dancing. “Here we can jig and drink and fuck,” Thomas tells the other mollies, “Sisters. This is the best we got” (109). The play’s final image merges the two time periods as the mollies dance: “The dancing becomes more and more frenzied. [. . .] The MOLLIES start to take their clothes off. The music turns into techno. The molly house becomes a rave club as the light fades to nothing” (110). In British Theatre of the 1990s, Ravenhill describes his own idea of the scene: “They start a molly house dance, but then gradually the music builds into what is more likely house music. Then it’s 2001, they have their shirts off, there are laser lights, and the audience has a sense that they are just going to carry on dancing for 300 years and forever. They are just trapped in a rather hedonistic existence” (100). For Ravenhill, Mother Clap’s Molly House is an excavation of queer history. He tells a diachronic narrative that sees the molly houses of the eighteenth century leading directly to the disaffected boredom of gay culture in the twenty-first century and beyond. As with Some Explicit Polaroids, Mother Clap is complex and ambivalent, but in both plays Ravenhill’s critique of radical western capitalist culture is unequivocal. His twenty-first-century characters are unmoored from ideology but feckless and completely unhappy. They are sexually liberated and defiantly queer but they lack political drive or even a vague interest in the lives and welfare of people other than themselves. To illustrate this point, and in fact, to define the lives of these queer men, Ravenhill portrays them in relationship to acts of violation. The men’s response to violence in both Polaroids and Mother Clap is to ignore it and continue on with their lives. In Polaroids this means going to a gay club and in Mother Clap it takes the form of an orgy. The Body Vulnerable In both Polaroids and Mother Clap Ravenhill chooses the female body as the object of violence. In each case the violation works to define the queer male characters in the play. As discussed in my introduction, playwrights and filmmakers frequently use violence to illustrate and constitute the queer subject. In Mae West’s The Drag the connection between the queer subject and violence takes the form of a gay male murderer and his queer victim. In Six Degrees of Separation, The Children’s Hour, and numerous other plays, violence and the queer subject are connected by an act of suicide, violence perpetrated on the queer body by him- or herself. In Afore Night Come and The Sons of Light, David Rudkin connects violation and the queer subject

49 by creating characters who fight against violence and attempt to generate positive change in their societies. We have also seen how playwrights use the violence of rape as constitutive of the queer subject. In each of these cases, however, the queer subject is involved directly with the act of violation, either as its perpetrator or its victim. Some Explicit Polaroids and Mother Clap’s Molly House, however, displace the violence that the playwright is using to define the queer subject onto the body of a female victim. The vulnerable female body, victimized by men, is a dramatic device as old as western theatre itself. Indeed, one of the oldest extant plays from ancient Greece is Æschylus’ Suppliants, where fifty Greek virgins flee a forced marriage to their Ægyptian cousins. The action of the play follows the vulnerable females as they beg Pelasgus, ruler of Argos, for protection. In the Suppliants and other traditional iterations of this device, the male subject is evaluated, defined, by his response to the violence enacted on the vulnerable female body: the Ægyptians pursue the women, Pelasgus rescues them. In the plays discussed in this chapter, Ravenhill exploits this dramatic trope with a twist. These plays are about the male subject, and he is measured—as is the Argive ruler Pelasgus—by his response to the violence directed toward the vulnerable female body. Ravenhill’s characters are negligent when it comes to protecting and advocating for the vulnerable women in Polaroids and Mother Clap, and the playwright uses their worthless responses to these acts of violence to critique the twenty-first-century queer subject. It is important to note, however, that to characterize his male subjects as hedonistic, selfish, and irresponsible, Ravenhill displaces the vulnerable queer male body. He characterizes the male subject as weak, but to do so, he objectifies the female body. He creates another, even weaker body—the victim of an act of violation—with which he then compares his ineffectual male subjects. For Mark Ravenhill, queer identity is the answer to none of society’s problems. On the contrary, Ravenhill’s queer characters exemplify apolitical contemporary culture in all of its excess and grotesquerie. This callousness is most evident in Polaroids and Mother Clap when Ravenhill juxtaposes contemporary gay culture with an injured female body. Twenty years ago, in her seminal study Between Men, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick stressed that “profound and intuitable as the bonds between feminism and antihomophobia often are in our society, the two forces are not the same. As the alliance between them is not automatic or transhistorical, it will be most helpful if it is analytic and unpresuming” (20). Polaroids and Mother Clap point to this disconnect in contemporary gay culture between anti-homophobic discourse and feminism. As Ravenhill says in British Theatre of the 1990s, “having spending power makes you mainstream, not marginalized.” (92). In Some Explicit Polaroids and Mother Clap’s Molly House, homonormative gay culture appears unstoppable. It has become so much a part of mainstream society, that it creates its own margins, ignoring violence against women in favor of shopping and fucking.

50 CONCLUSION

I began research for this thesis because of an article by Randy Gener in the Gay & Lesbian Review entitled “Joe Orton’s Sexual Revolution.” Gener’s piece is about the queer characters in Joe Orton’s plays and Orton’s boundary-pushing subject matter, but I was struck in particular by Gener’s discussion of the playwright’s death. Three years after beginning his career as a playwright, Joe Orton was murdered in 1967 by his lover and mentor Kenneth Halliwell. Gener says that Orton’s death changed how people looked at his life and work: Like [Oscar] Wilde, as well as many past tragic figures of homosexual culture who meet gruesome deaths, Orton was used by the straight world to stereotype gay life as pathetic and filled with debauchery and empty nihilism. Framed by their deaths, both Wilde and Orton are darkly resonant of the “crime does not pay” ethos—morality tales about doomed gay lives that the world could not tolerate and that must inevitably implode.76 Gener’s article immediately got me thinking about other queer artists whose lives had similarly been represented by media as self-destructive and untenable: Joe Orton and Oscar Wilde, certainly, but also Sal Mineo, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Leslie Cheung, etc. As the story goes, they were oh-so-brilliant artists but they led lives of destruction and violence and their deaths were oh-so-tragic but also unavoidable because a queer life is a sad life. The arrival of AIDS in the 1980s began to be framed by media in this way as well. The disease was described by many as a punishment for being gay. In each of these instances an equation is drawn with a queer life on one side and a premature but inevitable death on the other. I knew this equation to be a nonsensical one, but I began to wonder about the prevalence of the trope in news-media, in literary fiction, and also on the stage. It was this question that eventually brought me to Mark Ravenhill and David Rudkin. I began seeking out plays where queer characters committed murder or violently assaulted others. I looked for films with queer villains or straight villains who had creepily queer sidekicks. I began to see these violent queer characters everywhere, and I started naming iterations of the queer killer trope as a dramatic technique for distancing the audience from the villain. I have since expanded my exploration of violence and queer subjectivity from the topic of gay killers. I changed my mind when I saw a production of Cirque du Soleil’s Zumanity, directed by René-Richard Cyr, in May of 2007. The show is filled with acrobatic and comedic performances that refer to queer sexualities of various kinds, but in the show’s single gay male act, the two men onstage are featured in violent conflict—wrestling and struggling against one another—inside a steel cage. After their acrobatics are completed, the cage is flown out and the two men kiss passionately before leaving the stage. I loved Zumanity; I still think it is the best show on the Las Vegas strip, but I could not help wondering why gay male sexuality in the show was represented in terms of violent confrontation.

76 Randy Gener, “Joe Orton’s Sexual Revolution,” Gay & Lesbian Review 14.3 (2007): 12.

51 In this study we have discussed murderers, suicides, men who sacrifice themselves for the good of their societies, rapists, victims of rape, men who turn aside as a woman is beaten, and men who fail to cope with women who have seriously injured themselves. Acts of violence abound in contemporary society, and they are ubiquitous on our stages and in our movie houses. Further, playwrights and filmmakers continue to write gay, lesbian, and other queer characters who are defined by acts of violence. This document is intended to be an introduction to ways of examining violence as constitutive of the queer subject on stage. I have chosen two specific British playwrights and examined some of the acts of violence they have written and the queer characters who are defined by that violence. There is, of course, much more work to be done on this topic. Rudkin and Ravenhill are only two of the many playwrights who use violence to discuss queer subjectivity. Numerous other queer theatre artists do this, many of whom work and perform in the United States. The list includes Carl Morse, David Drake, Charles Busch, Terrence McNally, Nicky Silver, Craig Lucas, Cherríe Moraga, and Edward Albee, to name only a few. Indeed, the two playwrights in this study each have numerous plays where violence and queer subjectivity intersect; I have discussed only five at length. Many (ostensibly) heterosexual writers have also written plays with violent queer characters, and this work needs to be examined just as much as the work of queer artists does. The work of Mark Ravenhill’s British contemporaries is particularly rich ground for the exploration of this topic. Several of the writers to whom Aleks Sierz refers as in-yer-face playwrights have written plays where queer subjectivity is bound up with acts of violation. Certainly the plays of Sarah Kane, Anthony Neilson, and Philip Ridley would all benefit from an examination begun from this point of view. We ought not to limit our examinations to queer characters who commit violent acts, either. The question is how the playwright in each instance has used violence as a constitutive element of the queer subject she or he describes. Images of queer people in relationship to violence—and critical analyses of those images—are important because they have a powerful effect on the lives of queer men and women. Didier Eribon, in his book Insult and the Making of the Gay Self argues that insults and verbal attacks become a “formative part” of the personalities of queer people.77 He offers that: [I]nsult is only the extreme form on a linguistic, cultural, and social continuum that also includes malicious gossip, allusions, insinuations, spiteful remarks, and jokes that are more or less explicit, more or less nasty. [. . .] All of these attenuated or displaced forms of insult together form the linguistic horizon of the hostility within which gay people lead their lives. (46) Images of violent queers and other representations of queer people in relationship to violence form a part of this “linguistic, cultural, and social continuum.” These representations are important to explore because they serve to define queer people through control and subjugation. Further, whether in service of a homophobic project or attempting to provide positive images of lesbian and gay people, representations of queer-identified people have an impact on our entire culture because they also create, reinforce, and support the boundaries of heterosexuality which control and subjugate all people, queer and straight, who live in heteronormative society.

77 Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self (Durham: Duke UP, 2004) 16. Further citations from Insult and the Making of the Gay Self will be given by page number in the text.

52 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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53 ———. The History of Sexuality – Volume 1: an Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Trans. of La Volenté de Savoir, 1976. Fromm, Erich. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973. Gener, Randy. “Joe Orton’s Sexual Revolution.” Gay & Lesbian Review 14.3 (2007): 10-2. Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. New York: Routledge, 1995. Hart, Lynda. Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. Hellman, Lillian. The Children’s Hour. Six Plays by Lillian Hellman. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. 1-78. Kane, Sarah. Complete Plays. London: Methuen, 2001. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Trans. of Pouvoirs de l’Horreur, 1980. Marlowe, Christopher. Edward II. The Complete Plays. Ed. J.B. Steane. Middlesex: Penguin, 1975. McMullen, Richie. Male Rape: Breaking the Silence on the Last Taboo. London: Gay Men’s Press, 1990. Norton, Rictor. Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700-1830. Revised 2nd ed. London: Chalford Press, 2006. Rabey, David Ian. David Rudkin – Sacred Disobedience: an Expository Study of His Drama 1959-96. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997. ———. English Drama Since 1940. London: Longman, 2003. Ravenhill, Mark. “The Bottom Line.” Guardian 20 June 2001. 15. ———. British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics. Ed. Mireia Aragay, Hildegard Klein, Enric Monforte and Pilar Zozaya. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ———. “My Pink Fountain Pen Has Run Dry.” Guardian 12 November 2007. ———. Plays: 1. London: Methuen, 2001. ———. “Plays about Men.” State of Play Issue I: Playwrights on Playwriting. Ed. David Edgar. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1999. 48-55. Ravenhill, Mark, Hilary Fannin, Stephen Greenhorn, and Abi Morgan. Sleeping Around. London: Methuen, 1998. Ravenhill, Mark and Matthew Scott. Mother Clap’s Molly House. London: Methuen, 2001. Rebellato, Dan. Introduction. Plays: 1. By Mark Ravenhill. London: Methuen, 2001. ix-xx. Rudkin, David. Afore Night Come. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

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56 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Aaron C. Thomas grew up in and around Pasadena, CA. He graduated magna cum laude in 2003 with a B.A. in Theatre Arts at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, California. He has since worked professionally as a director, assistant director, vocal coach, text coach, and theatre educator. Aaron is focused on both the production and study of theatre, and wants to continue to combine his theatre scholarship with the practice of theatre. This thesis is the culmination of a full year of work in the field of queer theory, and he plans to continue to write about both violence and queer subjectivity.