Women in Theatre (Contemporary Theatre Review Series)

CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL Editor in Chief: Franc Chamberlain, Nene College, Northampton, UK. Editorial Board: Rufus Collins (Netherlands), Leon Gitelman (Russia), Malcolm Knight (UK), Jacques Lecoq (France), Judith Malina (USA), Neville Shulman (UK), Anatoly M.Smeliansky (Russia), Maria Delgado (UK). Aims and Scope Contemporary Theatre Review is an international journal concerned with all aspects of theatre—from text-based drama and current developments worldwide, to work of an interdisciplinary or cross-cultural nature. The journal includes primary material, production notes, documents and interviews as well as research. Contemporary Theatre Review complements the companion Contemporary Theatre Studies book series. Notes for contributors can be found at the back of the journal.

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Introduction Julia Pascal

This introduction explores some of the feminist debates conducted by theatre practitioners over the past fifteen years. It is a personal account of the editor’s own experience coupled with an analysis of several, particularly British, problems. KEY WORDS The Glass Ceiling, drama-as-conflict, The Conference of Women Theatre Directors and Administrators. My impulse for editing this work was to encourage the feminist debate in theatre. During the last decade in Britain, the serious discussion has gone on mainly in secret. Anxiety about criticising inequality, particularly in the subsidised sector, has been, and still is, widespread. Many women practitioners fear jeopardising future possible employment by expressing feminist views. In a world of high unemployment and fierce competition between rival males, women’s position is extremely weak. Sexual apartheid is frequently the norm in British state theatre. Although government funding bodies, such as the Arts Council and Regional Arts Associations, have pressured clients to employ the disabled and those from so called ‘ethnic minorities’—there is no such parallel impulse to offer equality to women. The writers, I invited to write for this edition, were not involved in those particularly British discussions because most of them live elsewhere. They speak from their individual experiences and their own cultural and political backgrounds. But many of the issues raised are international. Béatrice Picon-Vallin offers the works of the Russian playwright Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. In two papers, Celita Lamar examines the contemporary French perspective. The French Revolution, as seen through the eyes of modern playwright Vera Feyder, is analysed by Patricia Lancaster. British gay politics are explored by Jackie Clune. Elizabeth Jane Schafer examines Cleopatra through the male gaze. Susan Lynn Carlson gives us the Midwest’s Omaha Magic Theatre. A pragmatic view of women’s role in Australian theatre is offered by Peta Tait. Susan Bassnett takes a look at contemporary Italian Theatre and Susan Bennett at Canadian theatre.

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But what of the British debate? It was one weekend in the early 1980s that the women’s theatre movement lurched from a state of imminent rebellion to subservient reform. The moment in question was the end of a long-running series of debates held by The Conference of Women Theatre Directors and Administrators. This organisation was a thinktank engaging in theories of women’s working methods. It also surveyed the state of women’s employment in British subsidised theatres and found out, to nobody’s suprise, that women were either secretaries, personal assistants, domestic workers and occasionally assistant directors or designers. The majority of women directors were to be found marginalised, on the ill-funded fringe. Women administrators fared slightly better in small and middle scale companies but hardly figured at all in the large playing arenas of the high profile theatres such as the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company. The governing bodies or boards, as they are known, were also examined. It was found then (and in 1994, little has changed) that most boards—the so-called ‘great and good’ were a majority of men with a few token ‘ladies’. This meant that women applying for high profile jobs were always made to feel outsiders to the norm. I should perhaps state my own background to show where I personally fit in to the debate. I am the granddaughter of Roumanian Jews who settled in Manchester on my mother’s side and, paternally, the great-granddaughter of Lithuanian Jews who ended up in Dublin. The Roumanians were of a liberal bourgeois mentality and the Lithuanians rooted in the mores of the nineteenth century ghetto. My father was of the generation that moved from a family of impecunious Talmud scholars to the respectable Anglo-Irish world of medicine. He and his three brothers studied medicine at Trinity College Dublin and were the first generation to go to university. The money to pay their fees was earned by their sisters who played piano for the silent movies. My father, true to his background, urged me to spurn education, marry in to a good Jewish family and produce sons! My ambition to work in theatre was considered a sin close to prostitution! I refused his world. In 1967, I was accepted as a student at E15 Acting School which was inspired by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop methods. I then acted for four years. At 24 I wanted to move from acting to directing and read English Literature at London University. While taking finals, I returned to acting at the National Theatre and then, after a year as Associate Director at The Orange Tree Theatre, formed Pascal Theatre Company. The decision to go to university changed my life and was the most important step in my personal liberation. I wanted to use my education to help myself and others express themselves in the world I know best—theatre. But none of us can work in isolation and it was important to me to connect with those who were not part of the Oxbridge establishment. In the daily British newspaper The Guardian, and the now defunct weekly London Magazine City Limits, I wrote of inequality in Peter Hall’s National Theatre and in Trevor Nunn’s Royal Shakespeare Company. This provoked an immediate reaction as token women were briefly hired as writers and directors but, fundamentally, the power structure remained static. At the same time, interestingly enough, black actors were agitating for integrated casting and their protest had some measure of success. They were ready to be more vociferous than the mainly white, middle class women practitioners. They knew they had nothing to lose whereas the women already felt themselves somewhat privileged in this society and therefore were less willing to rock the boat. They did not realize that even if one is born middle class and privileged there is no need to identify with this state of mind. By the mid 1980s the argument amongst us progressed. Gloria Steinem’s question was raised. Did we just want a piece of the cake or did we want to bake a new one? The larger political questions of class, race and working methods were occasionally touched upon and quickly forgotten. Since 1990 The Glass Ceiling Debates organised by The Sphinx Theatre Company (formerly Women’s Theatre Group) have revitalised the debate. But the gap between talk and action is still to be breached.

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For this volume, many of the women theatre directors I admire could not be persuaded to write of their experience. It was as if the doing itself could not be analysed yet. Part of our discussions a decade ago asked where were we to find models. Should we copy the male style of Oxbridge game-playing where the director is the model of his form master; the gentle or perhaps didactic pedagogue leading the rehearsal room as if it were a minor public school? On a deeper level we asked ourselves should we be the dictator or the democrat? Should we follow Socrates and the drama-as-conflict theory or redefine drama as an expression of lateral thinking? As playwrights, we knew our texts could also be inspired by dreams, song and dance. We looked at the drama of continents other than our own white western Europe. We saw that Indian and African dance drama could also teach us skills. Students of Peter Brook and admirers of his book The Empty Space, we knew that we also were entering a holy place. But whose holy place? If theatre in Britain connects back to the Church and its Mystery Plays, then how could we escape the unconscious male collective memory of theatre/church as a place where woman is a spectator and never a leader: a place indeed where she is often ‘unclean’ and where her voice should not be heard. Are the images of Eve, Mary Magdalene and Mary The Virgin, still firmly rooted in that memory? In the Apocrypha we read that Lilith, Adam’s first wife, was thrown out of the Garden of Eden for manifesting her sexual power. Lilith who steals babies, steals semen, steals creativity: is the warning to all ‘disobedient’ females. Today’s current conflict about the place of women priests in the Anglican Church tells us that in Europe, the power struggle for control of the ‘holy’ is still crucial. Where women have been hugely instrumental in changing British theatre their role has been forgotten. Without Annie Horniman or Lilian Baylis there would be no National Theatre today. But The National Theatre has named no Baylis or Horniman Theatre in their honour. Poor Lilian Baylis has only a National Theatre Terrace and Annie Horniman—no mention at all. Returning to our recent historical perspective, at the momentous meeting a decade ago, a minority of us suggested approaching the Arts Council of Great Britain (as it was then known). We proposed that they only fund our national theatres when these institutions implement an equal opportunities policy. Some of us were learning from our black theatre colleagues’ demands. If black theatre workers could demand equality, why couldn’t we women? When the debate started, a majority of Conference participants expressed alarm. They said, ‘let’s have meetings with Peter Hall and see if we can improve the situation’. At the National Theatre, representatives from the Conference were politely listened to, smiles were offered by the women hoping for employment and, of course, in that particularly British way, nothing happened. The root of the problem was these women’s deep fear of political confrontation. And, being British, they were in a double bind. As women they had learnt to “get their way” by being “good little girls” and not by making demands. As middle class British citizens they had learnt that “good behaviour” means never expressing too strong an opinion or standing out in a group. Although they could acknowledge that others making demands, such as the gay and the black practitioners, were being heard, the women, unable to see themselves as ‘outsiders’, individually hoped to gain entrance through the back door as the chosen exception. Those who have gained entrance through the action of the more militant activists, have remained silent about their role as the token women in these state theatres. In Thatcher’s spirit, they have never challenged the state theatres on their position. It is as if the establishment has bought their silence.

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The Conference of Women Theatre Directors and Administrators decided to persevere with its soft option of talks—not—action. There was a general desire ‘not to cause trouble’. There was little political awareness except a low level feeling that ‘things are not quite right’. At the open vote only the women’s theatre company Clean Break (an ensemble composed of former prisoners, mostly gay, working class) and myself voted for direct action. The majority were seduced by the Thatcher idea of setting up shop in the private sector. This gave the illusion of activity without engaging in political confrontation. The Women’s Playhouse Trust was formed to buy a West End theatre and produce commercial plays. It was a Thatcherite idea which encouraged the dream of, sponsorship from rich Tory ladies, and gaining patrons such as Lady Di to help raise sponsorship. Of course few fairy godmothers appeared. In the early 1980s we saw male establishment directors who had graduated in a climate of civil liberties during the 1960s and seventies, men once the vanguards of freedom and anti-censorship, now in their middle age, controlling these exclusive power structures. We, as women, were paying taxes to subsidise state theatres which refused our equal participation. Even Tory feminists acknowledged this injustice but, so great was their fear of confrontation, that the Conference was unable to progress. All debate ceased and the majority still continued to slog it out on the ill-funded fringe. There have been some recent improvements, particularly in the regions. Today there is Jude Kelly at Leeds Playhouse and Helena Kaut-Howson at Theatre Clwyd. (As we go to press it is revealed that, despite her success at Clwyd, the Board is not renewing her contract.) Annie Castledine was Artistic Director at Derby Playhouse for several years. But these are the still the exceptions. It is with ‘Auntie’ (the pet name for BBC Radio) that women have flourished as writers, directors and producers (Radio is still perceived-wrongly-by many to be a women’s medium.) Is the situation different in France or Germany? I asked group of leading French journalists if women are well-represented in theatre. ‘We have had our feminist movement’ they tell me. ‘There is no discrimination’. Indeed there seems to be no great surge of women’s playwriting or directing in France but then, theatrically, there is little New Writing at all. During the 1970s and early 1980s, Britain encouraged New Writing Schemes which obliged companies to commission emerging talent. In France, there was no such funding pressure. In Paris and the provinces, this is Director’s Theatre where directors, usually male (the notable exception is Ariane Mnouchkine) adapt a novel or present yet another high-tech production of Shakespeare. An invitation by The Goethe Institute to Berlin’s 1993 Theatertreffen gave me a sense of the contemporary German theatre scene. Theatertreffen is a two week May festival where ‘the best of German theatre’ is shown in Berlin. Of the twelve productions selected, two have women directors. There are no women writers represented. But then many of the male writers are dead: Shakespeare, Rolf Hochhuth, Georg Büchner, Alexander Ostrowski, Hugo Von Hofmanthsthal. Does it really matter that women are so poorly represented in European theatre? Won’t they continue to write and direct despite their disadvantaged positions? Being a talented writer or director is not enough. The individual has to know how to engage in the larger political struggle. It means ‘coming out’ rather than trying to gain a special individual place in the sun. Theatre is a very public world and (s)he who holds the purse strings dictates the cultural and political agenda. What is the answer? In the commercial world, Agatha Christie is London’s longest running successful author. Where money talks gender politics are irrelevant. In Britain, France and Germany the subsidised theatre is a microcosm of state politics whether Left or Right is in power. At this moment Jacques Toubon, France’s Minister for Culture, is replacing Jack Lang’s Socialist appointments. In this merry-go-round, the men exchange places as Right replaces Left. But, onstage, does anything really change?

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Women in European theatre—and internationally—need to move towards concerted political action. Black performers have begun a serious and fearless movement. Their battle is not won but at least their rights as British citizens and performers have been recognized and changes have been made. Women theatre workers have to be braver in their demand for equality. We are 52% of the population and yet we accept sexual apartheid in our cultural establishments. Power has to be taken by whatever means possible—all revolutions show us that it is never freely given up. What have we to lose—but our silence. Julia Pascal was the first woman director at The National Theatre. Her plays include: the dramatisation of Dorothy Parker’s writings, Men Seldom Make Passes, (National Theatre), Far Above Rubies (Drill Hall), Charlotte & Jane for BBC Television, Theresa, A Dead Woman On Holiday, The Dybbuk and Year Zero/L’Année Zero. She is a theatre director and founder of Pascal Theatre Company working both in Britain and Europe. Her childhood autobiography Prima Ballerina Assoluta is published by Virago in Truth, Dare or Promise.

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Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, the Male Gaze, and Madonna: Performance Dilemmas Elizabeth Schafer Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London

Shakespeare’s Cleopatra offers much material for feminist analysis; however, her circumscription by the male gaze is disabling both for herself and for women caught in the trap of believing ‘infinite variety’ to be a desideratum in a woman. Consequently Cleopatra’s success in playing to the gaze needs to be deconstructed. Cross reference to the example of Madonna suggests that even an intensely self-conscious and analytical performer is likely, finally, to collude with the oppression of the male gaze. KEY WORD: Shakespeare’s Cleopatra: male gaze: feminist criticism: Madonna A striking feature of Shakespeare’s construction of Cleopatra is its overt theatricality. Barbara Freedman (1991) suggests that theatricality involves a subject who is always ‘aware that she is seen’ and ‘reflects that awareness, and so deflects our look’ (p. 1). This offers a useful approach to Cleopatra and suggests that Antony and Cleopatra, like the Shakespearian comedies examined by Freedman, could be seen to be playing subversive and complex ‘games with right spectatorship’ and problematizing the action of presuming to ‘read’ (p. 20). However, Cleopatra’s potentially subversive theatricality also tragically confines Shakespeare’s construction of the (camp) queen/quean of Egypt. Cleopatra is consistently exhibited as trapped by and yet also in collusion with the male gaze, a gaze which feminist theatre critics are increasingly committed to deconstructing (Case, 1988; Austin, 1990; Freedman, 1991). Positioning Shakespeare’s Cleopatra as both a victim of and accomplice with the male gaze is a depressing project because in many ways she is the only consistently stimulating, seriously heroic female character created by Shakespeare. The extent of the challenge she provides to dominant ideology is evidenced by the lengths critics have gone to in order to discredit her theatrical power; Linda Fitz (1977) charts the overt misogyny successive generations of ‘objective’ academic male critics have had to deploy in order to discredit the character. The tradition of demonising Cleopatra is continued and far more widely disseminated, in the cover illustration of the new penguin edition of Antony and Cleopatra. Antony’s ‘serpent of old Nile’ (I.5.25) is represented as a hooded cobra, dangerous and clearly poised to strike. The snake is encircling/strangling a broken off/castrated Roman column, the fallen remains of Antony’s manhood. A fig leaf references not only the basket of figs in which the ‘asp’ is conveyed to Cleopatra but also the misogynist linking of snakes and ‘evil’ women in the Eve story. The fact that the snake also

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suggests the royalty of the pharaonic crown hardly compensates for the overwhelming impression—on a symbolic level—that the snake Cleopatra is a devouring vamp. The need for such misogynist tactics to be deployed only confirms that of all Shakespeare’s plays Antony and Cleopatra offers some of the most exciting and amenable material for feminist analysis, inviting the feminist critic of Renaissance drama to take a break from the usual disempowering routine of charting woman as victim, the monstrous feminine and seductively packaged misogyny. For example, on the basis of her lyrical reading of Antony and Cleopatra Helene Cixous (1987, p. 122) can claim approvingly that Shakespeare ‘was neither man nor woman but a thousand persons’. Woodbridge (1984) confirms that Antony and Cleopatra centres on a tragic and sympathetic sexually aware female character in a way almost unparalleled in the English Renaissance.1 The play is also suggestive for feminism in its iconography. The power of the mother goddess Isis is remembered at Cleopatra’s court (I.2.65, 68, 70: I.5.70: III.3.15) and Cleopatra identifies herself with the power of Isis when she appears in public in ‘th’ habiliments of the goddess’ (III.6.17). The image of Isis is sometimes serious, sometimes joking, but it is also picking up on centuries of recognition of effective female power. Another suggestive feature of the play for feminism is its emphasis on fluidity, on deliquescence. The over spilling Nile, in its destructive but also life giving expansiveness, offers an emblem of the play’s own overflowing, a structuring which could be described (in comparison with other plays by Shakespeare) as having a feminine morphology (Case, 1988, p. 129). Despite Philip J.Traci’s (1970) attempt to read the play as achieving a single, male, sexual climax, Antony and Cleopatra’s multiple climaxes, its refusal of clear focus or linear development all suggest a female libidinal flow. Cleopatra’s sensuous, (orgasmic?) deliquescent death (Neely, 1985, p. 161) also reconstitutes the phallic asp as Cleopatra’s baby at her breast, complicating Freud’s construction whereby a baby substitutes for a woman’s lack of the phallus (Gardiner, 1985). The snake is a particularly loaded symbol here because, before its appropriation as a phallic symbol, it was associated with the power of the mother goddesses, wisdom and healing (e.g. Hughes-Hallett (1991) plate 4). Perhaps the most obvious material for encouraging a feminist reading of Antony and Cleopatra appears in Cleopatra’s provocative play with gender roles. As many critics have pointed out, Cleopatra disrupts the masculinity of Antony and the femininity of herself;—she wears his ‘sword Phillipan’, he wears her ‘tires’ (II.5.22–3): Antony is ‘not more manlike/Than Cleopatra, not the queen of Ptolemy/More womanly than he’ (I.4.5–7): Cleopatra will ‘appear there for a man’ in battle (III.7.18): and Antony mourns ‘She has robbed me of my sword’ (IV.14.23.). However, the image I find most telling appears in Cleopatra’s comments on the treacherous Antony; ‘Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon,/The other way’s a Mars’ (II.5.116–7). The reference is to trick perspective pictures much in vogue in the Renaissance (Freedman, 1991, p. 28–9). However, the alternative views of Antony construct him either as the male god of war or the female, snake-haired Medusa whose gaze transfixed men and turned them to stone. Medusa is important as a myth figure because she offers a remnant of the mother goddess power outlawed and rendered monstrous by the patriarchal myths of Ancient Greece, ‘an image of womanly potency and castration which has always struck

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The only comparable character according to Woodbridge (1984) p. 260 is Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. Woodbridge claims that in the Renaissance; ‘Defenders of women almost never got beyond contending that the old ugly charges were not true, or not universally true. The duchess and Cleopatra are virtually the only women whose creators dared to maintain that the old ugly charges weren’t really ugly’.

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terror into male hearts’ (Hughes-Hallett (1991) p. 185).2 Cixous (1987) mocks the patriarchal terror; ‘All you have to do to see the Medusa is look her in the face: and she isn’t deadly. She is beautiful and she laughs’ (p. 69). However, the male inscribed version—Antony as Medusa—does, as it were, turn Cleopatra to stone or inanimacy with its gaze; playing for a final time to Antony’s gaze the dying Cleopatra ‘changes before our eyes from a breathing human being into an inanimate work of art, something to be gazed at—as Caesar and his men do in fact gaze at her’ (Jones, 1977, p. 42). Cleopatra is also however, damagingly complicit with the male gaze that kills her. Partly this is a survival strategy. Despite the fact that Cleopatra is queen of Egypt, her femaleness means she has both to pander to the male power brokers— That Herod’s head I’ll have; but how, when Antony is gone, Through whom I might command it? (III.3.4–6). and play to their gaze—‘my becomings kill me when they do not/Eye well to you (Antony)’ (I.3.96–7). Cleopatra’s enthusiasm for playing to the gaze is also related to her much commented upon fondness for play acting; Cleopatra, catching but the least noise of this, dies instantly. I have seen her die twenty times upon far poorer moment. I do think there is mettle in death, which commits some loving act upon her, she hath such a celerity in dying (I.2.141–5). Her ‘infinite variety’—an attribute which, given its enthusiastic endorsement by the ‘boringly conventional antifeminst’ Enobarbus (Fitz, 1977, p. 306),3 we should resist as a desideratum—is simply skill in acting or deceit. Loomba (1989) finds subversion here and a ‘threat’ allied to the threat Renaissance popular theatre ‘posed to the status quo’ (p. 77). Cixous (1987) celebrates Cleopatra’s enjoyment of playacting to the gaze; She knew how to give herself to being seen, to bestow unforgettable beauty on seeing, in a representation whose moments rhythm the awakening of desire, its blooming and its delighted satisfaction (p. 126) and goes on to speak of Cleopatra organizing the look’s route, by degrees, by a series of postponements, of detours, of approximations that excite and suspend and make souls spin around the fire…Then she, immobile and apparently indifferent, seemingly passive, yields to the looks, which she calls, which she takes (p. 127).

2

Australian playwright Alma de Groen, in her play The Rivers of China, deconstructs both the male gaze and a liberal feminist counterpart, ‘the medusa look’, which has developed in a dystopia where women rule men as oppressively as men ruled women under patriarchy. De Groen insists that binary oppositions male/female, powerful/powerless must be broken down not merely reversed. Her choice of the emblem of the medusa look is challenging, not least in the definite attractions of such a phenomenon alongside the horrifying limitations De Groen evokes. 3 See also Fitz writing as Woodbridge (1984) p. 294–7.

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In the face of such ecstasy it seems churlish, but vital, to maintain that the frame of the male gaze also places Cleopatra’s play acting as tragic, even desperate, self fashioning. The desperate element is most forcibly suggested by the interchange between Cleopatra and Charmian in I.3. discussing tactics, specifically which tactics will ensure the gaze of Antony the power broker is kept fixed upon Cleopatra. The ‘infinite variety’ here becomes a frenzied attempt to entertain, to attract the gaze, seeking to counteract any possible diminishing of Cleopatra’s beauty with the onset of age and wrinkles (Fitz, 1977, p. 300–1). The queen whom ‘everything becomes’ (I.1.49), who is ever ready to improvise and switch roles—‘If you find him sad,/Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report/That I am sudden sick’ (I.3.3–5)—is maintaining an exhausting performance regime as oppressive, and as predictable, (Fitz, 1977, p. 316) as anything described by Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (1991). Wolf is describing a phenomenon she sees as a backlash response to the successes of second wave feminism but the condition she describes intersects with the behaviour Shakespeare attributes to Cleopatra—consciousness of aging, compensatory acting and stage management (‘Age cannot wither her’ (II.2.240)), the diversion of energies in a woman who does have actual power into ludicrous ploys aimed at fascinating men (thereby assuring them that her power cannot ultimately challenge theirs), etc. The most damning indictment of Cleopatra in terms of her endorsement of the ‘beauty myth’ and competition for the gaze, however, comes in her construction and treatment of Octavia. Cleopatra clearly accepts the dangerous standards of the male gaze and measures herself by her ability to capture and hold that gaze—she gloats that;great Pompey Would stand and make his eyes grow in my brow; There would he anchor his aspect, and die With looking on his life (I.5.31–4) Something of the risk Cleopatra is running is indicated by the fact that this standard is so enthusiastically endorsed by Cleopatra’s antagonists. Enobarbus pays tribute (on his terms) when he comments that Antony at Cydnus paid ‘his heart/For what is eyes (ate) only’ (II.2.230–11). Philo grudgingly admits Cleopatra’s power when he complains that Antony’s goodly eyes, That o’er the files and musters of the war Have glowed like plated Mars, now bend, now turn The office and devotion of their view Upon a tawny front. (I.1.2–6). Most revealingly, however, Enobarbus (in response to Antony’s ‘Would I had never seen her!’) even as he praises Cleopatra’s skill in playing to the gaze, reduces her to the status of tourist attraction;O, sir, you had then left unseen a wonderful piece of work, which not to have been blessed withal would have discredited your travel. (I.2.154–6). Given Cleopatra’s endorsement of the gaze, it is not surprising that Caesar’s invitation to Antony to ‘view’ Octavia (II.2.172) is paralleled by Cleopatra’s desire to ‘view’ Octavia’s physical attributes vicariously, asking her messenger for details of height, voice, visible ‘majesty’, gait, age, roundness of face, colour of

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hair (III.3.). There is little interest in Octavia as anything more than a competing object of the gaze and this competition is used to create misogynist comedy. For example, III. 3. depends on the ‘joke’ of competitive female ‘bitchiness’, both in Cleopatra’s predictability in constructing Octavia unfavourably (‘low-voiced’ and not as tall as Cleopatra becomes ‘Dull of tongue, and dwarfish’ (1.16)) and the trap she falls into;Cleopatra: Messenger:

Widow? Charmian, hark. And I do think she’s thirty.

The stage tradition of playing this as a slap in the face for the thirtysomething Cleopatra invariably gets laughs. However, at the risk of appearing humourless, this comedy needs to be placed. The comic catfight element is extremely demeaning (as is the comedy of II.5. which constructs the representation of a woman inflicting violence on a man as a joke and in creating that joke, of course, belittles the ‘real’ power of the woman). Cleopatra’s construction of Octavia solely as a rival for the gaze of Antony also helps to create a divisive image of the female gaze. The only individualised gaze that Cleopatra fears in the crowd watching the triumphal procession, as she imagines it, is Octavia’s—her ‘sober’ (V.2.54.) and ‘modest eyes’ are imagined ‘Demuring’ upon Cleopatra (IV.15.27, 29). Antony also expects Cleopatra to be ‘shown’ in Caesar’s triumph as a prelude to being offered to ‘Patient Octavia’ for her to ‘plough (Cleopatra’s) visage up/With her prepared nails’ (IV.12.38–9). Although Shakespeare’s Cleopatra subscribes to Antony’s divisive vision, and expects a version of the Medusa look, a mutilating female gaze from Octavia, this caricature vision of female rivalry counters history; Octavia was so far from being dedicated to revenge that she brought up all the children of Antony and Cleopatra’s union. If the tactical discussion of I.3. shows some of the work that goes into maintaining Cleopatra’s ‘infinite variety’, that is her main resource in her one-upmanship (sic) over other women, more of the cost of playing to the male gaze is suggested in the fact that two of Cleopatra’s tour de force performances are extremely disabling for her and threaten her identity with annihilation. In Enobarbus’s description of the Cydnus performance, Cleopatra as human being entirely disappears behind Cleopatra’s costumes, hand properties, settings and crowds of extras. The peripherals are described in gorgeous detail but all we learn of Cleopatra is non-specific; ‘her person’ ‘beggared all description’ (II.2.202–03) and she ‘o’erpictur (ed)’ Venus. Even the air wants to ‘gaze’ on Cleopatra but her performance is so well stage managed that she herself becomes almost redundant, she becomes an absence. Cleopatra’s cry ‘O, my oblivion is a very Antony,/And I am all forgotten’ (I.3.90–1) seems disturbingly suggestive of the price she pays to perform successfully to Antony’s gaze. Freedman (1991) discusses play with absence and presence as a subversive strategy commenting on the nature of theatre and performance. However, Cleopatra’s ‘absence’ here resonates sinisterly with her ‘absence’ in her final ‘great’ performance, that is her death. Again accoutrements are all important; the image must be perfect. ‘Show me, my women, like a queen’ (V.2.227) says Cleopatra and so, before suiciding, Charmian adjusts the crown that’s ‘awry’, so that in death Cleopatra is playing perfectly to the male gaze—‘As he would catch another Antony’ (V.2.345). This death tableau is particularly suggestive for feminist readings dealing with fetishism (Kaplan, 1983, p. 31)—Cleopatra is quite literally objectified and with help from the phallic snake is comfortingly adjusted to the demands of the male gaze. Cleopatra is undeniably centre stage at this point. Callaghan (1989) discusses the gaze of the dead female characters of tragedy, in particular Cordelia and Desdemona, as creating a ‘dead centre’ (p. 96) upstaging the male hero and helping to induce crisis in him. Cleopatra, unusually among Renaissance tragic heroines, has no need here to upstage the male hero who is well beyond crisis. However, Cleopatra’s dead gaze may help to induce unease, if not crisis, in the audience as it offers such a profoundly disturbing theatrical

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appeal. She destroys her own identity in a way which can be pleasurable and indeed titillating to the male gaze but which also aligns the pleasure of the gaze with necrophilia. Something of the degree of pleasure an audience may derive from gazing on this scene can be conjured up by considering the possibility of its frustration—in a staging of Antony and Cleopatra which contested the gaze framing and deliberately staged Cleopatra’s death so that the audience could not see it. This would disrupt and question the dominance and acceptance of the male gaze in classical theatre extremely effectively but would totally destroy a famous theatrical set piece. This particular set piece—Cleopatra’s death—is also the tableau that Hughes-Hallett’s (1990) collection of Cleopatras suggests most artists expect their audiences to want to see most (second place would go to ‘Cleopatra feasting’). However, denying the theatre audience the ‘pleasure’ of witnessing Cleopatra’s death would be partly in line with Cleopatra’s own expressed wishes. In V.2.207–21 Cleopatra explains her suicide as a deliberate attempt to avoid two horrific prospects—firstly the fate of being subjected to a public gaze, out of her own control, in Caesar’s triumph, and secondly the fate of being represented to a public gaze, in a way she cannot control, in theatre. The first of these prospects is a horror shared by others in the play. Roman culture in Antony and Cleopatra is obsessed with demonstrating power by subjecting unwilling victims to a public gaze by means of a triumphal procession (see e.g. IV.12.33–7, IV.14.72, IV.15.23–5 and the whole of III.1. which consists of a triumph). Cleopatra would rather be exposed to the male gaze ‘stark nak’d’ (V.2.59), with her own stage management, than be exposed even in all her glory in a triumph, a show she cannot control because Caesar is stage managing it. The second nightmare prospect for Cleopatra, that of being exposed to a male gaze in theatre, is extremely confrontational for the play’s audience. The metatheatrical references in V.2. (particularly in Renaissance staging when a ‘squeaking boy’ would have been uttering the lines) clearly position the audience as oppressors in their acts of gazing. Cleopatra constructs the fate of being represented by an actor and being offered in an unauthorized form to the public gaze as something so horrific that one of her motives for suicide is to avoid seeing this happen. Here she, as it were, resists the creation of Shakespeare’s own text and we as audience members are made embarrassingly aware of the fact that we have paid money to subject Cleopatra to our gaze, that is to make her nightmare happen.4 Cleopatra plays to the gaze magnificently but finally this playing to the gaze helps to kill her. Framing Shakespeare’s Cleopatra by acknowledging her subordination to the gaze disempowers her but liberates the audience from being seduced by an oppressive myth of ‘infinite variety’ as a desideratum in a woman, from allowing Cleopatra (a male creation, written to be performed by a male to a male gaze) to set strained, unrealistic standards for ‘fascinating’ women and from being enthralled by a gaze which demands enormous sacrifices, in Cleopatra’s case granting apotheosis only in death. ***

4 Austin (1990), p. 90–1 discussess Wine in the Wilderness by Alice Childress in terms which are suggestive alongside Cleopatra’s ‘resistance’ to the creation of Shakespeare’s text. Tommy, the artist’s model does not allow Bill, the artist, ‘to devalue, punish, save, or fetishize her. The female “muse” resists being “written” as what she is not and acts as critic, before the fact, influencing the making of the art in a more active way than that of a passive model. She inserts “I am” into the picture.’

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The iniquitous nature of the trap Cleopatra is caught in and some of the dangers of performing an ‘infinite variety’ so successfully that even a misogynist like Enobarbus is captivated, are illuminated by a comparison with the public performances of Madonna.5 Like Cleopatra, Madonna is extremely skilful at stage managing her own infinitely variable iconicity. Both Cleopatra and Madonna rely heavily on camp, on dress ups, on overt theatricality, on enjoying the attention of an audience.6 What is more, in their performances Cleopatra and Madonna inhabit related territory; Cleopatra appears as the goddess Isis, Madonna appears as the sex goddess Marilyn Monroe; both gender bend; both create so many and such various self images that it is difficult to identify a ‘real’ identity; both flout decorum—the queen of Egypt indecorously hops through the public street, Madonna indecorously simulates masturbation on stage; both demand attention and stage manage spectacles which demand total attention on themselves; both have international political impact—Cleopatra changes the face of the Roman Empire, Madonna clashes with the Pope and causes riots in India. Cleopatra and Madonna also seem to me to intersect in offering very male versions of female sexuality. Cleopatra’s joyous sexuality may be astonishing in terms of Renaissance sexual politics but it is still portrayed in terms of misogynist stereotypes—particularly the bitchiness over Octavia which fulfils the fantasy of the male being fought over by two women—one the good ‘virgin’ type, the other the bad ‘whore’. Madonna parades an upfront sexuality which includes the very (traditionally) male characteristic of aggression and she evokes male dominated constructions of female sexuality in her quotations from pornography. In addition she offers very male identified visions of her own power; she has male dancers grovelling at her feet in a reversal rather than a deconstruction of power; when the dancer ‘Madonna’ escapes from the peepshow in the video of Open Your Heart, she is dressed in men’s clothes to signal her movement to empowerment; as the Madonna character in the video Justify My Love is revealed as the real power figure, she becomes a sex centred (and sexy) version of the successful, powerful, and male identified Marlene in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls—the moral of the video helpfully underlines this male identification: ‘Poor is the man (sic) whose pleasures depend on the permission of another’. It is partly because Madonna has such enormous power that she can play at disempowerment, imaging herself as victim in Open Your Heart and (initially) in Justify My Love, and even more problematically singing in Hanky Panky of the joys of being spanked. Despite the parody music and the throaty camp voice, Danny Ecclestone (1990), is right to point out (in a very classist remark): Y’see MADONNA a thousand bricklayers winkingly confide likes a bit of rough. As of course, do they all. Her declaration that ‘I’ll settle for the back of your hand’ hardly considers the fact that thousands of women are forced every day to settle for just that. Madonna may play at lack of control, being spanked for being naughty, but ultimately she is only playing. She has the power to dictate most of the rules of the game and when the games stop. In this the artistic construction of Madonna, like Shakespeare’s artistic construction of Cleopatra, offers an image of femaleness which can be liberating for most women only up to a point; both constructions empoweringly

5 I’m not suggesting direct influence here—apart from the tradition of the Hollywood queen, Madonna’s well publicised interest in Frida Kahlo indicates a more immediate source of interest in female self-fashioning. 6 For dependency on audience see In Bed With Madonna (released as Truth or Dare in America) (1991). Amidst the pretence of parading the private as public, Warren Beatty comments that Madonna ‘doesn’t want to live off camera’. Cleopatra’s private life is so public that she is only once alone (for five lines) in her entire play and when her man (camera?) is absent, she is bored and wishes to ‘sleep out’ (I.5.5) the time he is away.

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state that women can have huge power, but their image-making is not empowering for women who do not have the resources to compete in the infinite variety stakes or who do not want to play power games while the same old oppressive set of rules are still in force. As with her simultaneously empowering and disempowering imaging of her own power, Madonna’s projections of herself often seem to be simultaneously available for feminist applause and opprobrium. Judith Williamson in an excellent analysis of male sexism in the British reviews of Madonna’s ‘Blonde Ambition’ tour7 is right to remind us both that ‘Darlings, MADONNA is CAMP’ and that the ‘armour plated’ underwear as outerwear is witty and speaking seriously of a female vulnerability, the need to wear armour if discoursing in public on the subject of female sexuality. However, the exaggeratedly breasted ‘armour’ also evokes the quasi-pornographic caricature women of science fiction and fantasy comic strips. Again, the furore over the ‘Blonde Ambition’ tour placed female sexuality on the agenda for debate in national newspapers—but female sexuality was being defined only in limited ways, most of them centering on aggression. And despite generating debate on the subject of female sexuality, the recorded voices in the press generally demonised Madonna—as Cleopatra’s frankly sexual voice was demonised by male critics for so long (Fitz, 1977). A similar tension is also to be found in Madonna’s analysis of and playing to the male gaze. One of the foremost proponents of male gaze analysis, E.Ann Kaplan (1987) examines the complexities of Madonna’s video Material Girl—where the video contradicts the materialist message of the song lyrics—and identifies Madonna as a: postmodern feminist heroine with her odd combination of seductiveness and a gutsy sort of independence. (p. 117)

However, Madonna, like Cleopatra, can be read as dedicated to projecting a self image in such as way as to hold the male gaze and attract the wealth and power that goes with it. And although Madonna’s medium, video, gives her far more power over the gaze, more control than Cleopatra in the theatre (or even more unstably, in a reading of the play) yet Madonna still has problems, like Cleopatra, in terms of what it means to play to the male gaze, despite the fact that, in her performance work, Madonna displays an acute awareness and critical analysis of this gaze. Madonna explicitly features the male gaze as a subject in the narratives of her videos Justify My Love and Open Your Heart; indeed Open Your Heart offers an almost textbook exposé of the male gaze and mocks this gaze by assembling a parody parade of ‘male’ gazers which includes a female transvestite and several caricature cardboard cut outs. In Justify My Love the gaze is problematized as it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish female and male or who is gazing at whom. Open Your Heart portrays the male gaze (and performance generally?) as a dirty raincoat, peepshow mentality which the performer Madonna breaks free of when she escapes with a small boy who has been trying to get in to the peepshow. Madonna’s role as performer is clearly characterized as involving unpleasant subjugation to the gaze as long as she remains at the peepshow, something which indicts the gaze of both her on and off camera audiences. However, her escape from the gaze is both unbelievably fairytale—skipping off into the sunset with a small boy (something which can admittedly be read as a fairly

7 Williamson is devastating at the expense of some of the critics: ‘John Sweeney on The Observer felt that in MADONNA’S masturbatory act to ‘Like a Virgin’, ‘she was clearly enjoying herself, but it seemed there was someone (or something) missing…’ ‘You, Big Boy?’

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contentious ‘happy ending’ given the kiss Madonna gives the boy) and fallacious—because in her act of escape from the gazers of the peepshow Madonna is still of course subjected to the gaze of the video viewer. Justify My Love plays with the gaze by problematizing right reading (particularly on gender) and by initially misleading the viewer into reading Madonna’s role as that of a disempowered woman. In a liberal feminist gesture, the narrative reveals Madonna as the real power figure—the final image is of her laughing with joy, having obtained the pleasure she set out to obtain. There are subversive qualities; the gender bending, the multiple role-playing, the overt theatricality, the lesbianism. However, the lesbianism is performed to an on-camera male gaze, which sites the sequence more in terms of traditional pornography than radical feminism, particularly as the video is full of quotations from pornography, evoking, as it does, wholesale oppression of women. Even when Madonna herself becomes the gazer and watches others performing sex, the power structure of the gaze is not interfered with—the gender of the gazer has changed but the same politics of oppression are in place—it’s just that Madonna has assumed a power role more usually occupied by men than women in our society. For me this sequence hardly critiques the gaze, it plays to it and validates it as a source of pleasure. Justify Your Love, for me, constructs women as sex-centred, as on heat and incapable of ever really meaning ‘no’. Madonna is protected by her wealth, power and bodyguards from running the danger of having to pay the cost that this video has the power to exact. However, while, for me, Madonna’s assiduous and sex-centred playing to the gaze is finally regressive, it has to be conceded that, in her two videos Open Your Heart and Justify Your Love, she has done more to popularise the notion of the male gaze than any academic discussion could hope to do and has reached an enormous audience no academic could ever hope to match. Freedman (1991) comments that ‘Since the male is traditionally envisioned as the bearer of the gaze and the woman as the fetishized object of the gaze, the staging of any spectacle is always a matter of sexual difference’ (p. 117). Hence it is not surprising that despite Madonna’s acute awareness of and ridicule of the gaze in her spectacular videos, she ends up playing to the gaze more than she subverts it. When Madonna is so successfully contained by the gaze, it seems inevitable that ‘Cleopatra’ in performing her gaze conscious spectacles will also be contained utterly by the gaze. However, in the theatre, a performer playing Cleopatra may, by means of an awareness of the performance dilemmas generated by the stranglehold of the gaze, at least find ways of resisting if not defeating that gaze. References Austin, Gayle. (1990) Feminist Theories For Dramatic Criticism Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press Callaghan, Dympna. (1989) Women and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy Brighton: Harvester Case, Sue-Ellen. (1988) Feminism and Theatre London: Macmillan Cixous, Helene, and Catherine Clement. (1987) The Newly Born Woman translated by Betsy Wing, Manchester: University Press De Groen, Alma. (1989) The Rivers of China in Australia Plays edited by Katharine Brisbane, London: Nick Hern Ecclestone, Danny. (1990) ‘Slap, crackle and pop—just when you thought you didn’t want to read another article about what MADONNA means to other women…Danny Ecclestone airs his own views on the case.’ Guardian, Women, 7th August Fitz, Linda. (1977) ‘Egyptian Queens and Male Reviewers: Sexist Attitudes in Antony and Cleopatra Criticism’, Shakespeare Quarterly 28, 297–316 Freedman, Barbara. (1991) Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press

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Gardiner, Judith Kegan. (1985) ‘Mind mother: psychoanalysis and feminism’ in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn, London: Routledge Hughes-Hallett, Lucy. (1990) Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions London: Vintage Kaplan, E.Ann. (1983) Women and Film; Both sides of the Camera London: Methuen Kaplan, E.Ann. (1987) Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture London: Methuen Loomba, Ania. (1989) Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama Manchester: University Press Neely, Carol Thomas. (1985) Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays New Haven and London: Yale University Press Shakespeare, William. (1977) Antony and Cleopatra, edited by Emrys Jones. Harmondsworth: Penguin Traci, Philip J. (1970) The Love Play of Antony and Cleopatra The Hague: Mouton Williamson, Judith. (1990) ‘What men miss about Madonna—Second Sight’ The Guardian, Arts, 2nd August Wolf, Naomi. (1990) The Beauty Myth London: Chatto and Windus Woodbridge, Linda. (1984) Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind 1540–1620 Brighton: Harvester

Elizabeth Schafer lectures in Drama and Theatre Studies at Royal Holloway College, University of London. She has published on Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists, Aphra Behn, Georg Büchner and Dorothy Hewett. Her research interests focus around feminist readings of the Renaissance, women’s writing and Australian Drama. She previously taught for four years at La Trobe University Melbourne. She is currently editing Thomas Middleton’s play The Witch for New Mermaids.

Uncovering Heroines: Some Theatrical Perspectives on the French Revolution Celita Lamar

The celebration of the Bicentennial of the French Revolution in Paris provided a setting for the theatrical introduction of patriotic heroines whose very existence had been virtually ignored for nearly two hundred years. In three plays: Monick Lepeu’s Elles étaient citoyennes (They Were Citizens), Marianik Réveillon’s Théroigne de Méricourt, I’Amazone de la Révolution, (Théroigne de Méricourt, the Amazon of the Revolution) and Michèle Fabien’s Des Françaises (Frenchwomen), historical figures such as Olympe de Gouges, Manon Roland, Théroigne de Méricourt and Claire Lacombes look back on their participation in the struggle to create a new Republic. This article discusses the plays and focuses on how each of these women, in her own way, comes to the realization that, ultimately, her identity as a woman overrode every other consideration of her merits and that, ironically, her brave deeds, inspiring words and vision of equality had only succeeded in bringing about a humiliating defeat for all women. KEY WORDS Heroines of the French revolution, feminism and theatre, Olympe de Gouges, Théroigne de Méricourt, Manon Roland, Claire (Rose) Lacombe

In the spring and summer of 1989 the celebration of the bicentennial of the French Revolution in Paris provided the setting for uncovering not only the courageous and inspiring roles that many women had played in the struggle for freedom, but also the seemingly incredible fact that their participation had been ignored for nearly two hundred years. A major part of the celebration was the production of a number of plays with revolutionary themes. While this was not surprising, given the many grants to encourage patriotic creativity, what was unexpected was the number of plays written about the heroic women of the Revolution. These women and their exploits were virtually unknown to theatre audiences, and their names were unfamiliar to the great majority of the French people.1

1

Although a number of these women went before the National Assembly to give speeches or to present petitions which were made part of the public record, and although some of them had even published their ideas in pamphlets, these historical sources have not made it into mainstream history books or school texts. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the general revival of interest in the revolutionary period included the unearthing of some of these

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To see these plays is to witness the making of heroines, an activity that has not been in favor in France since the time of Joan of Arc. Whereas the French adore heroism, and the wearing of military or civilian medals is both common and expected at any “gala” affair, this adoration for the most part is limited to male heroes. Why then are heroines suddenly in fashion? Perhaps these playwrights and directors, almost exclusively women, felt the need in this bicentennial year to delve below the surface of prevalent revolutionary myths, to find a place for themselves in the celebration of the Revolution, not just as French citizens, but as women. Three plays will be considered2 here: Monick Lepeu’s Elles étaient citoyennes, Marianik Reveillon’s Théroigne de Méricourt, I’Amazone de la Révolution, and Michèle Fabien’s Des Françaises. With no networking and practically no knowledge of the others’ projects, these playwrights have produced a panorama of the hopes, aspirations, accomplishments and disillusionments of women revolutionaries from all walks of life. They have presented us with real-life heroines, pioneers in the struggle for women’s rights in France, historical figures who serve as models for literary creations. These heroines had one thing in common with their male counterparts, and that was the abruptness with which all of their careers, and in many cases their lives, ended. The principal difference between them was that the men’s glory survived the guillotine or the assassin’s knife, while most of the women’s contributions failed to make it into the pages of history until much later.3 The plays under consideration here, on the other hand, have kept the men in the background and have brought the women to center stage. The heroines of all of these plays were women with significant if brief roles in the revolution, and well known in their day. Another element shared by these plays is that they are set late in the lives of the protagonists, when each one’s hour of glory was past and she faced the guillotine, imprisonment or oblivion. From this vantage point the women look back on their triumphs and their defeats. Elles étaient citoyennes, written and directed by Monick Lepeu, brings together from different social backgrounds three heroic women who were noted at the time for their exploits or for their words: three women who believed that the abstract notion of liberty for which they were struggling could also correspond to their individual desires for liberty as women. Although they were neither tried nor imprisoned together, Lepeu takes the historical liberty of associating them in this setting in order to allow each

sources. The eminent historian, Jules Michelet, was one of the first to have written specifically about the heroines of the period, but when he published his book—The Women of the Revolution, an excerpt from his History of the Revolution— in 1853, he was deposed from his Chair of History at the Collège de France. There was no attempt to incorporate the information contained in his work into history books more accessible to the general public; works by lesser authors were totally ignored as well. A new edition of Michelet’s book, with notes and commentary by Françoise Giroud, was published in 1988. In the past few years, there has been a great deal of research done that has unearthed a wealth of information about the women of the Revolution. Most of this research has been the work of women historians. Careful studies of public records, including police archives, library collections and private correspondence have resulted in the publication of a number of books by and about these women. An excellent bibliographical source book was published in March, 1989 by the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand and the Mairie de Paris (see Bibliography). The authors of the plays considered in this article were well aware of the excellent sources that had recently become available and made good use of them. 2 A fourth play—Musiques, citoyennes! based on an idea by Francesca Solleville and written by Eugéne Durif and Dominique Guihard—was not included because the heroines depicted were fictional characters meant to represent typical women of the time and not historical personnages. This play was performed in Paris in the Spring of 1989 under the direction of Dominique Guihard. It included several musical numbers—both revolutionary songs and some modern ones—most of which were sung by Francesca Solleville. 3 See note 1.

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woman’s story to be supported and corroborated by the others’. She then uses a fourth woman, who represents “the people”, to be a foil for the others’ views and to read the accusations against them in their “trials”. This character plays a complex role: at times she accuses the other women, at other times she appears to be the sensitive witness to their condemnation; she, herself, is a composite of the Woman of 1789. Manon Roland (née Marie Jeanne Philippon) was born in Paris of humble parents who gave her an education well above their means. Better able “to explain the celestial spheres than to cook an omelette,” her extensive reading, especially of the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,4 aroused in her a revolutionary zeal. She held a salon in her home, which was a focal point for the Girondin party.5 The accusations against her consisted primarily of allowing members of the opposition to meet in her home and of writing letters in support of her husband, Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière.6 Her final words as she was about to be beheaded were: “Liberty, how many crimes are committed in your name!” Olympe de Gouges (née Marie Gouzes) was the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy nobleman. Her education was neglected by her mother and stepfather, and she never learned to read and write French, having been taught these skills in the Occitan language. This did not prevent her from writing plays or from penning the “Droits de la femme et de la citoyenne [Rights of Woman and of the (female) Citizen],”7 a document that proclaimed the same rights for female citizens as for male. She presented to the National Assembly petitions for homes for the elderly, for hygiene in hospitals, for public works projects for the unemployed, for the opening of schools to the people and to women, and for the rights of minorities. However, she also dared to oppose Roberpierre’s8 extreme measures during the period of the Terror and to speak in favor of a trial for Louis XVI.9 Her most famous words were addressed to her fellow women citizens: “Since a woman has the right to climb to the gallows, she should also have the right to climb to the

4

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1778. The son of French Protestant immigrants, he was born in Geneva, Switzerland. At sixteen he went to France, working at many different jobs in various cities. He invented a new system of musical notations using numbers; wrote an opera, Les Muses galantes; and collaborated on Diderot’s Encyclopédie. He is best known for writing La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and Le Contrat social (1762) and for his Discourse on inequality (1754). His philosophy of education and his ideas on virtue and liberty greatly influenced some of the leaders of the Revolution. One of his most famous and influential quotations is from the Contrat social: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” 5 The Girondins were the moderate members of the Convention Assembly. They were pushed out of power by the most fanatical members of the Convention, the Montagnards, in June of 1793. 6 Jean-Marie Roland was a Girondin who twice served as Minister of the Interior. 7 “The Rights of Woman and of the Citizen” (fem.) parallelled the official document of “The Rights of Man and of the Citizen.” 8 Maximilien de Robespierre (1758–1794). A native of Arras and known as “l’Incorruptible”, the incorruptible one, Robespierre was the principal revolutionary leader responsible for the period known as the Terror, when the guillotine was used daily for purging the nation of its “enemies”. He was a member of the Jacobin party. In July of 1794 a group of moderate deputies, weary of the climate of terror, got together to declare Robespierre “hors la loi”, or outside of the law. He was sent to the guillotine, and his death marked the end of the Terror. 9 Louis XVI (1754–1793) succeeded to the French throne upon the death of Louis XV, his grandfather. He was not quite twenty years old, and his wife, Marie Antoinette, was barely nineteen. Although his youth and that of his wife made them popular at first with the French people, his inept rule and the extravagant life they led when hunger was rampant were at least partly responsible for bringing about the Revolution. He was accused of betraying France to a foreign power (Austria) and was tried and finally executed on July 21, 1793.

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tribunal.” Both Manon Roland and Olympe de Gouges were guillotined for their “crimes against the Revolution.” Théroigne de Méricourt, known as the “Amazon of the Revolution,” was the daughter of Belgian farmers. She was ill-treated by her parents as a child and was sent to live with different relatives who dealt with her even more harshly. She eventually escaped this life by becoming a companion to a noblewoman, Madame Colbert, who took her to London. There she met and fell in love with Lord Spenser who brought her to Paris where she suffered the disillusionment of being one of many mistresses to a man who was given to having orgies. Théroigne left Spenser and had several other liaisons, one of which resulted in her enjoying a brief career as a singer in Italy prior to her revolutionary activities. She founded a club, “Les Amis de la Loi,” and thereby drew the attention and wrath of the royalists who lost no opportunity to defame her in their newspapers.10 The irony was that, once she became devoted to the Revolution, Théroigne gave up her romantic liaisons; yet her name was constantly being linked with that of one or more of the deputies. She often wore an “Amazon” costume which contributed to making her at first famous and later legendary.11 Théroigne was elected to the National Assembly as “President of her sex” by the women patriots. However, when she attempted to recruit a battalion of “Amazons” she was again attacked by the newspapers and vilified as a “second class courtesan” and a “boudoir heroine”. Even the patriots who had previously supported her subsequently accused her of turning women away from their duties, of betraying their femininity. Unlike the other two women, Théroigne was never condemned to death, but she was imprisoned more than once and was eventually interned in an insane asylum, where she lost her reason and died many years later. The greatest humiliation she suffered was that of being publicly stripped and spanked by the Tricoteuses.12 Lepeu uses Théroigne’s madness as a kind of Greek chorus to the final moments of Manon and Olympe. At the beginning of Elles étaient citoyennes, the woman of the people reads the charges against the three other women. The stage is draped in red and black, with white tulle curtains in the center through which will be projected a stylized silhouette of the guillotine at the precise moment of each woman’s execution. There are several red, white and blue cocardes13 as well as a large candle and a wooden panel containing a representation of the Declaration of the Republic. A wide plank held up by trestles symbolizes the tribunal. The women are dressed in the colors of the Republic: Manon Roland in a white dress and cape; Olympe de Gouges in a blue and white dress; and Théroigne de Méricourt in a red “Amazon” suit with a black hat sporting an ostrich feather “in the style of Henri IV.” The use of these patriotic colors in their dress emphasizes the women’s devotion to the Republic, a Republic that they had helped to establish and in which they were attempting to find their place. Lighting variations transform the stage into the common hall of the prison, the women’s individual cells, the asylum to which Théroigne was committed and the Revolutionary Tribunal. As each woman responds to the charge that she has “maliciously and deliberately participated in the conspiracy against the unity and indivisibility of the Republic and against the liberty and security of the

10

It was one of the royalist newspapers that gave her the name, Théroigne de Méricourt. It took the French version of her Walloon family name, Terwagne, and combined it with the French version of the name of the town she was from, Marcourt. Her full, real name was Anne-Josèphe Terwagne. 11 Théroigne’s exploits were described and magnified by the nineteenth century poets Alphonse de Lamartine and Charles Baudelaire, as well as by the historian, Jules Michelet (see note on Michelet). 12 The Tricoteuses, or “knitting women”, were used as spies by the police. They were paid forty sols a day to knit and to make derisive remarks at the foot of the guillotine. They roamed through the streets of Paris, denouncing those who appeared to them to be enemies of the Republic. 13 A rosette made of red, white and blue ribbon and worn as a symbol of allegiance to the Republic.

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French people,” she reveals her strength and also her vulnerability as a woman. She describes both heroic deeds and commitments, as well as personal disappointments and disillusionments such as the horror of being married at fourteen to a much older man, the difficulty of nursing a child, or the humiliation of having the fatherhood of her child attributed to a dozen men. All three women had believed and had acted upon the belief that their participation in the front lines of the Revolution would be a first step in the recognition of their personal right to “liberty, equality and fraternity.” They had fought side by side with other women and with men, and their words had inflamed others with revolutionary fervor. Now they were having to face the fact that their identity as women overrode every other consideration and that their brief taste of liberty had ended in defeat. The heroism of Manon Roland, Olympe de Gouges and Théroigne de Méricourt was twofold: not only did they participate in fighting the royalists and establishing the Republic, they also withstood vicious personal attacks from the very people they were trying to help. As Manon, Olympe and Théroigne speak of what each has accomplished and lost, of her dreams and aspirations for herself and for all women, they could well be participating in the creation of a modern manifesto for the rights of women. In Marianik Réveillon’s play, Théroigne de Méricourt, I’Amazone de la Révolution, we encounter Théroigne as she is brought to the Hospice de l’hôtel Dieu. She is led there by a man who is both her keeper and her protector. There are nine other women in this prison, and with the exception of a young girl who idolizes Théroigne, the women attack her unmercifully, both verbally, and at times, physically. Two images of Théroigne are intertwined throughout the play: the militant revolutionary and the image of the woman created by public opinion, as portrayed by the other women prisoners. Throughout the play Théroigne repeats the statement, “Oh women, you have acquired nothing in this revolution.” Her fellow prisoners are all women of the people: La Rose, Jeanne and Marthe were sellers of soap, of fish and of vegetables. Clarissa was a Tricoteuse, and she continues to knit as she had done for Robespierre. Antoinette was a dressmaker who spends all of her time making knots and bows with which she adorns herself. Marie sold rosaries and Cornélie hates the Jacobins14 with a passion. The little girl is the daughter of a woman who was shot during a demonstration. La Rose protects the girl, but does not encourage her admiration of Théroigne. The setting for the play is the women’s prison to which Théroigne was condemned. Two large panels of translucent cloth, backed by an open weave material that appears to be a grill when lit from behind, form the backdrop. When Théroigne is brought in by her jailor/protector at the beginning of the play, the other characters are asleep, huddled beneath their blankets and the canvas sacks containing their possessions. These sacks, too, hold the props that the characters will use during the performance. The use of fabrics in various forms makes a powerful statement in this play. Each woman produces from her canvas bag hats, scarves and other articles of clothing in order to dress as royalists as they act out a mock wedding of Théroigne and the legislator Populus. At other times they use the scarves to turn their skirts into culottes in mockery of Théroigne’s exhortation to women to claim the right to wear pants. Their belts become whips in the most violent scene of the play, which is, of course, the re-enactment of Théroigne’s public spanking by the Tricoteuses. All of these fabrics, cloths, clothes, bags, ribbons and knitting materials are closely linked to the women themselves, to the way in which they spent their time, as well as to the manner in which women are adorned, armored and trapped in their lives.

14

The Jacobins were a society that, during the Revolution, held its meetings in the former convent of the Jacobins on the rue St. Honoré. Its members were Republican partisans of a centralized democracy. At first a moderate group, it took on a more Revolutionary aspect under Robespierre, who became its principal moving spirit in 1792. The society was finally dissolved in 1799.

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In another scene, huge marionettes with grotesque masks represent all of the men of power who used and then persecuted Théroigne. The men recite all of the charges and the calumnies with which she was branded as they look down upon her. Théroigne tries to pull off their masks, but they are out of her reach. She responds to their charges: Stop, you are all monsters…I only wanted one thing, to raise the people to the level of dignity of their rights…To shed light on their true interests and on the degree of confidence and esteem that they owe to the zeal, the brilliance and the virtues of their representatives to the National Assembly. To develop for them the advantages of the Revolution in order to assure their well-being. But they refused to listen to me.15 Nonetheless, in Marianik Réveillon’s depiction, it is the women, the Tricoteuses who humiliated her and also her fellow prisoners, who continue the ordeal and who finally break down Théroigne’s resistance, reducing her to a state of near dementia. In the final scene of the play, Théroigne is transferred to la Salpétrière, an insane asylum where she will spend the rest of her life. From there she reads a letter she has written to her former friend and supporter, Saint-Just.16 It is a lucid but pathetic letter describing her plight and her desire to be free and to continue working and writing for the Republic. The playing of a sad refrain on the violoncello as Théroigne reads the letter symbolizes the depths of human ingratitude and underscores the hopelessness of her appeal. The final lines of the letter are also the final lines of the play:

I have always been guided in all my proposals by a love for what is good and by the glory to be acquired in rendering myself useful to the nation. But for that I had neither enough talent nor enough experience, and I was a woman…I was a woman…I am a woman…17 The sad repetition of the statement “I was (I am) a woman,” along with Théroigne’s oftrepeated refrain addressed to the women of France,18 seem to signal the end of a period of intense activity on the part of a number of women, an activity that was both patriotic19 and feminist. Théroigne’s descent into madness paralleled the descent into oblivion of these individuals, as their aspirations and their very existence were obscured by a veil of silence. Des Françaises was written by Michèle Fabien and directed by Laurence Février.20 It is the only one of the plays that departs from a strictly revolutionary theme. Divided in two parts, it evokes the heroism of two

15

From the unpublished text of Théroigne de Méricourt, l’Amazone de la Revolution, given to me by Marianik Réveillon. 16 Louis Antoine de Saint-Just was a close friend and supporter of Robespierre and one of the more extreme members of the Jacobins. 17 Réveillon, op. cit. 18 “Oh women, you have acquired nothing in this Revolution!” 19 A “patriot”, according to the Scribner-Bantam English Dictionary (1979), is “one who loves and supports his country and its interests.” It is in the definition of a country’s “interests” that we find the most disagreement as to who deserves to be called a patriot. All of the women in these plays loved and suported their country, and they believed that its best interests were served by recognizing the rights of all of its citizens. 20 This alone of the four plays I saw has been published.

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women who lived a century and a half apart. In “Claire Lacombe,” which constitutes the first half of the play, Claire has just been released from eighteen months of prison. She has finally been declared “pure in her intentions towards the Republic,” but her incarceration has left indelible physical and spiritual scars. She is “free” but cannot come to terms with a type of freedom that is not liberty. An actress who worked closely with the Jacobins and who used her eloquence to further the aims of the most violent partisans of the Revolution, the Enragés, she was a founding member and president of the Club of Revolutionary Republican Women. She also regularly attended meetings of the Jacobins. On July 25, 1792, clothed as an Amazon, she addressed the Legislative Assembly, offering to do battle against the tyrants. On August 10, carrying arms, she took part in the assault of the Tuileries Palace, which resulted in the arrest of Louis XVI. On August 26 she read her club’s petition to the Convention. It was the Jacobins, with whom she had worked, who eventually turned against her. Accused of consorting with the nobility through her affair with the journalist Leclerc, she was refused the right to speak in her own defense. During the term of her imprisonment all women’s clubs were outlawed, as were all public gatherings of more than five women. Robespierre himself was deposed and guillotined, but the end of the period of Terror did not end the repression of women’s voices; on the contrary. In this theatrical rendition of Claire’s first hours out of prison, she encounters three other women: her former landlady, an allegory for those women whose lives have been reduced to seeking survival and security; Anne Colombe, a former printer and colleague of Claire’s; and Gabrielle, a young actress who had seen her mother, also a club member, guillotined. The landlady wants Claire to come back to the house where Claire had once rented a miserable garret room; she offers Claire shelter and safety in return for taking care of her. This woman is old and has lived under the Old Order, what could be called the ancient servitude of those who have never had the right to anything. For her the Revolution is a strictly individual affair; she has profited from everything including the Terror and the Emigration of the Nobility, but her age and disposition now make it difficult for her to deal with shopkeepers in the daily struggle for the necessities of life. Lacking any social or political conscience, she wants to drag Claire into her hateful cocoon in order to take advantage of her youth for her own, materialistic ends. Claire is repulsed by the notion of mere survival. She would prefer to start over again, inciting women to participate in the affairs of state. Yet, she finds no support or encouragement from any of the other women; even her once militant friend Anne Colombe has given up the struggle. As she gives Claire the key to their former meeting place, Anne refers to it as “the key of aborted dreams,” thereby ironically linking the imagery of abortion and childbirth to the silencing of women’s voices. And we are the fetuses! We believed that we women were being born, but it was an error, a monstruous illusion: false, all of that, everything was false…When women give birth or when they fuck, you know who they are. But when they speak, when they write, when they print, when they think about something other than hearth and home, you no longer know. We were born dead!…Flown away, defeated, finished, our words have evaporated into nature or have been hurled and broken against a wall; even our bodies are superfluous. (15) The use of this metaphor is certainly apt, for the rebirth of women as “Amazons” was a frightening prospect to the Founding Fathers of the new Republic; in their minds, such dangerous voices had to be suppressed. Anne acknowledges her own defeat; she has run out of hope and cannot respond to Claire’s need to resume or renew the fight.

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Nonetheless, it is the young woman, Gabrielle, who more precisely foreshadows the nearly two centuries of oblivion to which the dreams and the very existences of these women will be cast. She, whose mother died for her convictions, can only detest those who she believes took her mother from her. Her own solution is to escape into her acting: “It’s fine, even if the books don’t tell the truth; on a stage, one can be happy to cry, even to lose…as many of us21 as we wish to be!” (27) Claire’s bitterness over her helpless position is exacerbated by the landlady’s repeated insistence that Claire resign herself to the fact that the Revolution is over for her, and that she must learn to live—that is, to survive. In the following passage Claire is responding to the landlady, as well as addressing herself: Claire Lacombe, you who contributed to the arrest of the King, you who founded the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, you who knew the Convention, the decrees and the Law, who wanted them to be applied; you, Claire Lacombe, since you are living and since you are free, you become null and void, you may learn to knit. You and all of the women! Women are supposed to stop everything: their lives, their desires, History, their history? The Revolution is frozen, thus women will be, too? It’s out of the question. I don’t want to think that, it isn’t true; we are shadows, so be it, then let us be shadows to the end, truly. Liberty, for us is a phantom; equality too, for us, is a phantom. That doesn’t prevent them from existing, liberty and equality, in one’s head…(20–21)

Claire believes that it is possible for them to keep alive a dream of liberty and equality, even if, as women, they are, for the moment, politically nonexistent. But she is unable to persuade Anne to help her or even to understand her need to act. Claire’s encounter with Gabrielle and the young woman’s antipathy to their cause then deal the final blow to her fragile hopes. When Gabrielle makes her exit, Claire remains alone on the stage; she has been deserted by both her enemies and her friends, and her voice will not be heard again in public for nearly two centuries. There is a marked contrast between the portrayal of Claire’s spiritual defeat and the second half of the play which focuses on the more public, though long undervalued, contributions of Berty Albrecht to the French Resistance movement from 1940 until her execution in 1943. Although Berty Albrecht’s death at the hands of the Nazis was a more extreme punishment than Claire Lacombe’s eighteen months in prison, Berty was killed by the enemy while fighting for her country while Claire, ironically, was punished by her country for trying to fight the enemy. Berty’s half of the play begins with the words of a female journalist who is looking at the stone monument to Berty Albrecht (in the Paris production it was a postcard showing the monument) when Berty’s daughter, Mireille, appears. The journalist’s questions to Mireille serve as a catalyst for the appearance of Berty and subsequent scenes between mother and daughter and between Berty and her husband, Frédéric. There is also a scene between Berty and her Resistance partner and lover, Henri Frenay, and a long monologue delivered by the woman who betrayed Berty to the Nazis. In these scenes we become aware of not only Berty’s pre-war work to promote birth control and her Resistance activities, but also of the intensity of her commitment, which at times caused her to leave behind her husband and daughter and which kept her own life constantly in peril.

21

This is an allusion to the news brought by Anne that henceforth and public gathering of more than five women was to be forbidden.

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From Mireille we learn of the difficulty of being “the daughter of a heroine,” and we witness her sorrow at losing her mother “so soon after reaching an understanding with her.” The two men help us to understand Berty a little better. The scene with Frédéric takes place in London at a moment when Berty has decided to return to France to work in a factory. Frédéric, a successful and wealthy banker, is trying to persuade her to stay with him. He speaks of his love for her, of her own appreciation of fine food, wine and fashionable clothes, and, finally, of how unsuited she is to a working-class environment; but Berty’s need to leave and to be useful is visceral; it cannot be denied. I want to know, I want to become familiar in my body with the true life of those whom I defend…they (the women) need it so much… Things are done here that are good, that please me; England knows how (to do things), but I don’t feel needed, I don’t like the taste of the ashes of uselessness. In France, I believe, it’s different. All women everywhere must learn that they are not machines for making babies, that they don’t have to live hanging on their menstrual periods, that a uterus is not a destiny. (40) In the scene between Berty and her partner, Henri Frenay, the discussion is of the activities of their Resistance group, “Combat”. They have finally found a printer they can trust to put out a clandestine newspaper. They speak of their first meeting, of learning to trust each other, and they drink a toast to the future of their group and of all the other Resistance groups. What is evident here is Berty’s enthusiasm, her dedication to a cause: I’m fine now, I’m fine. Everything is lacking here, food, clothing, information…We have to do everything here, begin everything. I love beginings. Finding a printer becomes an action one can celebrate… To your health, Henri, to mine, it’s all the same! I like this feeling of tiredness in my legs. Do you feel it, too? Does History have to whirl in order for me to find my place? (49) Berty is an historical heroine in the classic sense: she fights selfessly for the causes she believes in, and she thrives on the danger. Yet there is another, vulnerable, side to her personality, which is evident in her conversations with her daughter. She feels guilt for having put her daughter’s life in danger, and rage when Mireille’s friend is raped by the Nazis, singled out from among those who were “too old, too young or too ugly,” a group that included Berty and Mireille. In discussing this event with her daughter, Berty tells her that “the hardest part is this desire to bite, to claw, to disembowel, to blind, to castrate…” (45) We also hear Berty agonize over whether she will be able to survive, in the asylum to which she has been committed, until Mireille and her Resistance friends are able to rescue her. Berty’s heroism was welcomed by her country, even if it took a long time for it to be recognized publicly.22 This recognition of her contribution may be seen as a vindication for all the women whose deeds were effaced from the history they had helped to create. There is no attempt, within the framework of the play, to create a direct connection between Claire Lacombe and Berty Albrecht; yet they are both examples

22

Berty Albrecht received four posthumous decorations: la Croix de Compagnon de la Liberation, la Médaille Militaire, la Croix de Guerre avec palmes, and la Médaille de la Resistance. The monument referred to in the play was constructed more than forty years after her death.

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of historic heroines. The seeds sown by Claire Lacombe and other women of her time finally took root one hundred and fifty years later in the person of Berty Albrecht; it seems that History was finally ready to accept and to recognize a woman’s heroic accomplishments. Des Françaises elevates the two women to their well-deserved status as heroines, even as it protrays them in their most vulnerable moments. In Des Françaises there is no stage; rather, there is a space surrounded by small tables and chairs, where the audience sits. There are cones of light on each table and a piano at one end of the room creating the ambience of an intimate café. The characters themselves bring in the few props that they use and, especially in the second half of the play, address and interact with the audience. The journalist distributes to each person in the audience a postcard displaying a photograph of the monument to Berty Albrecht. Henri Frenay opens a bottle of wine and places it on a table at which members of the audience are sitting. The setting is one of intimacy but also of discomfort: there is no escaping the disquieting truths expounded by these women, no way of avoiding the spectacle of their suffering. The audience is predictably silent when apostrophized by the players. In the last analysis, it was their sex, their being women, and not their actions as such, that was responsible for the defeats suffered by Claire Lacombe, Manon Roland, Olympe de Gouges and Théoigne de Méricourt. Manon Roland recalls the attacks that newspapers directed against her for having entered an essay contest sponsored by the Academy of Besançon on the subject, “How the education of women can contribute to making men better.” Her sin was to receive the same praise for her work as the writer Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.23 Olympe de Gouges and Théroigne were both vilified for claiming the right to free love and the right to divorce, and especially women’s right to education. Their beauty also occasioned the fabrication of scurrilous gossip linking them amorously to every man with whom they worked. Claire Lacombe was denied the right to speak in her own defense because of her “dangerous eloquence”. Virtue was the order of the day and, according to Robespierre and other revolutionary leaders in power at the time, those who encouraged women to leave the home could not themselves be considered virtuous. A virtuous woman, in their eyes, was one who stayed home, had children and took care of and encouraged her husband, a silent, modest mother and wife.24 Some of the excitement of the three plays emanates from an obvious delight among the authors, directors and actors at having discovered and resurrected a forgotten part of their history. The playwrights harbor no illusions that their works will bring about the rewriting of history overnight, but they know that the effort has to begin somewhere. They are fulfilling a role as “human archeologists”, bringing to light long-buried persons/artifacts of their culture. Yet, these plays are more than period pieces created to celebrate a particular aspect of the bicentennial. They recreate living characters with whom we can empathize for reasons other than their ideals. In Des Françaises Michèle Fabien has drawn a Claire Lacombe of flesh and blood, a woman whose spirit has been crushed but not broken, and who is not yet ready to abandon her ideals or her cause. Her story is one of courage and daring, but also one of loneliness and disappointment. The four women in this part of the play represent four distinct reactions to the events leading up to and including the August day in 1795 when Claire Lacombe was released from prison. The landlady and Gabrielle, each in her own way, embody the opposition: they do not understand the thirst for freedom that motivated women such as Claire Lacombe 23

From the unpublished text of Elles étaient citoyennes given to me by Monick Lepeu. Yet, in 1789, the great majority of women who lived in Paris performed some kind of work outside of the home, for which they received wages far below those earned by working men. Some of their petitions for better working conditions, access to education, etc. have been published in 1789, Cahiers de doléances des femmes (see Bibliography).

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and Anne Colombe. Anne herself does not regret having participated in the effort, but she believes the situation is hopeless until such time as women can come out of their isolation to gather once again in the streets. It is Claire who insists that their story must be told, and she proceeds to tell it with passion and conviction. As previously mentioned, the presentation of “Claire Lacombe” with “Berty Albrecht” produces a composite of two very different women who share the same ideals of devotion to their country and to the cause of freedom. Each has much to say about the value of standing up for one’s convictions, even in the face of overwhelming odds. The intimacy of the setting and the proximity of the actors to the audience constitute a deliberate attempt to make that communications as direct as possible. Elles étaient citoyennes is the only one of these plays that is overtly feminist in its perspective on subjects ranging from politics to childbirth.25 Not only does the play revive the memory of forgotten heroines, but by delving into the more personal side of their lives as women, it transcends the historical and political aspects of their contributions. In their private lives they suffered dissatisfaction with marriage (which Olympe de Gouges refers to as the “tomb of love”), and frustration with the child each has borne. All of them had a strong sense of identity and an eloquence with which to incite other women and men to action. The contrast between their aspirations and early victories on the one hand, and their ultimate situations on the other is sensitively developed. We see them in moments of personal weakness: when faced with execution, Olympe wonders whether she could save herself by pretending to be pregnant. Manon points out to her that she would only be doubly defamed, and that she must go to her death bravely. Despite all of the setbacks and humiliations they suffered, these women considered themselves patriots until the moment of their death. What comes through clearly in Lepeu’s work is the sense of a terrible waste of women’s lives, and the subsequent paranoiac effort to erase the very fact of their existence. Marianik Réveillon’s portrayal of Théroigne de Méricourt is both a political allegory and the story of the rise and fall of a woman whose strengths—her beauty and power—catalyzed her destruction. By setting the story in prison, Réveillon is able to use the women prisoners to evoke the destructive forces unleashed by Théroigne’s rapid rise to prominence. Their unquestioning acceptance of all of the gossip about her, and their acting out of alleged incidents in Theroigne’s public and private life, are effectively counterpointed by the presence of the “real” Théroigne amongst them. She has been reduced to a caricature of herself, able only to produce sporadic glimpses of her former glory interspersed with pleas for water that go unanswered. The evocation of Danton,26 Robespierre and the other “great men” in the form of grotesque marionettes is most effective in demonstrating the extent to which she was betrayed. In addition, Réveillon keeps the entire cast of the play on stage at all times, with minor interactions going on continuously among the characters. This contributes to making the staging of Théroigne the most developed of the three plays. The recent search for heroines and female role models is unquestionably a contributing factor in the creation of these plays. While none of the revolutionary women portrayed achieved any lasting success, all of them may still be viewed as “foremothers” of present-day women’s rights movements. It is difficult to predict what lasting effect, if any, these plays will have on the perception of the role of women in French

25 It is interesting to note that Elles étaient citoyennes received its most favourable reviews in the French press from distinguished male critics. Its author and director, Monick Lepeu, has won acclaim for her work in other plays dealing entirely with women: notably, Gertrude morte cet après-midi, based on the works of Gertrude Stein (1985–86); 20, rue Jacob named for the Paris address of Nathalie Barney at whose home both French and expatriate women writers, artists and intellectuals gathered and Moi, Zéro magnifique, a play about Violette Leduc, a lesbian writer of the fifties. 26 Georges Danton (1760–1793) was an extremely popular figure in the years preceding the Revolution. He had great influence in political circles and was an early supporter of Robespierre. When Danton turned against his former friend in the midst of the excesses of the Terror, he was denounced, tried and executed.

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history. The ephemeral nature of plays, especially plays that are not published, coupled with the reality of small theatres and sparse audiences, will doubtless limit their impact. Nevertheless, new light has been shed on a previously dark corner of French history, and for those fortunate enough to be a part of the audience, history has begun to be rewritten and heroines are being reborn. References Fabien, Michele. (1989) Claire Lacombe suivi de Berty Albrecht. Paris: Actes Sud-Papiers. (The play was presented under the title: Des Françaises.) Lepeu, Monick. Elles étaient citoyennes. Unpublished manuscript. Réveillon, Marianik. Théroigne de Méricourt. Unpublished manuscript.

Additional Bibliography Abrey, Jane. “Feminism in the French Revolution,” American Historical Review, No. 80, 1975. Blanc, Olivier. Olympe de Gouges. Paris: Syros, 1981. Blanc, Simone. Les Femmes et la Révolution Française. Paris: Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, Mairie de Paris, 1989. Bouchardeau, Huguette. Pas d’histoire les femmes.Paris: Syros, 1978. Bouvier, Jeanne. Les Femmes pendant la Révolution: leur action politique, sociale, économique, militaire, leur courage devant l’échafaud>. Paris: E.Figuière, 1931. Bruhat, Yvonne. Les Femmes et la Révolution Française. Editions du Comité mondial des Femmes, 1939. ——. Cahier de doléances des femmes. Paris: Des Femmes, 1981, 1989. Cerati, Marie. Le Club des citoyennes républicaines révolutionnaires. Paris: Editions Sociales, 1966. Charzat, Gisèle. Les Françaises sont-elles des citoyennes? Paris: Gonthier, 1972. Chatel, Nicole. Les Femmes dans la Resistance. Paris: Julliard, 1972. ——. Le Club des Citoyennes républicaines. Ed. Sociales, 1966. ——. Le Club des Républicaines révolutionnaires. Ed. Sociales Chaudieu, 1833. Collins, Marie et Weil Sayre, Sylvie. Les Femmes en France. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974. Duhet, Paule-Marie. Les Femmes et la Révolution. Paris: Julliard, 1971. Eaubonne, Françoise d’. Histoire et actualité du féminisme. Paris: Alain Moreau, 1972. Francos, Ania. Il était des femmes dans la Résistance. Paris: Stock, 1978. Godineau, Dominique. Citoyennes tricoteuses. Les femmes du peuple à Paris pendant la Révolution française. Aix-enProvence: Alinéa, 1988. Gouges, Olympe de. Oeuvres, presented by Bénoite Groult. Paris: Mercure de France, 1986. Groult, Benoîte. Le Féminisme au masculin. Paris: Gonthier, 1977. Guibert-Sledziewski, Elisabeth. “La femme, objet de la Révolution,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française janvier-mars 1987, 1–16. Jourcin, A. and Van Tieghem. Dictionnaire des Femmes Célèbres. Paris: Larousse, 1969. Lacour, Léopold. Les Origines du féminisme contemporain: Olympe de Gouges, Théroigne de Méricourt, Rose Lacombe. 1900. Legouvé, Ernest. La Femme en France au XIXe siècle . Paris: Librairie de la bibliothèque démocratique, 1873. Marand-Fouquet, Catherine. La Femme au temps de la Révolution. Paris: Stock—Laurence Pernoud, 1989. Michelet, Jules. Les Femmes et la Révolution. Présenté par Françoise Giroud. Paris: Carrère, 1988. Monestier, Marianne. Elles étaient cent et mille, hommage pathétique aux femmes de la Résistance. Paris: Fayard, 1972. Portemer, Jean. “Le statut de la femme en France depuis la réformation des coutumes jusquà la rédaction du Code civil”, Recueil de la Société Jean Bodin sur La Femme, IIe partie, t. XII. Bruxelles, 1962. Rosa, Annette. Citoyennes: les femmes et la Révolution française. Paris: Messidor, 1988.

UNCOVERING HEROINES

Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Théroigne de Méricourt, une femme mélancolique sous la Révolution. Paris: Seui, l 1989. Sarde, Michèle. Regard sur les Françaises. Paris: Stock, 1983. Sopriani, Anne. La Révolution et les femmes, 1789–1796. Paris: M.A., 1988. Stephens, Winifred. Women of the French Revolution. London: Chapman & Hall, 1922. Strobl-Ravelsberg, F.de. Les Confessions de Théroigne de Méricourt. L.Westhausser, 1892. Villiers, Marc de. Histoire des clubs de femmes et des légions d’amazones. Paris: Plon, 1910.

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Dialogues of the Heart: Norodom Sihanouk and Mahatma Ghandi as Portrayed by Hélène Cixous Celita Lamar

In 1985, Hélène Cixous’ eight-hour play, L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge (The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia), opened in Paris at the Théâtre du Soleil. Two years later, in 1987, Cixous presented a second major play based on recent history: L’Indiade, ou l’Inde de leurs rêves (The Indiade, or India of their Dreams). Unlike Cixous’ earlier plays, which featured female protagonists and few characters, these two revolve around strong male figures, Sihanouk and Ghandi, and a cast of some fifty other personalities ranging from powerful men such as Chou-En-lai, Jawaharlal Nehru, Henry Kissinger and Lord Mountbatten to simple peasants and ghosts. Cixous portrays Sihanouk and Ghandi at dramatic historical moments, when their countries are being torn asunder. She captures the essence of each man as the spiritual symbol of a people in crisis. Focusing on their “dialogues of the heart,” this article examines comparable elements in the portrayal of Sihanouk and Ghandi against a background of political intrigue and fratricidal struggles. KEY WORDS Contemporary French theatre, Cixous, Norodom Sihanouk, Mahatma Ghandi, Cambodia, the Partition of India. In 1985, Hélène Cixous’ eight-hour play, l’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge (The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia) opened in Paris at the Théâtre du Soleil. Two years later, in 1987, Cixous and director Ariane Mnouchkine presented a second major play based on recent history: l’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves (The Indiade or India of their Dreams). Both of these plays recreate significant and explosive moments in the history of the respective countries; they present fratricidal struggles, dreams of independence—and the tragic disintegration of those dreams. Cixous was a belated “convert” to the theatre. In an article written in 1977 for the Parisian newspaper, Le Monde, she expressed her distrust of the theatre, referring to it as a place of sadism directed against women, and further, of the reproduction of a patriarchal family structure wherein the woman assumes the eternal position of victim. She stated that if she went to the theatre then it had to be as a political gesture, “with a view toward changing, with the help of other women, its means of production and expression”. This she

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sought to do with her first play, Portrait of Dora (1976), based on Sigmund Freud’s “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.” In the ten years between the staging of Dora and the production of the Sihanouk play, Cixous’ views on the theatre underwent a metamorphosis. By 1983 her initial mistrust had already given way to an enthusiastic endorsement of the theatre as a place where “we have chance to meet the gods. The gods? I mean that which surpasses us and carries us along, and to which we address ourselves blindly. I mean our own part of divinity.’1 She writes of an “archaic complicity” both between spectators and performers, and among the members of an audience. In some of her most recent writings on the theatre, Cixous has come up with a further refinement of her definition of the theatre: …the theatre is the space where we as human beings experience ourselves as an atom in the cosmos, as a moment in time, as a question in the multi-millenium dialogue between men and the Gods, as one of the thousands of “whys” hurled from the mystery of the spoken question in the direction of the formless Mystery, of the disembodied Cause.2 In this progression from a deep distrust of the theatre to a sense of awe at its divine possibilities, Cixous has made radical changes in her approaches to the stage. Her first two plays featured women protagonists who were struggling to free themselves from patriarchal restraints and to experience their personal power. These were small, intimate plays with few characters. L’Histoire terrible and l’Indiade each bring to the stage strong male protagonists and a cast of some fifty other personalities. The scope of the plays has expanded as dramatically as the number of characters. The Sihanouk play encompasses twenty-five years of Cambodian history, from 1955 to 1979. It is divided into two epochs, presented on different evenings, each composed of five acts and twenty-five scenes. L’Indiade, a five hour play presented in a single evening, spans eleven years of Indian struggles for independence, from 1937 to 1948. It consists of five acts and nineteen scenes. This seeming reversal of priorities and values is, in fact, no reversal at all. For in her portrayal of masculine protagonists such as Norodom Sihanouk and Mahatma Ghandi, Hélène Cixous has remained true to her basic principles. Portrait of Dora represented the theatrical incarnation of a personal and political philosophy. With the staging of L’Histoire terrible, Cixous took on the world, as it were. Although the object of her attention may appear to have altered radically, her interests have merely shifted from the expression of the particular female voice to the incantation of a collective global agony. In each case her focus has centered on those whose situation she perceives as “precarious.”3 In her depiction of both leaders, Cixous exphasizes their respectively paternal and maternal qualities: Sihanouk as Cambodia’s Monseigneur Papa and Ghandi as the “Mother of India.” She portrays the two at dramatic moments, when their countries are being torn asunder, thus capturing the essence of each man as

1

All translations in this article are mine. “L’Ourse, la Tomber, les Etoiles,” in “Ecrits sur le théâtre” an appendix to L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves Paris: Théâtre du soleil, 1987):248. 3 In several articles and interviews Cixous has spoken of the attraction that Cambodia and its people held for her, “What I’m interested in is what I call the precarious. Something which is almost on the verge of disappearance, which we have to pray to keep alive.” This particular quotation is from a paper presented in English to the Focused Research Program in Gender and Women’s Studies, UCI, May 1988. Similar quotations are found in Veronique Hotte’s “Entretien avec Hélène Cixous,” in Théâtre/Public (March-April 1986):22; and in Gisèle Barrett’s article based on two interviews with Cixous: “Petit Essai sur la dramaturgie de l’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge” in Cahiers de Théâtre Jeu 39–2 (1986):140. 2

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the spiritual symbol of a people in crisis. It is through their “dialogues of the heart” that Sihanouk and Ghandi emerge, vividly delineated against a background of the vicissitudes of their respective peoples. Before turning to the similarities between the two leaders, let us briefly examine their situations and some of the differences between them. At the beginning of the play, Sihanouk is King of Cambodia. He decides to give up the throne and to present himself as a parliamentary candidate to his people in order to preserve the monarchy and the independence and neutrality of Cambodia. Sihanouk’s enemies include his cousin Sirik Matak, who believes himself to be the rightful ruler of Cambodia, the Khmers rouges (Cambodian Communist extremists), the United States of America as embodied by several ambassadors and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and Cambodia’s traditional enemies, the Vietnamese. Sihanouk envisions Cambodia’s future as that of a neutral nation, independent of interference from other, larger nations. He perceives the United States as being indifferent to the fate of Cambodia, wishing only to use it as “a silken footstool to peer over the wall into Vietnam.” (II, 2) Sirik Matak, on the other hand, prefers to receive aid from the Americans and to ally Cambodia with them against the Vietnamese and the Communists. In his desire to remain neutral and friendly to the rest of the world, Sihanouk sets out to visit heads of state in France, Russia and China. He leaves army chief Lon Nol, in charge during his absence. Lon Nol betrays Sihanouk’s trust as he allies himself with Sirik Matak and takes over rule of Cambodia, leaving Sihanouk in exile in Beijing. Sihanouk’s efforts to counteract Lon Nol’s influence by allying himself with his former enemies the Vietnamese, and the even more vicious and deadly Khmers rouges, is doomed to failure. The tragic mistake he makes by leaving Cambodia in a time of crisis proves to be a costly one. When Sihanouk is finally permitted to return, it is as a prisoner and in order to serve as a mere figurehead for the Khmer rouges. His subsequent departure into exile is inevitable. Mahatma Ghandi, on the other hand, had no pretentions to royalty. As a Hindu holy man he lived in poverty, walking barefoot through the dusty roads of India, carrying his message of non-violence and independence. His constant message to the British, “Quit India” serves as a leitmotif for the play. For Ghandi, and for 400 million Indians, independence is the long-awaited dream. But even as the dream begins to emerge as a possible reality, it is eclipsed by the nightmare of the Partition, the creation of Pakistan out of the very heart of India. Sides are drawn between the Hindu majority under the Pandit Jahawarlal Nehru and the Mohammedan League led by the atheistic Mohamed Ali Jinnah. The British are represented by Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India. Jinnah’s dream is the creation of Pakistan as a Muslim state. Ghandi’s own political stance is independence for a whole and undivided India. His efforts to that end fail as Nehru’s party bows to what they perceive to be the inevitable “Partition.” On August 15, 1947 the safran, green and white flag of India flies for the first time as Independence is granted by the British. But the moment is bittersweet, for on the eve of this great day the state of Pakistan was created, dividing provinces and setting brother against brother, friend against friend in a bloodbath of unimaginable proportions. In an attempt to put an end to this fratricidal frenzy, Ghandi goes on a hunger strike. As he is about to reach the end of his endurance, the news comes that all sides have agreed to stop the bloodshed. But soon after a victoriously smiling Ghandi has left the scene, leaning on two of his friends, bells begin to toll. Word comes that the Mahatma Ghandi has been killed by a Hindu assassin. The two sets of bare facts outlined above form a framework for each of the plays, but tell us little of their essence. For it is not the historical events that are of principal interest here but rather the vibrant glimpse Cixous affords into the hearts of two unique human beings with extraordinary bonds between themselves and their people: Norodom Sihanouk, Monseigneur Papa of Cambodia, and Mahatma Ghandi, the Mother of India. Cixous portrays Sihanouk as a strong Father figure who loves his children, his people, and is loved in return—albeit not by everyone. It is the constancy of this love, and not its betrayals, that becomes the focus

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of the play. The words Sihanouk uses to refer to Cambodia and its people resemble at times the romantic words of a lover to his beloved; at other moments they seem more like those of a father speaking to or about his children, or like the heartfelt devotion of a loyal friend. These words are most often pronounced in the company of the two individuals closest to Sihanouk, his wife (referred to only as “the Princess”) and his close friend and advisor, Penn Nouth. It is to them, and to the ghost of his father, King Suramarit, that Sihanouk voices his fears for his people and his sorrow at being separated from them. Four examples will illustrate how Sihanouk’s words express his intimate ties with the Cambodian people and with the land itself. Early in the play Sihanouk explains to the ghost of King Suramarit why he has decided to abdicate in favor of his mother and to present himself as a candidate, thereby keeping the throne in the family and the political power to himself. He is certain of the support of his loyal subjects: SURAMARIT: SIHANOUK:

All right, my son, let’s abdicate! But you will be hated as a politician. Do you have a few friends? I have all of the people. Within the palace walls it is like the ancient circus with its wild beasts. But as soon as one has passed through the gates, then there is love. (I, ii, 33)

In this next scene Sihanouk is on a plane with the Princess; they are flying between Moscow and Beijing. He has just learned of the coup d’état that has suddenly turned him into an exile. Here he identifies intimately and passionately with both the land and the people of Cambodia. SIHANOUK:

…And now how can I forget the great dream that I have become…I can no longer stop being Cambodia. I myself have become these rivers, these rice plantations, these mountains and all of these peasants who inhabit me. (IV, iv, 165)

In Beijing, Sihanouk has just learned from Penn Nouth that all of his ambassadors have rallied behind Lon Nol save one, Chea San. Rather than dwelling on the defections of the others, he is instead deeply moved by the simple expression of loyalty on the part of one courtier. SIHANOUK:

San! San! Precisely and only he! Among all of them, San, the one whom I have so harshly treated. Penn Nouth, in your bad news there was hidden a piece of information so precious that it almost reconciles me with humanity. A single look suffices at times to pull us out of hell. At this moment, thanks to someone from whom I expected nothing, I am happy. (V, i, 80)

Nonetheless, Sihanouk is far from sanguine towards what he perceives as a complete betrayal. Later in the same scene Penn Nouth has just told Sihanouk of the lies being spread by Lon Nol in the newspapers and by loudspeakers to discredit him and his family in the eyes of his people. Sihanouk experiences this attempt to separate him from his subjects as the most heinous of all of the offenses committed against him. SIHANOUK:

I want the blood in my veins to turn to fire For henceforth I want, and this is irrevocable, to fan the flames of a superhuman rage

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They have stolen from me my land, my people, my power, They have thrown me to the depths of the world And now they want to close those hearts Where what remains of Sihanouk could find shelter. (V, i, 182) Sihanouk identifies in a very personal, intense way with Cambodia; he is not only the Father of his people, he is the living symbol of their land. The confidence he feels in their love, the pain of separation, are poignantly expressed time and again in his conversations with the Princess and Penn Nouth. In the midst of politics and tragedy, Cixous’ portrayal of Sihanouk remains that of a love story between a prince and his people.4 In l’Indiade, Ghandi’s love for India and for all of its people transcends political considerations. Cixous writes in her introduction to the play that “The glorious entry of love into the public sphere in the middle of the twentieth century, that is the gift that, through Ghandi, India gave to the universe.” She refers to Ghandi as “the divine warrior.” “Yes, Ghandi is a warrior. His bow is love. His law: unbiased action. Do or die, that is his motto.” But Ghandi was also a human being and, according to Cixous, therein lay his greatness. His strength was evident in the effort, not necessarily in the result. There are so many references to love in this play that I shall limit examples to a few utterances delivered by Ghandi. In the following scene Ghandi’s wife, Kastourbai, has just died; it is 1944 and Ghandi is in prison with her and with their friend, Sarojini. He speaks to Kastourbai the words he had never said to her while she was alive. He mingles his love for her with his love for India, using a double mother image in which each spouse is both the other’s mother and child. GHANDI:

Ba, my girl, my old woman, my village. You my secret India, my pupil and my teacher, you my thirst, you my milk and my bread. Sixty-two years we have proceeded together through childhood, youth and old age, Ba and Bapu together towards Truth. How lucky we have been. You my mother and my baby, I your baby and your mother. Each nourished at the other’s breast for sixty-two years. (II, i, 75)

Having poured out his heart, Ghandi is ready to go forward, to take up his cause once again. His greatest desire now is to conquer the Muslim leader, Jinnah, with love. In his efforts to bring together in love the warring factions in his country Ghandi, the Hindu holy man, calls upon Jesus Christ to help him. Immediately before the meeting between Ghandi and Jinnah, Ghandi is with Haridasi, the itinerant Bengali woman whose role is similar to that of a Greek chorus in the play: GHANDI:

4

I keep going around Jinnah as Joshua did around Jericho. Today, Jesus Christ, it is of you, wounded God, that I will ask for help. Give me the strength to wound and to be wounded. Give me the opportunity to pay in order to buy

In the introduction to L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves, Cixous also speaks of writing a “love story”: “The [hi]story that bears the fatal name of Partition is in reality an immense love story. Love, that’s what is was all about beyond the [question of] politics and religion”(13).

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back my brother’s love. I am ready to go too far, to lose honor and self-respect if I can bring him to my breast. (II, ii, 79–80) Once again the mother image surfaces: Ghandi sees no act as too ignoble if it will only bring back his lost “child.” Ghandi relates to Jinnah a nightmare in which he saw “a body torn limb from limb, a mother disemboweled, India sliced up like a piece of meat.” When Jinnah nonetheless reiterates his desire to have India divided into “Pakistan and Hindoustan,” Ghandi begins his most fervent plea for love: GHANDI:

JINNAH: GHANDI:

If you will permit me, today I am going to speak to you of love. Love, there is the remedy. Let us all love one another. That is everything. That is the door, the lock, the key…do we love one another? Do the Hindus and the Muslims love one another? NO. No? How can you say that? We have been living together for a thousand years, fighting and making up. For a thousand years we have been wondering: Does he love me? Does she love me? He doesn’t love me any more! No, it is I who no longer love him. And yet how can we live without you? At times, in the midst of love, we think that we no longer love each other. At this moment, you believe that you no longer love me. But love still endures under the ashes. Just allow me to blow on them. (II, ii, 81)

Jinnah violently rejects all of Ghandi’s overtures and mocks his belief that there could be love between Hindus and Muslims. The spirit of Kastourbai returns and tells Ghandi to stop, that instead of loving him more, Jinnah loves him less for his efforts. Ghandi responds like a mother whose child is threatened. The child here is the Muslim part of his country. GHANDI:

He wants to tear the Muslim child from me. I will not let it go. I will roll myself around it like a glove. You will have to cut me into pieces in order to reach it…It’s war? Yes, it’s the war that I am declaring against war, against hatred. (II, ii, 85)

In L’Indiade Cixous returns again and again to images of motherhood. She depicts Ghandi as the mother who would rather give up her child than to see it cut in two by Solomon’s sword. Just as Lord Mountbatten offers Jinnah a reduced version of the Partition he had demanded, Ghandi makes his final desperate plea: I know this song well! And I know an even better one! It’s the Song of Solomon. Listen to me: Your Excellency, I beg of you, give the living India to Mr. Jinnah and do not put her to death! Do not cut her in two, for the love of god, give her to Jinnah. (IV, ii, 160) But Mountbatten is no Solomon, and the sword falls. The political machinations against which Sihanouk and Ghandi vainly struggle appear to exist in another dimension through wihich the two men pass, their souls unscathed, their capacity for love undiminished. In these two tragic tales of our century, the effects of which are still being experienced today, Hélène Cixous uses the “lovers” as keys to the understanding of their two countries, one small and one immense. Whether

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it is Sihanouk’s unfinished story or Ghandi’s legacy, love is portrayed as both the question and the answer; as the means through which human beings reach the heights of divinity and are inextricably linked to friends and enemies alike. References Cixous, Hélène. “Aller à la mer”, Le Monde, 28 April 1977. Translated by Barbara Kerslake in Modern Drama 27.4 (Dec. 1984):546. ——.“Le droit de légende”, Introduction to La prise de l’école de Madhubai. In l’Avant-Scène Théâtre 745 (1 March 1984):4–5. ——. L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge. Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1985. ——. L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves. Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1987. ——. Théâtre: Portrait de Dora et La prise de l’école de Madhuboi. Paris: Editions des femmes, 1986.

38

On Creativity and Anger Julia Pascal

Anger as a negative transferred in to a positive energy. Its pragmatic use within theatre. Anger at how history is taught to cover up the truth and how the war history of the Channel Islands was ‘forgotten’. The use of anger at this misrepresentation as inspiration for the play Theresa. Two monologues from The Dybbuk and Year Zero to show how anger transfers in to creativity. KEY WORDS Nuremberg Laws, Kindertransport, Blackpool, Guernsey, Germany. ‘Don’t get angry.’ That’s what they tell you when you are a little girl. ‘It’s not nice. It makes your face ugly’. In the playground in a Blackpool primary school in 1958, a fair haired, eight year old screamed at me, ‘You killed Jesus’. And I, opened my mouth not knowing what to say. ‘No, I didn’t’, I heard my voice loud and angry.’ I wasn’t born. It was the Romans’. A year later the girl attacked me again. By now she was wearing spectacles. I pulled off her glasses and threw them on the concrete floor fully enjoying the sound of the glass smashing. What has this moment to do with playwriting? In 1989 I read an article in the Sunday newspaper. The Observer about the Channel Islands under Nazi occupation. The feature revealed the betrayal of three Jewish women to the Gestapo by the British governing authorities. The theme of this article haunted me for several months. I was furious to realise that an important area of British history was still secret. The Bailiff of Guernsey, together with his ruling elite, had accepted the Nuremberg Laws and willingly handed over the Jews stranded on the Island. I went to Guernsey and was given secret access to unpublished documents where I read subservient letters from the Bailiff, Victor G Carey, to the Gestapo revealing the addresses, ages, and economic situation of all the Jews on the island. Theresa Steiner, Marianna Grunfeld and Auguste Spitz were the three women first noted in the Observer article and I traced their fate from Europe to their deportation in St Peter’s Port, Guernsey via Drancy and finally, through Serge Klarsfeld’s documentation, to Auschwitz. My research convinced me that I must write a play about these women. I focused on Theresa Steiner and imagined her life in Vienna before her journey to London. Then, using the experience of German and Austrian refugees during the Kindertransport, I tried to see London of the late 1930s through her eyes. But in the final part of the play where she spends two years under Nazi occupation being banned from going to the cinema, skating rinks, public parks and cafes because she was a Jew, I began to imagine all of Britain

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under Nazi rule. If the Channel Islanders could betray the Jews and betray one another by settling old scores, then what difference on mainland Britain? The myth we were all taught in Britain was, ‘that it could never happen here’. But this was a lie. After the war, Guernsey’s Bailiff, Victor G Carey, was knighted for his war service by the Queen (now the Queen Mother). It is as if the French had honoured Maréchal Pétain instead of imprisoning him. Obviously Westminster did not wish to show British wartime collaboration. It was bad for Britain’s public image. And, the fact that Alderney hosted concentration camps where French, Polish, Russian and Jewish prisoners were murdered, was certainly not a fact anyone wanted to reveal. How embarassing if Channel Islanders were to be known as collaborators. This would destroy the image of the-plucky-littleIslanders. I chose actor Ruth Posner to play the name role. She escaped from the Warsaw ghetto as a child. I wanted someone who would bring the living experience of surviving the Nazi era, rather than an actress who would just take on the character as just another job. The real Theresa was in her early twenties and Ruth was almost sixty. As I was writing the role especially for her, I was forced to imagine a Theresa of her age. Instead of being a music student in Vienna which was the reality, I imagined that the music student, had she lived, would have become a Professor of Music. So Theresa Steiner in my play Theresa is a Professor at Vienna Conservatory. After that, I traced the true story of Theresa Steiner as far as my research revealed. She came to work as a nanny in England. When her host family moved to the Channel Islands to escape the expected London bombings in September 1939, Theresa went with them. But, after the fall of France, it was evident that the Nazis were going to invade the Channel Islands. The British army left the Islands and Whitehall offered evacuation to those who wished to leave. This was denied to Theresa Steiner. A British policeman, Inspector William Sculpher, needlessly forbad her escape, even before the Nazi invasion. My anger at the official cover up of what happened made me write the play. It was warmly received in London, Manchester, Maubeuge in France and widely in Germany. Reviews in all countries were very pleasing. A small core of Guernsey dissenters tried to get permission to show the play on the Island and I was asked to send a script for approval. Theresa was banned in Guernsey. The reason given was ‘offensive language’. There is no offensive language in the play other than the names of the collaborators. Even if the guilty are now dead or approaching the grave, their children have no wish to see the family name revealed in public. How to write such a story? It emerged through rehearsal, as a mixture of naturalism, expressionism, English music hall and political theatre. There was music. There was song. There was movement. It starts suprisingly enough with Johann Strauss. I went in to rehearsal knowing that I wanted to use the leitmotif of Strauss’ Blue Danube to express the end of an era. The Danube seems kitsch to us today. I wanted this kitsch vision of Vienna before the Nazi jackboot. Ruth Posner, a former dancer with London Contemporary Dance Theatre, was asked to relive her war memories while reacting to Strauss’ Danube. At first she listened and then little by little her body expressed her months as a supposed Catholic in Warsaw’s ‘Aryan Sector’ and later in a German prison camp. She moved as a little girl going to her first dance or as a slave. She moved as someone seeking help or someone on a long painful journey. Impossible to describe the power her ‘dance’ provoked. Imagine the body of a sixty year old woman who has the suppleneness of an eighteen year old and whose face expresses memories which no actress just performing a role can evoke. In one scene on the Channel Islands, Theresa Steiner is forced to show her passport and declare that she is a Jew. ‘I am a Jew’ she says and the scene is repeated six times, each time more grotesquely—a Georg Grosz image meant to sear the

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Figure 1 Monique Burg in Theresa. Photograph by Julia Pascal

mind and one of the hardest scenes for Ruth to perform. Living in England for most of her post war life, and being a Jew, was something to keep quiet. Add this to the fact that she hid her Jewishness in order to save her life in Poland and Germany during the war and you can imagine how she felt. How to present the holocaust onstage? The question troubled me during the writing of the play. I explored simple movements. Sometimes I added Jewish humour to show areas of Jewish self-parody. For instance in one scene Theresa Steiner meets a former German history professor in the lobby of the London’s Savoy Hotel. He is a bellboy; she a nanny. Both preserve the dignity of their professions and call one another ‘Frau Docktor’ and ‘Herr Professor’. They are to typify all those German and Austrian middle class Jews, communists and anti-Nazis, who were forced to become menials in Britain before and during the war.

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Figure 2 Monique Burg (white blouse) Kate Margam in ‘Theresa’. Photograph by David Jacobs

I wanted the audience to laugh at the way the German Jews clung on to their pretensions but to also pity them for all they had lost. German Jews represented the most assimilated of all European Jewry. In 1914 they fought for the Kaiser and many even converted. When they arrived in Britain in the late thirties they were fondly mocked by Britain’s Eastern European Jews who called them ‘Yeckes’. (This Yiddishism is a reference to their refusal to take off their jackets even in midsummer for fear of offending decorum. Die Jacke is German for the jacket). But gentile audiences are often scared to laugh during a holocaust play. When Jews tittered in selfrecognition, the gentiles felt they were also being given permission to laugh. I wanted the audience to laugh and to cry. But how to present the actual Final Solution? I decided that the most potent way of doing this was by sound. In the last scene, the final image is of Theresa and the Gestapo Officer in a tight spot-light with only the interminable sound of the train heading towards Auschwitz as an indication of what is to come.

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Figure 3 My Lithuanian family. The lost cousins of Esther’s speech in ‘The Dybbuk’.

As the lights come up, the stage is bare except for Theresa’s suitcase, coat and hat. When we played in Germany there was a terrible silence at the end followed by sobbing. Here our audiences were frequently students. The play, as they saw it, was not Guernsey, but part of their own living German history. The German actor playing the Gestapo officer, Thomas Kampe, represented their fathers and grandfathers. In Germany I learnt of the cathartic weapon of theatre and how such work can help bring together the children of former enemies. After Theresa I wrote, A Dead Woman On Holiday which was the story of two interpreters who fall in love during The Nuremberg Trials. And the third in the trilogy was my version of The Dybbuk which draws on Solomon Anski’s classic as an inspirational force. Here is the first monologue. It shows how the anger I frequently feel in Germany prompts me to recognize today’s dybbuks. The second monologue is from my fourth war play Year Zero set in Vichy France. It explores the massive level of collaboration during the Pétain years. A woman is condemned for ‘horizontal collaboration with the enemy’. Her accusers are a crowd who, as the Allies land on the Normandy coast, suddenly join the Resistance! This is her inner monologue against these hypocrites. It is also a modern speech fuelled by my anger at the sexual hypocrisy still present in contemporary France. That little girl in the Blackpool playground back in 1958, never knew the favour she was doing me. Lights Up On Judith—The Dybbuk The rest of the company have their backs to the audience. They are dressed in 1940s costumes. She is dressed in today’s casual clothes.

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Figure 4 Thomas Kampe in ‘The Dybbuk’ Photo David Jacobs.

Judith I was in Germany and they went on strike. Not because of me. It was nothing to do with me. A little holiday with my fiancé combined with a little research for my job. Satelite communication. It was a hot spring day in Frankfurt. In the park by the Opera House, just by Goethe’s statue, two hundred young people were shooting-up. We were walking hand in hand. And suddenly we were in Dante’s Inferno. They were burning stuff, snorting stuff, injecting stuff. It was a kind of communal mass. One girl filled her vein with heroin and then passed on the syringe to another young woman. I wanted to shout stop, don’t take it. But she was past knowing anything. I took trains in the strike. There were no trams or buses but the trains still ran on time. To the second. Strange things happen to me on trains. I meet men. Of a certain age. Men who have not enjoyed ‘the mercy of a late birth.’ For some strange reason, they are always drawn to me. They are curious. They ask

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me something in German and when I respond they tell me my German is good and where did I learn it. From my grandmother, I say. ‘Was she German?’ ‘No Roumanian.’ Then I wait. Shall I pretend she was a Christian? I can’t. ‘She also spoke Yiddish.’ Then they look at me hard. There is usually a silence. Maybe they talk about something else. The strike. What a pity it is that there is no Berlin Wall. The invasion of all those East Germans. Anything to cover what is going on behind their eyes. And then little by little it comes out. ‘I knew about the Jews. Yes, I knew. I even helped them. My mother lived on the Dutch border. She heard the trains. She used to go out when it was a new moon, in order not to be seen, you understand. She went out and picked up all the scraps of paper, the tiny messages that the people threw out. They wrote on anything, a label from a jacket, a handkerchief, any scrap of material would do. The messages were to warn children in hiding. Of course we collected all these messages and filled up our kitchen table with them. We tried to get messages to those hidden children. We did what we could’. They don’t always pretend to have helped. Maybe that man did help. How do I know? Sometimes they tell me of their life in the Hitler Youth. Of their joy in pointing out a Jew hiding a yellow star behind an empty briefcase. Of Jews riding in trams, refusing to ride in the Jews’ car. I go to Germany and I think that Hitler won. Where is my generation? Where are my cousins? Where is the dream of assimilation? Oh yes, Hitler won. In Heidelberg, just by Macdonalds, is the square where they rounded up the Jews. I see a man in a yamulka, a kippa. He wears the mark of a religious Jew in defiance. Somehow he embarrasses me. As so many religious Jews do. Am I ashamed to be a Jew? Is this my own self-hatred? My own antisemitism? I don’t even believe in God, so what makes me a Jew? They don’t talk of such things in my family. “Keep your head down.” “Be British, be cool, be part of the crowd.” More and more I think about my family who vanished. I wonder what happened to them. I imagine them in a ghetto in Vilna or maybe in Warsaw or Lodz. I know it sounds strange but I am haunted by faces, different accents, different bodies, all the lost cousins and aunts and uncles who I want to have known. I see a blonde woman, a dark man, a curly haired redhead, a fair young man. I don’t know who they are but they often come to me in dreams. They say that a person can be filled with the soul of another and that soul, which has died too early, is a dybbuk. But I, I, I, I have so many dybbuks…. Lighting change. Actors slowly turn around. They are carrying suitcases in their arms. Slowly they let the cases fall to reveal yellow stars on their left breast. The Cut of 1944 La tondue—The woman with the shaved head. Extract from Year Zero written and produced 1994. Lights up on a woman on a raised platform in a public square. She is sitting. A man stands behind her with a pair of scissors as if just about to cut her hair. A German soldier is also present.

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L’Année Zero/Year Zero

Figure 5 Veronique Arbez & Stéphane Titelein. Photograph by Pierre Peron. Marbeuge International Theatre Festival, France, May 1994.

Woman: La coupe de dix neuf cent quarante quatre—nineteen forty four. You don’t need shampoo or curling tongues. This is really à la mode. In fact there’s another advantage, it costs nothing to keep neat. You can tip the coiffeur if you want to. Him. It’s always him. Pure white him. Never fucked the wife of a comrade away on forced labour. Never visited a fille de joie with the juices of Jerry running out of her. Oh of course. He was in the Resistance. On D-Day. They all were. Cocky little men with their feet in the shit while they shout “Coco-rico” for victory. Yes, I know them. They came to me before Jerry. When a man’s inside you you don’t care if his cock is French German or American. But, at least with Jerry at least there’s a certain courtesy. Gnädige Frau, may I enter now? Then he shows you a photo of Fraulein back home and you know in this corner of France you are giving the warmth of a stolen afternoon’s pleasure. What does he know poor sod. He doesn’t want to be here. He wants to be back home. The bastard knows he’s probably going to die here.

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Figure 6 Maubeuge International Theatre Festival France May 1994. Stéphane Titelein, Veronique Arbez, Marie-Odile Sahajdak (back of head), Bruno Tuchzer. Photograph Pierre Peron (Actors left to right)

And so what. Didn’t he kill too? So go on, get it over with. Tirez un coup mon bel allemand. Tirez un coup mon beau français avec un balle dans le cerveau pour Monsieur l’Allemand. Sois courageux mon petit soldat de chocolat. A bullet in the brain or in the heart. Be brave soldier boy. Me I’m brave with these bastards. Punish the women for what the men do. If I sell my cunt then there’s always a client. Who is more guilty the seller or the buyer? And does the deutschmark stink more than the franc? Oh you make laugh with your sense of justice. Men came to me in the night, in the morning, in the afternoon. Tits and ass. That’s all they want. Woman is just a hole where man leaves his mark in eternity. No words. With words. Brutally. Tenderly. ‘Meine liebe.’ ‘Ich liebe dich.’ Words of love for an afternoon forgotten by night. They used to cut off heads now they only cut hair. It’ll soon grow. She puts on a headscarf. Machine gun fire the German soldier is dead. AMERICAN MUSIC ‘Oh When The Saints Come Marching In’ Bonjour Yankee Soldier Boy. What do you want to give me? Nylon stockings? It’s a long time since I had a good pair of stockings on me. You want to help me put them on? She lifts her skirt and we hear sounds of American tanks and voices. Blackout

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Figure 7 Stéphane Titelein (barechested) Laure Smadja & Bruno Tuchzer. Photograph by Pierre Peron

Revolution and Poetry in Feyder’s Le Chant du retour Patricia Lancaster Department of Foreign Languages, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida

To celebrate the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the city of Arras commissioned playwright Vera Feyder to create a drama based on the life of a famous, some might say infamous, native son—Maximilien de Robespierre. The city requested that the play have a large cast of characters to permit the participation of several theatre companies: le Théâtre du Campagnol, Centre Dramatique National de la banlieue sud, les Tréteaux d’Artois and les Quatre sans cou. To one familiar with Feyder’s previous work, it is difficult to imagine a subject—Robespierre and the reign of terror—or a style—a large-scale production with numerous characters—less in keeping with her own themes and dramatic practice. Her best-known play, Emballage perdu, is an intimate two-character piece that traces the effect of verbal violence on the friendship between two women. However, Feyder accepted the commission on the condition that she be allowed to set the play in contemporary France rather than in the Revolutionary period. The result, Le Chant du retour, is a play that differs in many ways from Feyder’s usual dramatic style, yet remains faithful to her abiding themes: freedom, human dignity, and the power of language. This study deals briefly with the thematic content of Le Chant du retour, then looks specifically at both the literal and symoblic role of a single character, Constantin. The central action of the play is the disruption of the bicentennial celebration at Arras by the appearance of a native son, Maxime, who bears a remarkable resemblance to Robespierre. Absent from Arras for five years, Maxime has been invited back to play Robespierre in the local pageant. However, the Arrageois are not prepared to extend their hospitality to the companions with whom Maxime returns: a group of tortured and mutilated refugees from Togo, Peru, Haiti, Czechoslovakia, and South Africa. This plot device allows Feyder to evoke the worldwide violations of human rights that continue to exist two hundred years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man. She also manages to include allusions to the many struggles against violence and oppression that have occurred since 1789—the revolution of 1848, the Commune, the Great War, and the atrocities of World War II. But human suffering is not viewed merely in an historical or international context, for Feyder creates a number of Arrageois who illustrate the problems facing modern France: exploited immigrant workers, impoverished elderly citizens, destroyers of the natural environment. If all this sounds like a heavy ideological burden for a dramatic piece, Feyder lightens the tone through the use of word play, song, poetry, comic episodes, and an optimistic dénouement. Much of the humor and poetry is provided by Constantin, described as “homme libre et poète” [free man and poet] in the play’s list of characters. His role appears at first to be minor, a hobo taking a bemused interest in the town’s pageant preparations and supplying appropriate quotations, or misquotations, as the situation demands. However, an

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analysis of Constantin’s role shows that he must be understood on both the literal and symbolic levels and that he embodies the spirit that animates this theatrical event. On the first level Constantin is a tipsy vagabond who appears after six expository scenes have acquainted the audience with the play’s main characters, established the city’s intention to re-enact scenes from the life of Robespierre, and set the stage for the return of Maxime. In scene seven, the stage directions indicate that …la fièvre des préparatifs est à son comble, la chaleur aussi. On entend répéter dans les salles avoisinantes: des scènes de la Constituante, des chorales, des fanfares, se juxtaposant, se relayant… Entre Constantin, homme libre. L’air et l’espace lui appartiennent. (38) […the fever of preparation is at its height, the heat as well. We hear rehearsals in the nearby rooms: scenes from the Constitutional Assembly, chorales, fanfares, in juxtapostion and harmony with each other…Enter Constantin, a free man. Air and space belong to him.] Constantin announces to two middle-aged women, “Mesdames! Je suis la Revolution en marche, donc fatigué [Ladies, I am Revolution on the march, therefore tired],” and immediately falls asleep on the bench next to them. The disparity between his unassuming demeanor and the grandeur of his pronouncement leads at first to the assumption that his role is purely a comic one, but his subsequent contribution to the action reveals that he is an unusual sort of vagabond. He is among those most sympathetic to Maxime’s desire to find a safe haven for his friends and, in fact, functions as a sort of deus ex machina to provide them a home. In the last act, learning that the city fathers of Arras have confiscated Maxime’s house, Constantin offers sanctuary to him and his friends. The vagabond reveals: J’ai eu des terres autrefois, des titres, un château dont il reste quelques murs. Ils sont à vous. Je parle des murs. S’il vous faut un refuge contre la barbarie, le mensonge ou l’indifférence. Pour vous et vos amis. Mais ce n’est pas vraiment un cadeau. C’est une ruine en forme d’abri pour ceux qui n’en ont pas. (109) [I had lands once, titles, a chateau with a few remaining walls. They are yours. The walls I mean. If you need a refuge against barbarism, lies or indifference. For you and your friends. But it is not a really a gift. It’s a ruin in the form of shelter for those who have none.] Having surprised Maxime with the offer of a house, he goes on to say that the real gift he offers will come from the city of Arras. Ironically, the city’s contest for the best “revolutionary idea” has been won by none other than Constantin, who intends to turn over the cash prize to Maxime. So, Constantin functions on the literal level as a descendant of the nobility, against whom the French revolted in 1789, who recognizes and opposes the continuing oppression of 1989. His voluntary renunciation of privilege and property, in favor of freedom and humanitarianism, stands in sharp contrast to the wresting of power from his ancestors by means of force. His choice to be a free man reminds us that all persons, regardless of rank or class, have the ability and, indeed, the obligation to free themselves and others from society’s accumulated wrongs. But Constantin the poet has an even more important role. On the symbolic level he is a Dionysian figure, inspired with a poet’s ability to understand and express the truth of the human condition, the meaning of liberty, and the function of poetic language in shaping and sustaining revolutionary ideals. Solving the “mystery” (a term that seems especially appropriate in this dramatic context) of Constantin’s symbolic function requires careful attention to his words, particularly in scene seven. As already noted, he initially proclaims himself the personification, albeit a tired one, of the Revolution. As he dozes upon the park bench, Constantin rouses occasionally to make revelatory comments. First, when a loudspeaker carries the words

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of Robespierre denouncing the injustice of the government, Constantin adds the quotation “Celui qui n’est pas pour le peuple est contre le peuple [He who is not for the people is against the people].” (40) Second, upon hearing a reference to the “discours d’ouverture [opening speech]”, Constantin rhymes it with the name of Haiti’s revolutionary leader. He exclaims “Louverture! Le seul, le vrai…au port de prince: Toussaint Louverture!” (41) [Louverture, the only, the true…at port of prince] His reactions suggest that he is no simple wanderer but an educated man who knows something of history and revolution. After sleeping through four pages of dialogue Constantin next wakes at the mention of a “voyageur assoiffé [thirsty traveller].” Raising his hand, he answers “Présent.” (46) Given his midday torpor, it seems likely that this traveller unually thirsts for something stronger than water. Constantin’s next comment is in response to a woman’s expression of anxiety about atomic war. In an intriguing adaptation of a line from Valéry’s famous meditative poem “Le Cimetière marin”, Constantin intones: “Un vent de mort se lève, il faut tenter de survivre! [A death wind is rising, one must try to survive!].” He then asks the woman, “Avez-vous l’heure? [Do you have the time?]” (46) Here is an excellent example of the intelligence and subtle wit with which Feyder has endowed Constantin. His version of one of the most famous lines in French poetry resonates with the contrast between Valéry’s less complex era and our own, which is threatened by the deadly wind of nuclear fall-out. Valéry’s poem concludes that one must “tenter de vivre” [try to live], but given the dangers of the modern age, Constantin says one must try to survive. It is a sober thought to be sure, yet a humorous tone is quickly restored by his asking the time. After all, Valéry’s philosophical poem is known to be set precisely at noon. Poor Constantin, on the other hand, has lost track of time. The response to Constantin’s question is “Six heures, voyez bien [Six o’clock, as you can see].” The verb ‘see’ triggers a long, poetic reply that begins “Non, Madame, je ne vois pas. J’ai perdu mes lunettes. Je les ai perdues dans un rêve et ce rêve ne m’a jamais retrouvé [No, Madame, I don’t see. I lost my glasses in a dream and that dream never found me again].” (46–7) The speech turns into a rather fanciful tribute to the sun, whom Constantin calls “the great seer of the universe.” (47) I shall return to this speech later to discuss its significance in revealing Constantin’s symbolic role. An important clue to Constantin’s identity is in a conversation with the playwright Michard, immediately following the former’s poetic outburst: Michard: Constantin: Michard: Constantin: Michard: Constantin:

M.: C.: M.: C: M.: C:

Que faites-vous dans la vie? La manche! (Il la lui montre.) Enfin, ce qu’il en reste. (lui donnant sa carte) Et moi, du théâtre! Du nouveau théâtre. (déchirant la carte) Je ne crains pas la concurrence. Ah, je le dis toujours, les genies courent les rues. Les bois, Monsieur! “Les grands bois et les champs sont de vastes asiles… Libres comme la mer autour des sombres îles…Marche à travers les champs une fleur à la main.” (47) [ How do you make your living? From tricks up my sleeve. (He shows it to him.) At least, what’s left of it. (giving him his card) And I am in theatre. The new theatre. (tearing up the card) I’m not afraid of the competition. Ah, as I always say, the streets are full of geniuses. The woods, sir! “The great woods and the fields are vast sanctuaries…Free as the sea around the somber isles…Walk through the fields with a flower in your hand.”]

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Since “faire la manche” means to be a busker, Constantin’s reply, on the literal level, indicates that a street performer has nothing to fear from the competition of “new” theater. However, the term “nouveau théâtre”, combined with the notion of competition also calls to mind the opposite of ‘nouveau’: ‘ancien’ or ‘antique’. Also, Constantin makes clear his association with the woods rather than the city, again supplying a suitable quotation, this time from Alfred de Vigny’s poem “La Maison du berger” (lines 26–28). Combining the clues of the implied “théâtre antique” and the woods with the earlier identification of Constantin as a thirsty traveller, it is easy to associate him with Dionysus, the god of vegetation and the vine, the patron deity of Greek tragic festivals. As Rose Pfeffer explains in her excellent study Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus, the worship of Dionysus had its origins in Thrace and Phrygia, where the god was associated with orgiastic rites and drunken frenzy. “But”, she states, “when introduced into Greece and received by the priesthood of Apollo, the old Thracian god is united with the native gods of Olympus, and the non-Hellenic orgiastic elements of Dionysian excess merged with the measured sublimity and form-giving force of Apollo” (30). Pfeffer argues that Nietzsche, in his later works, goes beyond the Dionysian/Apollonian dualism expressed in The Birth of Tragedy to develop a concept of Dionysus that represents a synthesis in which negation and affirmation, suffering and joy, are reconciled in terms of a Dionysian faith that includes both gods and achieves true tragic greatness. However, this synthesis must never be understood as a static and and finalistic one, in which the contest between the opposing forces is abolished and the dialectical elements are destroyed. Dinoysos remains, as Nietzsche calls him, “the great ambivalent one,” forever struggling and yet forever giving structure and form. (31) The notion of a fusion of Dionysian chaos with Apollonian harmony and the idea that struggle is a productive power help interpret a passage that might at first seem to argue against the association of Constantin with Dionysus, i.e. the apostrophe to the sun preceding Constantin’s conversation with Michard. Thinking of a Dionysian/Apollonian dualism, I wondered why Constantin, if he is identified with Dionysus would praise the sun, symbol of Apollo. Looking again at this passage in light of Pfeffer’s explanation of a synthesis of the two, I became aware of an important cluster of themes: sun, wine, chance, despair and revolution. Addressing a young African woman, Djamila, Constantin declares: Heureusement j’ai rendez-vous avec le grand voyant de l’univers! J’ai nommé, le soleil. Celui qui nous voit comme je vous vois. Nue du haut des nues. (Il se lève) Celui qui gît au fond de tous les verres d’amitié et toutes les bouteilles à la mer…Le grand jeteur de sort lumineux, diseur de bonne et de mauvaise aventure. Soleil du gros rouge, du petit blanc, de la belle bleue. (Il prend la main de Djamila) Bleu, blanc, rouge…avec le désespoir il a fleuri…Soleil, grand fossoyeur d’idées noires. (Il s’agenouille devant Djamila et embrasse le bas de sa robe) Princesse, nous nous reverrons. (47) [Luckily I have a rendez-vous with the great seer of the universe! I have named, the sun. The one who sees us as I see you. Undisguised from high in the clouds. (He gets up) The one who lives at the bottom of wine glasses and in bottles cast into the sea. The great luminous sorcerer, teller of good and bad fortune. Sun of the hearty red, the little white, the beautiful blue. (He takes the hand of Djamila) Blue, white, red with despair it flowered. Sun, great gravedigger of dark ideas. (He kneels before Djamila and kisses the hem of her dress) Princess, we shall meet again.] The sun is found not only high in the sky but also associated with wine. It is in the wine drunk with friends; it is the sun of red wine and white wine. And although the sun is finally described as the gravedigger for dark ideas, it is not totally a source of order and harmony. Rather Constantin associates it with an element

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of supernatural power and chance, calling the sun a “jeteur de sort” and a “diseur de bonne et mauvaise aventure”. Moving by association from the color of wine to the colors of the French revolutionary flag, Constantin says that it “flowered” from despair. The “belle bleue” of the preceding sentence is an allusion to the blue fireworks that “flower” in the skies of France every July 14.1 So, within this passage are the symbols (sun and wine) of the Dionysian/ Apollonian synthesis as well as the juxtaposition of chaos or chance (“jeteur de sort”) with the notion of form and structure—as “diseur de bonne et mauvaise aventure” the sun articulates our fate. There is also the theme of revolution as a struggle against despair. Besides enunciating the primary theme of the play, this passage is an excellent example of the act of poetic creation. Through repetition, alliteration, imagery, and rhythm Constantin gives structure and form to his thoughts, making of them a beautiful and powerful prose poem. Important as are the meaning and style of this passage, we must also take into account the young woman to whom Constantin is speaking. Djamila is a mysterious presence in Arras. She has been on stage through most of scene seven without the citizens of Arras acknowledging her presence. People practically bump into her without so much as a hello; to the people of Arras she is a nonentity, an invisible woman. Later, in scene two of Act II, Maxime reveals that he found Djamila lying by the roadside in Togo, nearly dead from a botched excision of the clitoris. She became one of the band of outcasts and refugees under his protection. Constantin not only recognizes the existence of this mutilated victim but treats her tenderly, confiding in her, and calling her “princess.” She is one of the sufferers on this earth, but he reminds her that revolutionary changes can flower from the kind of despair that she has experienced. Through the remaining two acts of the play, Constantin continues to be the voice of poetry, sometimes creating his own, sometimes quoting poets like Blake and Victor Hugo. In the final act he dons the Robespierre costume formerly worn by Maxime, thus realizing his earlier claim to being Revolution on the march. Quoting the powerful revolutionary rhetoric of men like Robespierre and Saint-Just he demonstrates the importance of giving form and structure to the revolutionary impulse that springs from struggle and oppression. In one of his most beautiful speeches to the people of Arras he defines liberty as the wind: …Le vent c’est l’âme de la terre, personne n’a jamais pu l’attraper, ni l’enfermer. Mais tout le monde sait qu’elle existe. Et qu’elle souffle partout où on la persécute…Ecoutez-la. Elle est en marche. Elle est ici ce soir puisque le vent est de la fête. C’est le chant continu de tous les damnés de la terre, de tous les forcats de la faim réunis en un même souffle insurrectionnel. (109) […The wind is the soul of the earth, no one has ever been able to capture it or enclose it. But everyone knows that it exists. And that it blows wherever it is persecuted. Listen to it. It is on the march. It is here this evening because the wind is among those invited. It is the continuous song of all the damned of the earth, of all the prisoners of hunger united in one insurrectional breath.] The wind is associated with language through the terms “song” and “breath.” It is the breath of humans, who are capable of expressing through language as well as action their revolt against suffering and despair. And it is this idea that wins for Constantin the prize for best revolutionary idea. His entry in the contest is “La revolution, comme la poésie, doit être faite par tous et pour tous [Revolution, like poetry, must be made by all and for all].” (115)2 In keeping with the Dionysian/ Apollonian synthesis, struggle against pain and

1

Feyder provided this explanation of the “belle bleue” in a 1992 interview. Feyder identifies this as a variation on the words of the poet Lautréamont who says that poetry should by made “par tous et pour tous [by all and for all].”

2

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suffering go hand in hand with creative activity. Constantin’s contest entry also bears his true name: Gontran du Pressoir de Thionville. This Dionysian figure even has ‘wine press’ for a middle name! So the character who seems on one level to be a deus ex machina, offering a home to Maxime’s refugees, is really a god who has been at the festival all along, embodying the spirit of dramatic art. His presence is only one of many techniques that Feyder uses to endow her play with a spirit similar to that of the early communal ritual in which theatre is rooted. By the play’s end the citizens of Arras (those who commissioned the play) have seen themselves, represented by the actors on stage, confronting the truth about oppression in modern society, just as the chorus in Greek tragedy must finally discover the truth. Yet, in the heroic human tendency to struggle against life’s suffering and pain and in the creative spirit that dwells in the human heart they may still find the hope of a better future. “Peuple, écoutez le poète [People, listen to the poet],” Victor Hugo advised his own generation of revolutionaries, and so one should in Le Chant du retour. References Feyder, Vera. Le Chant du retour. Paris: Actes Sud-Papiers, 1989 ——. Interview 1992. Mansell Jones, P. and G.Richardson, eds. A Book of French Verse: Lamartine to Eluard. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964. Pfeffer, Rose. Nietzsche: Disciple of Dionysus. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1972. Valéry, Paul. Poésies. Paris: Gallimard, 1936.

Patricia Lancaster earned the M.A. and Ph.D. in French Literature from Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. She was appointed to the Foreign Languages Department of Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida in 1970 and was promoted to Professor of French in 1980. From 1983 to 1987 she served as Associate Dean of Faculty. As Director of International Programs from 1987 to 1991 she supervised Rollins study-abroad programs in Australia, Ireland, Mexico, and Spain. Since 1992 she has been Dean of Rollins Brevard Campus. While primarily engaged in administrative work over the past ten years, she has continued her research on modern French theatre, especially the work of Belgian-born author Vera Feyder. Among Professor Lancaster’s presentations at conferences are “Dreams within Dreams: The Film Adaptation of Feyder’s La derelitta” and “Vera Feyder’s Emballage perdu.” She is currently working on an English translation of Feyder’s novel La derelitta.

Laughing All the Way to the Ghetto: Lesbian Farce Jackie Clune

This article focuses on the nature of farce as a British theatrical genre with reference to lesbian theatre in particular. Farce is explored as a political weapon and as such is deconstructed in its traditional reactionary form in the cultural context of modern British theatre. The rest of the article focuses on a production by Red Rag Women’s Theatre Company, Ooh, Missus!, which attempted a radical pastiche of the Whitehall farce from a lesbian perspective. It ends with an analysis of the current trends in lesbian theatre in London. The main assertion of the article is that lesbian theatre in the eighties and early nineties has adopted an overtly “out” and confident identity with a clear set of acceptable humourous forms and characters. The closed nature of these “givens” is questioned in this article. KEY WORDS Lesbian Theatre, Farce, British. “There they are: the most robust survivors of a great tradition, the most successful British theatrical enterprises of our time. Curious that no-one can be found to speak up wholeheartedly for them—no-one, that is, outside the enthusiastic millions who have packed every British theatre they have played. It’s particularly curious considering the current intellectual agitation for a theatre of the masses, a true working-class drama. Everything, apparently, for which Joan Littlewood (the great British theatre director of the 1960s)1A had struggled—the boisterous, the extrovert playing, the integrated teamwork, the cockney irreverence of an unselfconscious, unacademic audience bent purely on pleasure—exists, patently and profitably, at the Whitehall. Yet how many devout pilgrims to Stratford East (where Littlewood ran her theatre)1A have hazarded the shorter journey to Trafalgar Square to worship at the shrine of the thing itself? How many Arts Council grants have sustained Mr Rix’s company? How many Evening Standard awards went to Dry Rot? How many theses have been written on the art of Colin “Morris, John Chapman or Ray Cooney? The time has come, surely, to fill the gap.1” (Theatre critic Ronald Bryden, 1964)

1A

Brackets—added by Editor. Ronald Bryden, New Statesmen, 24 July 1964, p. 126, quoted in Leslie Smith’s Modern British Farce, MacMillan press, 1989, Chapter 4, p. 70. 1

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This article is written from several seemingly diverse interests. The above quotation begins to outline an attitude towards what can be called a “popular” form peculiar to British theatre: the Whitehall Farce. However, I do not intend a critique of farce as a form per se; rather, I intend to open a discourse about modern lesbian theatre in Britain during the last five or six years. My interest in farce vis-à-vis lesbian theatre, has grown from a production I was involved in by Red Rag Women’s Theatre Company. The play attempted a radical parody of the Whitehall form and was called Ooh, Missus!, signifying a pastiche, the ultimate ridiculously suggestive title much favoured by the Whitehall farceurs. I am a performing and devising member of Red Rag Women’s Theatre Company (a lesbian collective) and I lecture in Drama and Theatre Studies at London University. Such autobiographical information is not designed to better acquaint the reader with the author, rather it is to identify the difficuly in constructing a critique from both inside and out, as it were. This difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that there is little language available with which to describe the experience of performance from the performer’s point of view. Most theatre theory is constructed from within a patriarchal framework which effectively disempowers the performer in the creative process, the performer being at the bottom of the pyramid in the male-defined power structures in operation. However, it is my intention to attempt an analysis of a production by Red Rag Women’s Theatre Company in London last year with a view to assessing the current trends in lesbian theatre as a whole. In 1991 Red Rag wrote and performed Ooh, Missus!2 at several different venues all over London. The play, then, was an inversion of the Whitehall product so lauded in the above quotation. The plot was arrived at through a study of the laws and structures of the farcical form, plus an agenda of essential ingredients; mistaken identity, sexual infidelity (either real or supposed), mocking of figures of authority, stock characters, misunderstandings and the prerequisite that, in the midst of the chaos, something vital must be at stake. We played to packed houses full of enthusiastic women who were thrilled to see their lifestyles being represented in a form usually associated with the worst kind of misogynist, homophobic nonsense. The production was immensely popular (in several senses of the word). The critical response was largely favourable. We had intended to subvert the form in order to provoke laughter plus an awareness of the stereotypes perpetuated through farce in its conservative form. This subversion was achieved through research into the aesthetics of farce plus practical experience of the reception of performances. We visited what must be considered to be the ultimate farce currently enjoying a long stay in London’s West End; Ray Cooney’s Run For Your Wife!3 I would like to outline some of this research with a view to establishing some critical criteria for the study of farce as a whole. I would then like to apply the same criteria to Ooh, Missus! in order to assess the subversive nature of genre parody. Run For Your Wife! centres around the confusion created when a bigamist taxi-driver is involved in an accident which induces a temporary memory-loss. We watch John Smith (whose name signifies his absolute “normality”) as he blunders between his two homes confusing one wife for the other and getting tangled up with the gay men living upstairs. The “hilarity” of the piece rests on a number of implicit assumptions about the reception of the play’s content, and how it is contained within the farcical structure. In order to really enjoy this play it is clear that we must share the majority of the opinions and prejudices of the writer/the central character: we must believe that heterosexual serial monogamy is the correct moral framework in which to live one’s life; we must therefore find the idea of a man duping two women very naughty and amusing; we must identify with the charming buffoon of a taxi-driver to such an extent that we wish him success in his duplicity and deception and hope that he gets away with it; we must believe that women are stupid, but that

2 3

Lois Charlton and Winnie Elliott, 1991, unpublished. Run For Your Wife! Ray Cooney, Samuel French, 1984.

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glamorous women are alright; we must find gay men hilariously funny at a distance but threatening in the extreme if too close; we must share the mistrust of any “foreigners” to the country; we must value the obsession with material wealth which leads the taxi-driver to overwork and thus cause an accident. In short, we must hold a white, male, heterosexual middle-class point of view. It is this point of view which often masquerades as the universal moral system with which everyone is expected to comply. Failure to condone this system results in the accusation of being overly politically correct and unable to take a joke. The discourse which suggests that any resistance to the humor outlined above is boringly pedantic is not reserved for the traditional MCP misogynist joke-teller. This postion is also implied in several critical works on farce. Leslie Smith’s Modern British Farce (Macmillan, 19894) builds on the assertion in an earlier critique of the form by Jessica Davis5 which suggests that “…the appeal of farce is at one level universal, not tied to a particular set of historical circumstances.” Smith calls for the legitimisation of British farce, and makes a case for its inclusion in the mainstream intellectual culture. He wants the Dirty Old Uncle6 of British Theatre to take his rightful place in the family album. The inclusion of farce seems unlikely. The position of British farce in the cultural hierarchy is—and always has been—caught up in a false dichotomy; namely, that there is “good” and “bad” art, “high” theatre and “low” theatre. The tacit political agreement is that these distinctions are natural and unavoidable. This, we are told, will always be the case. The cultural hegemony then tips the balance in favour of the “high”, and decrees it the most valuable, the most virtuous and the most worthy of a place in the nation’s legitimate cultural history. The “high” is called educational, concerned with the human existence, on the quest for the essence of the human condition. It usually excludes women. The “low” is called base, rooted, entertaining, concerned with innate rebelliousness and bestial pleasure and carnival release. The “low” has traditionally included women (even if only as sexually available objects). For those with a different political agenda to the ruling—usually conservative—hegemony, this analysis of culture is divisive. The charges have been that the cultural élite are guilty of being esoteric, unnecessarily highbrow and far too refined. The traditional response to this dangerous dichotomy has been to simply reverse the positions and decry anything bearing marks of “high” culture and, in turn, elevate anything smacking of authentic popular roots. Such a simplistic and misleading solution is the basis of Bryden’s lament above. Farce has thus tradionally occupied a place on the lower end of the cultural ladder. In general comedy is not seen as a valid art form. Farce can be characterised by its extreme formalisation in a comic mode and is therefore instantly dismissable.The lack of positive critical response to farce is not a modern phenomenon, nor is it confined to British theatre. Nahum Tate in his preface to A Duke and No Duke (edition of 1693) questions the critical silence surrounding the genre and wonders “by what fate it (farce) happens, in common Notion, to be the most contemptible sort of Drama”.7 Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote that Molière (Lettre à M. D’Alembert sur le Spectacles, in Œuvres, vol. 11, p. 44) “disturbs the whole order of society to further his joking…He creates laughter, it’s true, and only makes himself the more culpable for doing so.”8

4

Leslie Smith Modern British Farce, 1989, MacMillan, p. 15. Farce, Jessica Davis, Methuen Critical Idiom Series, 1978. 6 The type of relative who you only see at rare family gatherings, who is always sodden drunk, jolly, making crass sexual innuendos where ever possible, and who probably tried to molest you when you were six. 7 Jessica Davis, 1978 Farce, Critical Idiom series, Methuen, p. 1. 8 ibid, p. 25. 5

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What Bryden calls for is the elevation of farce in our culture to a postion where its is deemed worthy of critical study and acclaim. This elevation will, in effect, raise the status of farce in the eyes of the hegemony. Farce, once recognised as a form full of skill and enjoying immense “popular” appeal, will join the culturally élite group which includes opera, ballet, fine art, classical music, Shakespeare (on page and/or stage), “serious” new playwriting such as one can see at the Royal National Theatre or The Royal Court etc. etc.. The devotees of British farce are in effect bargaining for a place in the upper echelons, a share of the legitimate pie, the inclusion of the Dirty Old Uncle. The project as far as Red Rag were concerned was not to legitimise farce but to highlight the conservative and reactionary nature of its traditional morphosis. By flagrantly keeping the clichés of the parent-genre but substituting the expected heterosexual couple with lesbian characters we were making a powerful statement about the traditional use of queer sexuality in the form. If Cooney is going to use queers to raise a cheap laugh for heterosexuals, then let us hi-jack his vehicle and fill the stage with lesbians for lesbians. The production was not a defiant reaction to farce; rather, its impetus was a proud gesture of confidence in our ability to take anything from straight culture and use if for our own purposes. We stole our Dirty Old Uncle’s clothes while he was swimming in the sea and hung them from the flag-pole. In this sense the impetus for the play was linked to the many queer activist groups currently in operation. In Britain we have Outrage and Act-Up, and even more controversially, Homocult, three groups whose main intention is to use radical activist tactics to foreground queer visibility. No longer content with liberal reformist agendas, queers are taking to the streets and fighting back. They are insistent, uncompromising, and above all, unashamed. There is no reference to the straight world apart from witty parodies of it.9 The Stonewall Group, on the other hand, is committed to the reform of legal anomalies as regards lesbian and gay legal rights. Self-appointed worriers and protectors of disempowered nice homosexuals, the Stonewall Group seeks to create a dialogue with the oppressors.10 By this dialogue they hope to increase the awareness of those who hold the power in the hope of getting them to admit that homosexuals have the right to be as “normal” as anybody else. My protracted reference to the various agendas of Queer or Homosexual political groups in Britain serves as a useful analogy to contemporary issues in lesbian theatre. Since the early agit-prop days of issue-based earnestness such as Jill Posener’s Any Woman Can,11 it has become unclear what the agenda of lesbian theatre is. The initial reaction to the emergence of identity politics in the seventies was a certain seriousness, a movement towards redressing the balance and representing lesbian lives with truth and compassion. Political activity at this time was also, by all accounts, characterised by issue-based campaigns and reformist agendas. The project would seem to have been to educate then integrate into the heterosexual community and then demand equal rights. Theatre, then, reflected similar concerns. Gay Sweatshop, the first known political gay theatre company in Britain, used crude agit-prop plays to reach both gay and heterosexual audiences. Drew Griffiths, one of the company’s artistic directors, stated in Stages in the Revolution (Catherine Itzin, 1980),12 that “Wherever we went we made people talk. We used the plays as the basis for discussion. The theatrical dialogue started a ‘real’ dialogue…Straight audiences would come up to us afterwards, shake our hands and say we were the first homosexuals they’d ever met. We would tell

9

A recent Outrage demonstration involved hundreds of lesbians and gay men descending on Piccadilly Circus and holding a “Kiss-In” around that icon of heterosexual romance, Eros. 10 Sir Ian MacKellan recently shared afternoon tea with Prime Minister John Major. 11 Any Woman Can, Jill Posener, 1974 for Gay Sweatshop, published 1987, Methuen Lesbian Plays 1, ed. Jill Davis. 12 Stages in the Revolution—Political Theatre in Britain since 1968, ed. Catherine Itzin, Methuen, 1980, p. 236.

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them we weren’t, that they just hadn’t realised before.” Heterosexuals needed educating about homosexuality. Threatening the status-quo was not really on the gay agenda. Lesbian theatre in Britian during the eighties and nineties has diverged greatly from this educational “Gays Are Alright Really” agenda. Red Rag started life as a socialist feminist theatre company, but “came out” in the late eighties. From the beginning of our lesbian incarnation there was no soul-searching consideration of what our reason for existence was. We were clear that there was a lesbian audience out there waiting to be tapped. Homophobia dictated that we should “stay in”, but we knew from tentative experimentation with lesbian material and from witnessing the immense popularity of lesbian pantomimes performed at the Drill Hall Theatre, London, that there was a demand for a solely lesbian product. Our impetus, then, was to gather a pre-existing audience and entertain them. We wanted to create lesbian theatre which was a celebration of our existence, not an examination of it. There was a whole generation of women who had experienced the seventies and what it had to offer culturally, plus our generation, whose cultural expectations, thanks to the efforts of our predecessors, were not overly involved with hearing that it was alright to be a lesbian. We were committed to our broad comic style to prove that lesbians could be seriously funny. We felt that as lesbians were needed to loosen our stays and join together for a celebratory party. Ooh, Missus! represented the pinnacle of this celebration. The plot followed the guidelines of the genre closely. Penny (a Gestalt Psychotherapist) and Jenny (a spiritually-aware artist) are a couple with a nice suburban house who are trying to conceive a child by AID (Artificial Insemination by Donor). On arrival of the sperm (deposited in a mayonnaise jar) they settle down to inseminate Jenny. Suddenly Jenny’s Tory harridan mother arrives and they desperately try to conceal their relationship from her. Discovery would result in the usual major family trauma, and Jenny needs to keep her aura pure for the conception. Fran, a scene-dyke also living in the house, is a fitness freak with all the right designer sports-wear. Strange men keep leaving odd messages on the ansaphone, leading Penny and Jenny to assume that Fran is going straight on them; another alarming portent for the much-wanted child. Fran remains mysterious when challenged and spends most of the play trying to hide a pink box and its contents from Penny and Jenny. Nosey next-door-neighbour Hetty is fascinated with the antics of the lesbians next door and takes every opportunity to pop in for a poke around. The mayonnaise jar has meanwhile gone missing…A baby dyke full of wonderment at the prospect of coming out, Jane, has arranged to take the remaining spare room in the house. A woman called Jane arrives at the front door and is ushered up to her new room by Penny, out of the way of the prying mother. Meanwhile the hunt for the mayonnaise goes on…Mother is discovered about to tuck in to a sandwich which she feels needs something extra…perhaps some mayonnaise?…Jenny answers the door to a different Jane and shows her to her room… Penny and Jenny argue over the new Janes’ suitability for the house. Penny says Jane is loud, dirty and constantly stoned, Jenny maintains she is shy, innocent and in need of support. The audience knows there are two completely different Janes. Fran encounters the anarcho-dyke opportunist Jane, who turns out to be Fran’s ex-lover. Jane#1 and Jane#2 discover one another in the same bed and fall into each other’s arms. Anarcho Jane#1, realising she has just bedded the real Jane for the room, adopts a false persona and pretends to be a French penpal of Fran’s. Finally the confusion reaches a climax when Hetty disappears with Jane#1’s “mixed herbs” (grass) and the mayonnaise jar (a spurious cooking-lend which is really a pretext for another visit), Fran is discovered wearing a wedding dress and the imposter Jane#1 is revealed. Mother is told of the true nature of Jenny and Penny’s relationship and prompty faints. Hetty arrives stoned with mayonnaise jar in hand (“I didn’t touch it—smelt a bit funny!”) and Penny and Jenny announce their baby plans. Mother faints again and on waking recognises Hetty as an old flame from her secret lesbian days. Jane#1 and Jane#2 decide they will share the room and live as lovers, while Fran discloses she is marrying an Australian gay man in need of a work permit. Order is restored and they all live happily ever after.

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Although the plot sounds trivial, the play, by virtue of its parodic nature, touched on some key political concerns for lesbians and had its own set of implicit beliefs, viz lesbian mothers are good mothers who really want their children, homophobics have often got a queer past to hide, lesbian relationships are not the sad, inverted and doomed affairs that Radclyffe Hall once bemoaned and that lesbians are capable of creating a safe and caring “pretended” families for other lesbians who have been cast out of their “natural” families. This list sounds high-blown in relation to the plot as outlined. It also sounds like a lesson plan for straight anti-heterosexist workshops. It was less about education than affirmation. My assertion is that the difference lies in the nature of the representation of these issues. As with the Ray Cooney play deconstructed previously, the reductive statements one can draw from the work are statements about the tacit assumptions in the piece. There is no laborious justifying of the ideology expressed through either Run For Your Wife! or Ooh, Missus!, no step-by-step didactic pedagogy; but there is the same sense of a system of morality at work which is at once implicit and explicit. Ooh, Missus!, however, does have an extra layer of meaning in that the constant point of reference is the parent genre of the traditional Whitehall farce. Just as the Outrage Eros Kiss-In at Piccadilly Circus flaunted the stereotypical mores of heterosexual romance, so Ooh, Missus! indicated an aggressively ironic pastiche of a conservative form which was either unself-conscious of its reactionary ideology or flagrant in its trumpeting of such ideology as “true” working class popular culture. Ooh, Missus! was an out lesbian play which made no attempt to educate or explain lesbian existence to heterosexuals but endeavered to entertain a broad section of the lesbian community. That this revelling in our sub-culture with no regard to the niceties of heterosexual inclusion or reference is viable is surely a credit to the pioneering work of women theatre workers over the last two decades. Having argued for a place in the culture, and having built a solid audience, women are now able to exist— albeit frugally and often on state benefits—and create work with exclusive reference to other women. During the late 1980s there was a shift in the nature of lesbian theatre and a large number of comic plays and camp musicals were produced. At the Drill Hall Arts Centre a Christmas cultural institution was established in the form of a lesbian pantomime where the cross-dressing of the traditional panto was subverted and plot-lines were made to incorporate unlikely lesbian love affairs (Cinderella and the Princess in Cheryl Moch’s Cinderella, the Real True Story).13 The Oval House Theatre, a bastion of up-and-coming women’s theatre groups under the encouragement of Kate Crutchley’s direction, started to produce new lesbian plays under the collective banner of Character Ladies (Death on Lesbos, a skit murder-mystery pastiche and The Sister Mysteries, and Ealing Comedy parody set in a St. Trinians-like girls school, both by Penny Gulliver. Sandra Freeman’s The Ladies of Llangollen was also produced at the Oval during this period. The Women’s Theatre Group produced Bryony Lavery’s outstandingly popular Her Aching Heart,14 an hilarious parody of romantic fiction with a lesbian twist. The standard of this work varied greatly according to the funds available (for even within our ghetto there is an economic heirarchy with those at the top being moderately less poor than their unfunded sisters) but the general concensus was that lesbian theatre had to be fun, that feminist and women’s theatre had suffered from the idea that feminists had no sense of humour. It is my belief that an alien to the planet, on visiting any of the venues in London which promote lesbian theatre, would have assumed that all was rosy in our garden and that the posteverything society was well intact. Compared to the abundance of gay men’s plays during the same period, which continued the exploration of issues such as

13 14

Cheryl Moch, Cinderella. The Real True Story, Methuen Lesbian Plays: Two, ed. Jill Davis, 1989. Her Aching Heart; Wicked; Two Marias, Bryony Lavery, Methuen, 1991.

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Aids, homophobia and the intersection between personal politics and male desire,15 lesbian theatre has become camp in the extreme. This is not to say that Camp is not political or that comedy can never point to serious issues; rather, it would appear that the only way to produce lesbian theatre is in the comic mode. The mythology we are creating bears witness to the pressure we receive and maintain to appear as uncomplaining and well-adjusted. The protectiveness we feel towards the representation of our lesbianism is well-founded in the history of lesbian representation by stereotyping (witness the creation of and reaction to Basic Instinct), but this protectiveness can mean that we handcuff ourselves to a limiting range of acceptable lesbian role-models. There is a finite number of ways in which it is OK to portray lesbian existence, or so one would be forgiven for thinking, judging by the comic but well-adjusted characters which have become the norm in contemporary British lesbian theatre. The current cultural climate seems to dictate that being funny and flippant is the only acceptable way to express our identity. With all this in mind, Red Rag have been planning our next production. We perceive a certain tiredness with the seemingly-forced gaiety in our ghetto. As writers and directors, we have run out of gags. As performers we are aching for lesbian roles which requires some degree of earnestness and intensity. As political lesbians we need to re-open discussion with other lesbians and stop pretending there is a happy concensus. The time is right for us to begin addressing potentially explosive issues within our community. Our next production is Desire by Design by Carol Noble and Bridget Hurst, which opens at the Oval House Theatre in London. The play is a radical of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a Gothic tragedy of epic proportions. A lesbian scientist decides she is tired with the turbulance and irrationality of relationships with unsatisfactory women. She begins her quest for all the parts she will need in order to create the perfect woman; touring the lesbian scene, she selects her favourite bits from a number of different women and physically merges them into her ideal female form. Her monster complete, she begins the programming which will turn this body into the ideal partner for her, making her creation act out all of her fantasies in meticulous detail. Eventually the scientist becomes bored with the predictability of her monster’s responses and casts her out into the world, an innocent with no personality of her own. Alone in lesbian London, the monster finds she can survive by being a mirror for whoever she encounters. She is dissatisfied and realises that she must return to her life-source; the scientist. There follows a global chase sequence where the monster pursues the scientist, ending with the death of both in the harsh climate of the Arctic. We hope that the play will arouse keen debate within the community on the nature of lesbian desire, but anticipate a mixed response from the various political factions within the community whose agenda would appear to be the positive representation strangle-hold. Whilst we take full responsibility for the characters we employ to tell a story, it feels significant to the growth of Red Rag (and therefore, perhaps, lesbian theatre in London) that our last play ended with everyone coming out and coupling in a mirror-image of conventional heterosexuality (however ironic), while our next play ends with two dead lesbians rotting on icy plains of the Arctic. It also seems significant that now, and only now, Red Rag have received a modest sum from both the Arts Council of Great Britain and the London Arts Board. Is this an “acceptable” portrayal of lesbian existence? We shall have to see. Jackie Clune is a full time lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at Royal Holloway College. She is also a joint Artistic Director of Red Rag Women’s Theatre Company.

15

Notably Martin Sherman’s Bent, Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, Noel Greig’s Paradise, Now and Then, Carl Miller’s The Last Enemy.

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Women, Theatre, and Territory: The Omaha Magic Theatre and the Boundaries of Theatrical Performance Susan Lynn Carlson

The three women who oversee the Omaha Magic Theatre—Megan Terry, Jo Ann Schmidman, and Sora Kimberlain—stake out claims for the territory of women’s theatre in four domains: 1) they claim their artistic territory through collaboration, basing their work on a belief in knowledge as conversation and selves as socially constructed; 2) they claim the territory of performance by creating shows in which they integrate text, movement, music, sound, light, and visuals; 3) they negotiate their needs for capital through creative approaches to funding; and 4) they claim a theatre of the American Midwest which celebrates freedom and extremes. KEY WORDS Omaha Magic Theatre, Women’s Theatre, Contemporary Theatre, Collaboration, Theatre funding, Midwestern theatre About fifteen minutes into the Omaha Magic Theatre’s performance of Sound Fields: Are We Hear, the five performers transform from wolves into a band of hunters, sporting spears.1 Fortified by tequila they drink from a cactus, they—in the words of one character—become “wild women…and swore to be my protectors and follow me to the ends of the earth and to make sure that no matter how hard I worked there would always be time to party” (Terry, Schmidman, & Kimberlain, 1991, 8). As the speech ends, all five actors throw back their heads and ululate in concert, a bold verbal response they will repeat many times during the course of play. These wild women, projecting associations with the elemental, the mythical, and the pre-verbal, stand at the center of the play, a central part of the authors’ attempts to transgress boundaries between civilized and untamed, male and female, words and action. The wild women disappear from time to time as actors, assume other roles and moods, yet the spears—rugged in their curved six feet of feathers, wood, and twine—remain always visible on stage. Sound Fields is about many things; ranging from the environmental destruction of the world to space exploration to starvation; but the wild women are an ever-present reminder that the show is also about claiming territory. It’s a territory that’s wild, celebratory, and female. I would like to extend the metaphor of the wild woman for the course of this essay to speculate about women’s claims on theatrical territories of various sorts. The “wild women” who have set out to stake a claim on the male traditions of theatre in the last 25 years have, like the unpredictably recurrent wild women 1

In the original 1992 production, there were four females and one male acting in Sound Fields.

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of Sound Fields, maintained a threatening, stubborn presence. They have indeed found a space, many spaces, refined their ululations, at times made moves toward domestication. With a focus on a women’s theatre group working in the mid-section of the United States, I would like to study some of the qualities that attach to the territory we now think of as women’s theatre. Wild women, like those resident at the Omaha Magic Theatre, stalk the theatres of most nations, drawing nourishment from each other, strength from a resistance to the status quo. I Artistic Territory: Creative Collaboration The production (a product) always results, but focus is on the daily evolving “details” of the creative process. Absolute attention is paid to detail. The reward sometimes may be big box office; but the prime goal is the growth of each artist, through stronger collaborative and communication skills: artist to artist, artist to medium, artist to audience and medium to audience. (Schmidman, Kimberlain &, Terry, 1992, Right Brain 62) *** Two: Six: One: Two: Five: Two: Three: Two: Four: Two: Three and Five (in unison): Two: One:

Fewlula is bursting at the seams. This is the sound of a male trying to get out of a female body. This is the sound of a female trying to get out of a male body. She invited some guests over and they all ate key lime pie till the dawn’s early light. This is the sound of a wolf inside a female body. No one can push her around now. Her gut turned green and the roots of her hair are on fire. This is the sound of a lizard inside a male body. She has a different view on life now. In her view finder, the pictures clip along in color. This is the sound of a symphony inside a human head. Life is short, she said. I know what’s important to me now. This is the sound of drums inside a human heart. Fewlula drives a convertible. Her trunk is full of past events. The future rides under the hood. This is the beat of a dance inside the human feet. (Terry, Schmidman & Kimberlain, 1992, Sound Fields, 44–45)

*** The Omaha Magic Theatre (OMT) is a theatre run by women, an organization dedicated to a live theatre which batters and brings down restrictive artistic and intellectual barriers. The group’s artistic statement reads, in part: [Our goal is] To push the boundaries of what has previously been recognized as theatre to new limits. It is our intent to present the freshest text, directorial, performer and visual art images and clearest musical voice in an integrated performance form.

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We engage audiences to feel, reflect, dream and disagree very actively, but always as audience while we do the performing. Our productions are as abstract as life itself. Our works do not have plots which are resolved by the end. In this way the art reflects real life…Because we—the creators of the work—perform the work, the level of commitment is great. This makes for a more compelling theatre experience that engages the audience on a deeper level. (Omaha Magic Theatre, 1992) Such a call for an artistically experimental, aesthetically committed and people-oriented theatre connects the OMT with many women’s theatre groups that share similar goals. Yet few women’s theatres can boast such longevity. Founded in Omaha, Nebraska in 1968 by Jo Ann Schmidman, the OMT boasts 24 continuous years of women creating and producing original, non-traditional plays. Schmidman and Megan Terry (playwright in residence since 1972) have created, directed, and acted in scores of shows, ranging from issue plays (like Goona, Goona on domestic abuse or Kegger on teens and alcohol) to conceptual pieces (Sea of Forms physically encompasses the audience in a multi-media experience). Schmidman, Terry and Sora Kimberlain (who joined the organization in 1981) have increasingly produced shows of text-based performance art, combining sensory response and philosophical probing. To those of us familiar with women’s theatre, this combination of group work, multiple art forms, and social awareness is recognizable territory. As the women of the OMT have carved out this artistic domain, they have made collaboration the soul of their work. Group work can be messy, sprawling, intense. Yet in the next few pages I will suggest how collaboration at the OMT is considered and methodological; how it provides a sophisticated foundation for the artistic territory these women occupy. In the first epigraph above, the three women of the OMT describe their commitment to a shared and multi-dimensional collaboration; in the second—an excerpt from Sound Fields—they display the product of such collaboration, a text of many voices working through a redefinition of theatre and self. The OMT has depended on the collaborative efforts of its members for almost all of its 24 years. Megan Terry has most often been credited as the writer; yet many of the plays which bear her name have grown out of workshops and discussions with Schmidman, Kimberlain, and other members of the company. And as a reflection of this interaction, the plays created at the OMT increasingly credit multiple authors and multiple input. As several scholars have documented, the methodology of play construction has varied. During the generation of Family Talk, Terry conferred with audience members and family counselors, she then wrote a series of scenes, and the company went through intense workshops for months, analyzing and developing this initial material. Eventually, Schmidman structured the play for performance (see Babnich, 1988, 305–309). On the way to producing American King’s English for Queens, the group gathered humanists and language experts for extended discussion before they compiled their script about sexist language (see Zivanovic, 1989, 213). With three of the group’s most recent shows, Terry, Schmidman, and Kimberlain have committed themselves to their most intense collaboration. Beginning with Body Leaks (1990), and continuing with Sound Fields (1992) and Belches on Couches (1994), the group’s three main women have made their collaboration a lengthy, equally-shared endeavor. With the period from conception to production well over a year, the three have been producing a theatre of shared ideas, shared effort, and shared “author”ity. They move from initial journal writing and exploratory workshops to a tentative scripting of the text; they workshop the ever-transforming script while imagining the visual dimensions of the play; and they share their work by all acting in boisterous productions with after-performance audience discussions.2 2

For a detailed description of the collaborative process which culminated in Sound Fields, see my essay “Collaboration in the eartland.”

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Collaborative theatre is frequently undervalued, often ignored. The work of the American collectives of the 1960s (like the Open Theatre and the Living Theatre) are most frequently viewed as relics of an outdated, politically naive era. And with a few exceptions (like Mabou Mimes or the Wooster Group) critics and audiences still prefer to recognize an American theatre of individual effort. The groups which have been prominent on the London alternative theatre circuit have often not lasted long and are remembered more for outstanding individuals than group cohesion. Ironically, even at a time when many literary theorists have argued that the concept of the author is romantically misguided, a modern construct by which we have chosen to give unity to texts, understanding of anti-authorial collaborative art is still limited.3 It remains difficult to understand and value theatre by groups. I would like to offer a path for such understanding by analyzing the vision of knowledge and self that undergirds such theatre. The commitment many, like the women of the OMT, have to collaborative theatre reflects a comprehensive (though rarely articulated) view of human nature and social interaction. Collaboration at the OMT acts out a belief in knowledge as conversation, as a continual process of negotiation. Knowledge is not a bundle of truths to be professed or retrieved but a system of observations and interpretations being continually developed and constructed by individuals and groups. As philosopher Richard Rorty puts it, conversation should be “the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood” (1979, 389). Writing to explain Rorty’s concept as it relates to collaboration, Kenneth Bruffee elaborates: We establish knowledge or justify belief collaboratively by challenging each other’s biases and presuppositions; by negotiating collectively toward new paradigms of perception, thought, feeling, and expression; and by joining larger, more experienced communities of knowledgeable peers through assenting to those communities’ interests, values, language, and paradigms of perception and thought. (1984, 646) In effect, a truly shared collaboration models “how knowledge is generated, how it changes and grows” (Bruffee, 1984, 647).4 In the collaborative theatre it has developed over the years, the OMT has conducted such conversation in a pattern of joint work Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford call “dialogic collaboration.” In such egalitarian collaboration, participants “value the creative tension inherent in multivoiced and multivalent ventures.” Such work is also, regularly, “deeply subversive” and “predominantly feminine” (1990, 133).5 The group work which has led to theatre like Sound Fields, is, in sum, a methodology of theatre which privileges the group and its conversation, thereby mirroring a world where what we know is what we uncover together. This dialogic process is itself a threat since it challenges traditional, hierarchical paths of authority. There is a wild side to such epistemological assumptions—a territory the OMT has been quick to claim. Bruffee, Ede, Lunsford, and their colleagues in rhetoric and composition studies are generally working in the realm of academic and professional writing where collaboration is most commonly used to reach a goal

3

Useful summaries of this paradoxical situation (where theorists argue that the author is no more than a useful construction and where collaborative work is simultaneously devalued) can be found in Lunsford and Ede (1990, 76–93) and Gere (1987, 58–76). 4 See Clark (1990) for further elaboration on the concept that “we communicate neither to represent reality nor to transmit it, but to constitute it” (1). 5 Ede and Lunsford (1990) contrast such collaboration to a more traditional model of collaboration they call “hierarchical”; it is rigid, goal-driven, and, typically, male.

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or internalize a standard.6 The boundary-tampering work at the OMT fits a radically different profile, however. Instead of establishing consensus or solutions in their collaborative work, the women of the OMT are exploring the unsanctioned, trailblazing paths in the territory Rorty valorizes as “abnormal discourse.” The products of abnormal discourse, according to Rorty, range from “nonsense to intellectual revolution” (1979, 320). For the OMT, the wilds of such discourse result in a play like Body Leaks. In this play, a thematic focus on self-censorship generated a concatenation of scenes to challenge standard patterns of theatrical narrative and character; endless conversation led to expanded inter-connections of dance, music, and text; standard assumptions about gender and politics proved inoperable. The result is a play which challenges artistic, intellectual, and social perceptions and undermines the efforts of any audience member to relax. The OMT offers a theatre where knowledge is a product constructed and negotiated in community. When Schmidman labels the group’s work “educational” she is stressing the give-and-take implied in such negotiation. She complains that the long “laboratory process” at the theatre is undervalued; what she senses is a resistance to the radical vision of knowledge her theatre is based on (1992). This belief in the relativity of knowledge implies a particular view of the self also key in the collaboration of the OMT. Just as knowledge is presumed to be a negotiated concept in the collaborative process at the OMT, so too is the self so centrally involved acknowledged to be socially constituted, an amalgam of experience, opportunity, education, and language. In rejecting the single author, in committing their funds and energies to products bearing multiple names, the OMT has embraced a process in which the creative individual is indivisible from her community. There is no single author, thus no “authority.” As a result, there is also nothing as easy as an individual character in the plays. Terry suggests that “the audience can supply” any constructions of individuality needed (Terry, 1988, 246); and indeed, the plays necessitate such efforts. In Body Leaks, for example, where there are no stable characters, each actor takes on a series of guises, roles, and postures (seemingly disconnected). For the audience, this necessitates, as Terry suggests, an active (and, she hopes, invigorating) involvement. But just as there is no consistent character or individual creator in this theatre world, there is also no sanctified interpretation of the actors’ roles and authors’ worlds, only a range of response to be negotiated by the range of selves in the audience. The recent productions of the OMT have frustrated many audience members because the women, through their collaboration, have so uncompromisingly renounced traditions of authority and interpretation. The result is a theatre which is a process of intense community. Creating art collaboratively, Terry, Schmidman, and Kimberlain are making a big, wild “claim.” II Performing Territory: Beyond Words Voice over (Five): Four (ad lib): Voice over (Five): Four (ad lib):

Psst audience: Even numbered chairs turn right, That’s two, four, six turn this way. Odd numbers face left. Three, five, seven’s…nothing’s hard, you’ll just have to figure it out… this is a very important moment of the piece, called inner-audience

6 Even in their discussion of “dialogic collaboration,” Ede and Lunsford only begin to explore the potential wildness of women’s collaboration. See also Le Fevre (1987) who offers a solid philosophical and theoretical background for the study of writing in social contexts.

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involvement…if you don’t know the person next to you, kind of look that person in the eyes…eyeball to eyeball…that’s right, turn and look… (Terry, Schmidman & Kimberlain, 1990, 16–17)

About one third of the way into Body Leaks, the audience members are confronted with this request that they take the intimate step of looking directly at the person sitting next to them. The request for participation has been met by audiences with various mixtures of elation, embarrassment, hesitation, compliance, glee, and hostility. With such a transgression of standard performance boundaries, the OMT joins many others who seek to refigure theatrical performance. Yet for the OMT, the joint efforts of collaboration which have led up to the performance also direct the interactive delivery of that negotiable product to the audience. In performance, the artistic melding of three creators leads to a theatre in which the mediums of language, sound, image, light, and movement are brought together for the audience to make meaning. The text is still the dominant medium through which communication takes place, yet it is not offered as an independent icon of linguistic brilliance. To detail the interplay of elements in OMT performance, I will describe one brief segment of Sound Fields. In making theatre performance a complete intellectual and sensory experience, the OMT actively challenges its audience, extending its foundation in conversation and dialogue. The opening of the play immediately establishes a commitment to a theatre beyond text. On its own, the language of the opening moments is accessible, seemingly simplistic, consisting of a series of clever lines, connected only by their playful, political mood. Here is the spoken text of the play’s first five minutes: One: Four: Six: Three: One: Two: Four:

Three: Four:

Human beings evolved from garbage thrown out of a disabled spaceship from another galaxy. Viruses are a higher intelligence—they can transport themselves from one host to another without the use of oil. Music is inevitable. Your mind lives as much in one cell of your ankle as it does in your big head. Tarzan and Einstein are the same person. Cheetah passed her S.A.T’s but David Duke didn’t. Several boys came to shovel the walk They rang the bell at 10am, 12pm, 2pm, and 4pm. Each shoveled the same walk only the 10 am shoveler got paid. The puppy people take a big bite of lava. Their teeth have never been whiter. Who am I?

(Terry, Schmidman & Kimberlain, 1991, 1–2) Such jokes are complicated, however, by their many-dimensioned performance context, taking shape long before the first word is uttered. Before an actor even appears on stage, the audience (of about 100) has an extended look at the stage space, unveiled by either a proscenium or curtain; there is no apparatus to hide the mechanisms of sound, light, projection, costume, or music. In the intimate space of the OMT theatre,

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with its curved ceiling recesses and white brick walls, the audience is exposed to all that makes this theatre. This is theatre at a human level and the audience is invited to take part.7 When the performance begins, house lights dim to magnify the set, positioned in an ample corner of the large theatre. A huge screen at least 25 feet long runs across one wall at the back, on it are two compelling and competing slide projections, the first of dreamy white clouds against a brilliant blue sky and the second with the head of a raven somewhat menacing through its profiled midnight head and neon yellow beak. The other wall behind the stage space is exposed brick, bathed in blue light, a huge space for several keyboards, also serving as a hanging place for various props. Three six-foot high plexiglass and white metal pyramids dominate the back half of the stage. They point to a long, low plexiglass water trough at the front of the stage, just a few feet from the front row. On the periphery of the performance space, encircling this sleek, abstract set, are the light boards and slide projectors the actors will manipulate during the performance. Positioned around the stage space and on the plexiglass forms are various props, costumes, and musical instruments used during the performance. While from its entrance the audience has been greeted with recordings of natural sounds, that sound becomes a focal point only when the lights go down. The first crisp sounds of birds, whales, and running water are played against the motions of four of the actors entering, one by one, in a series of frantic, hesitant stomping movements; they circle the stage, playing, searching, finally lining up at stage front with backs to audience, now making their own animal-like sounds, accompanied by some dissonant string, wind, and vocal music. Each actor appears in simple loose garb, some completely in white, some sporting one or two colors, most with bold swatches of pink, orange, blue, and green. The dress is abstract and timeless; it is coordinated at the same time it remains individual. As a final prelude to delivering the opening lines, the four actors grab their backs, signalling to the audience that the “jokes” they are about to deliver originate in the spine; they are merely transmitting a language they do not fully understand. The actors never laugh. Neither did the audience at the performance I attended. Encompassed by the rich environment of sound, light, color, music, and movement, the jokes are transformed, contextualized. They can no longer be taken only as the comic one-liners they mimic. After the jokes are delivered, a threatening music builds, the line of actors evaporates, and a fifth actor appears clutching one of the wild spears. Then, all the actors grab spears and move cautiously about the stage, on the lookout, as the audience listens to the final line in this segment: “who am I?” Throughout this entire opening sequence, the actors transmit high energy. Yet their connections to one another remain tentative; although they make some motions in unison and often operate in parallel fashion, they also collapse in moments of confusion and loss. An audience making its way through this material for the first time is similarly confused about its connections to the piece. In fact, the most significant product of all the vigorous, choreographed movement, the abstract set, and the disconcerting jokes, is to unsettle viewer expectation. Yet crucially, the uncertainty which often defines action on and response off the stage underlines a connection between audience and actors. On stage, one group operates as a group working through its disjunctions; off stage another group attempts, without rehearsal, to tap into the community. As the performance continues on with this collection of multiple dimensions, an ongoing goal of the OMT is getting the audience to accept its part in the performance community. It describing the opening scene of Sound Fields, I have focused on the method of presentation, on the push toward group conveyed by the acting, on the synthesis of various sensual responses demanded by the

7 I am describing the performance of Sound Fields at its premiere in January of 1992 at the OMT’s newly acquired (second) stage space in Omaha, Nebraska. When the OMT takes its shows on tour, the space may change, but the attempt to bring the audience into the complex process remains strong.

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simultaneous and competing presence of word, song, light, image, and movement. Yet this framework for reception is also meant to carry the weight of ideas. As five members of the company discussed this opening segment in workshop eight months prior to the opening of Sound Fields, they revealed the depth of thought behind the abstract opening. Calling this one of their “jokes my spine told me” segments, they discussed its multivalent meanings: to listen to one’s spine might be to claim one’s physical self; to listen to the spine might be to listen to the stored up wisdom of the ages; to listen to the spine might be to trust one’s body. The comic tone might allow for challenging statements not welcome as serious comments; for the audience to laugh might be to enable release from burdens. The discussion was long and often heated. Many of the participants’ interpretations of the scene were conflicting. Yet out of the disagreements, the group was able to build a consensus about how to translate the material into performance. I, as observer of hours of such intense discussion, was left with three important impressions about the performance of this play: 1) the text is significant, but only as one part of a performance which is as sensory as it is linguistic, 2) the total effect of the performance grows out the ways ideas can be connected to their translation into the movements, lights, and images on stage, 3) most importantly, there is a commitment to a messiness of ideas that cannot be reduced or simplified. The whole made from these parts is demanding at the same time it is rewarding; its elusiveness seems necessary.8 The claims the OMT makes on performance are not unique. They are, however, sincere and meticulous. The women succeed in creating an environment in which the audience can participate, understand the reach of its own territory by making new connections. III Capitalizing on Women’s Territory Two:

Two (moves into candlelight, in confidence, to audience):

I looked down a long corridor. Each door had a label on it. The first door read “Women’s Room.” The next door said “Men’s Room.” (casaba begins) The third door was labelled “Men’s and Women’s Room.” (casaba intensifies) The last door said “Video Room— Slash and Rape showing. Previews for next week, Karen Finley and Jesse Helms starring in The Chocolate Wimp, followed by The Denver Yams vs the S & L Assholes.!” (Four crosses with pole, parachute guys dangling from it and makes fighter plane sounds.) Overhead: “Be Careful—Take a Risk Darling” Then there was one more door I hadn’t seen. I open it. (FIVE launches flying saucers) There’s a seven-story mouth—wide open! It’s Pat Robertson! (backs toward wall) I back up and Yell—“Annie Winkle! Fire! Holly

8 The details of this discussion come from a workshop held May 9, 1991 in the OMT theatre at 1417 Farnam Street, Omaha.

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Hughes! Fire! Tim Miller! Fire! Rachel Rosenthal! Fire! John Fleck! Fire! (Body Leaks, 11–12) The tension between maintaining artistic integrity and ensuring financial stability is a given for most alternative theatres and theatre groups. Yet theatre by women threatens an additional difference which makes funding even less steady and supporters less forthcoming. In her bold discussion of American funding for women in the arts, Peggy Phelan contends, “It would be a mistake to think that women are powerful presences in these debates about money. We are still peripheral to the main tension at the heart of them: the assurance of male visibility—which is to say, the assurance of male paternity and sexual potency that underlies paternity” (138). What this outsider status means for the OMT is that the very artistic and performative territory, which the women claim, threatens their ability to attract support. As a result, ensuring the company’s financial existence is another process of unending construction and creative collaboration. Complaining that her efforts to corral funding are more intense than ever, Schmidman confirms the ongoing battle a theatre of difference must take on (1992). Like other American theatre artists under fire for their anti-establishment art (Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, and John Fleck, whose names appear in Body Leaks, are at the heart of a national debate about what kinds of theatre the National Endowment for the Arts should fund) the women at the OMT claim their territory at a financial “price.” In these times of a sluggish and faltering global economy, theatres around the world have been increasingly aggressive to survive. Many have had to compromise their art. In the US, Great Britain, and Canada it is standard practice now for theatres to depend on corporate sponsors. And even governmental funding, which had shrunk sizably in this country and Great Britain, has come attached to increasing ideological constraints. For example, in this country, artists accepting money from the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) had for a time to offer written assurances that any funded work would not be obscene. The most insidious result of such ideological pressure has not been official censorship so much as an unofficial self-censorship which has muted some artists (see Phelan, 1991, 136–137).9 While they have not compromised their artistic integrity, the OMT has had to devote increasing energy to the pursuit of money. Compared to other theatres, the OMT remains admirably healthy: years of careful financial management have resulted in a monetary stability rare in avant-garde theatre. Support for the theatre continues not only from government agencies like the NEA, the Nebraska Arts Council, and United Arts of Omaha, but also from corporate sponsors and individuals. Terry, Schmidman, and Kimberlain have also consciously maintained a small-scale, non-corporate structure, avoiding what Terry identifies as the predictable recent collapse of many male-run theatres: The reason that, to my mind, there have been so many theaters failing was that they were forced by certain funding structures to mimic the whole model of the corporate world—have a board of directors, a whole batch of people who just did the business side, a whole batch who did the artistic side, extreme compartmentalization, perhaps like you sometimes think of compartmentalization in the universities. The structure got top heavy and when the funding started to shrink they couldn’t figure

9 It is much more than coincidence that the OMT’s Body Leaks is about self-censorship. Feeling the pressure to tow the line as artists, Terry, Schmidman, and Kimberlain created a play which shows clearly how self-censorship affects all lives, not just those of artists.

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out how to continue the artistic stuff; they had been so long in the corporate world going to three martini lunches and having cocktail parties for supporters. (Schmidman, Terry & Kimberlain, 1991) Yet in spite of such vigilance and insight, Schmidman reports an increasing challenge in keeping her company afloat. Her search for support is never-ending and increasingly discouraging. Of a recent day spent approaching several businesspeople about her “company,” she reports that her requests for funding are often thwarted by a single-minded focus on profit: What I am hearing when I go to these businesses (and much as I hate to I have to) is we give our money to other business guys who have clubs because they are giving us business and their clubs are this non-profit thing they do. The business guys no longer care about what the organization is doing. The reason they give money is because these guys are good customers…It’s distorted. I can’t go in and talk about artistic quality—it’s not looked at anymore. Other things are counted. (1992) As the arts become increasingly commodified, she explains, the segment of the population committed to non-traditional art is diminishing: “There used to be a larger segment of the population that believed in culture, for the sake of the good life…Just because a community has a symphony, an opera, a ballet, and a playhouse, doesn’t mean it’s got culture” (Schmidman, 1992). While her fight for funding goes on, leaving her less and less of her time for art, while the company must spend more and more of its time on the road raising extra income, Schmidman remains an idealist. Forced by a state arts agency to present a more “realistic” budget, she complied only on paper, noting that her dreams of funding are much more real. Yet she notes, it’s a harsh world for such dreamers—“There are fewer and fewer idealists who want to make something beautiful that will change the world” (Schmidman, 1992). But against the odds, the dreamers at the OMT continue to make their ideals come to life: their budget (the arts-council-approvable one) continues to grow by 10–15% annually; they have just opened a second stage in downtown Omaha;10 and they have just financed and published a photographic collection to promote the theatre of many experimental theatre artists (Schmidman, Kimberlain, Terry, 1992). They also take extraordinary measures to keep their theatre affordable. They only just raised ticket prices to $10, but to ensure that anyone who wants to can attend, they give away about one fifth of their tickets each night (Schmidman, Terry & Kimberlain, 1991). In their gutsy way, the women of the OMT are capitalizing on their uncompromising art, stubbornly measuring profit in their own way. IV Geographic Territory: Space and Place

THREE and SIX join ONE at tub. SIX forces their heads under water and speaks. Six: I've never told anyone this before because as you'll see modern people find it hard to believe in the worlds I come from. My mother was the Missouri River.

10

In converting a women’s clothing store into a performance space twice the size of their first stage, the group has sought to make art, not money. In the first eight months of 1992, they have used this second space only for the onemonth run of Sound Fields.

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Three: (up for air as SIX submerges): One (up for air as THREE submerges):

Before she was the Missouri River she was the Goddess who created the ice age. My brothers and sisters are the Great Lakes. My mother fell in love with my father, a wild horse. Now at the time of this deep and passionate love she was married to another God, a very stern and moral, upright, righteous fellow named Moses (SIX and THREE up for air). When Moses found out my Mother had fallen in love with a wild horse, and who could blame her, he became very angry (SIX and THREE submerge again). (Pounds floor for earthquake sound) He caused thunder bolts to come onto the plains. He caused an earthquake to change the course of the Mississippi River. (THREE comes up) Three (joins quake sound): He had aimed at my mother the Missouri, but his anger was so great, his arms shook and knocked his aim off a couple of longitudes. (ONE comes up) (Terry, Schmidman & Kimberlain, 1991, 6)

In these opening lines from the longest single narrative of Sound Fields, the authors map out an expansive geographic territory. With their theatre located less than a mile from the Missouri River, they have borrowed its seemingly endless length (2700 miles), its power over the land it has flattened and enriched, to engage the audience in a mythic, comic—indeed wild—narrative. That narrative of adventure, giant-sized places, and fun is in many respects their own. Their choice to work out of the American Midwest positions their work differently from that of comparable American theatre groups who work out of massive metropolitan centers with sizable theatrical communities. In the relative isolation of Omaha, the OMT can take their multi-media performance and develop it in the context of the particular world they inhabit. To claim the Midwest as theatrical territory is somewhat daring. To succeed in the claim as the OMT has done is a wild victory. The vast, rich expanses of the Midwest are not glamorous. But the endless horizons and enduring, dependable sameness engender a potent art. Fiction writer Michael Martone captures the essence easily missed by those looking for a flashy natural world or hyper-sophisticated cities: I think of it [the Midwest] more as a web of tissue, a membrane, a skin. And the way I feel about the Midwest is the way my skin feels and the way I feel my own skin—in layers and broad stripes and shades, in planes and in the periphery. The Midwest as hide, an organ of sense and not power, delicate and course at the same time. The Midwest transmits in fields and waves. It is the place of sense. It sometimes differentiates heat and cold, pain and pleasure, but most often registers the constant bombardment, the monotonous feel of feeling. Living here on the great flat plain teaches you a soft touch, since sensation arrives in huge sheets, stretches tight, layer upon layer, another kind of flood… The Midwestern landscape is abstract and our response to the geology of the region might be similar to our response to the contemporary walls of paint in the museums. We are forced to live in our eyes, in the outposts of our consciousness, the borders of our being. (32–33)

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Both Terry and Schmidman have claimed the artistic territory of the Midwest in ways that similarly point to the big, encompassing, and sensual creativity it allows. Terry notes that the possibilities for theatre in Omaha are wide open, in contrast to the New York theatre scene where the “commercial theatre work isn’t good”; she finds herself always eager to get back to Omaha (Babnich, 1988, 309). To Schmidman, the Midwest is, most basically, “freedom.” The vastness can allow for deviance from the norm, the wide open spaces encourage big ideas and unusual execution of them. Because it is what she calls “river country” it impresses a unique sense of place: “I am very connected—I think we [the women of the OMT] all are—to clean air; you know the river, it’s different than an ocean. It is not a lake either. This is river land. There is something incredibly expansive about this area. And about the people that live here. The extremes of temperature, I believe, allow extremes of creation.” She sums up the artistic fertility in saying, “Our sources are purer; mine [my sources] are thought, air—real basic, first-generation stuff, not transformed through other people’s visions” (1992). In his book-long meditation on postmodern theatre, Johannes Birringer implies that the city is the only workable site for contemporary theatre. Everything about the OMT—from its choice to locate in a modest city surrounded by vast expanses of farmland to its artistic focus on connecting with the natural world—denies his assumption. Sound Fields, the latest play to grow out of the Midwestern geography of the OMT, is about the crucial need to recognize and register the “fields and waves” this “place of sense” transmits. The authors’ point is that saving our world and ourselves depends on such awareness. Around the world, much theatre by women is on a small scale, developed out of local talent and needs, primarily serving, challenging, and entertaining its local audience! This rootedness should not be read as a sign of parochial vision or limited art. On the contrary, the OMT and these other theatres stand as examples of a theatre firmly rooted in their locale, recognizing that by maintaining a human scale they best serve the world. The river country of the American Midwest has a wildness that belies its seemingly sedate facade.

V Adding it all up: The Territory of a Theatre by Wild Women All (sing): Attention, attention To Prevention: To throw off your pain Get vain—get vain, Get vain About your brain. In the main You can beat the rain If you say “I love you” to your brain. You can drown shame, Raise depression to elation, Give yourself the ultimate vacation. So get off your posterior, You’re no longer inferior,

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Indulge yourself on your interior. It’s all right—you have the right (Terry, Schmidman & Kimberlain, 1990, 45)

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To show your might.

In this song which marks the celebratory ending of Body Leaks, the actors all join in claiming the territory of their female selves. In performance, the song gives a strong sense of an ending to a play marked by its seemingly endless and often tense negotiations over image, sensation, and meaning; and in the notable definition of this ending the performers cast the wildness of their performance out to the audience members. This is not a unique moment in the work of the OMT, but one which is representative of the group’s dedication to carving out a territory of their own. It is a territory of community and collaboration, grounded in a belief that we have control over the construction of our selves, our values, and our world. It is a territory of disciplinary integration where in performance the text is one part of a complete sensory experience completed together with an audience. It is a territory where idealism remains uncompromised, financially supported by inventive bargaining for capital. It is a territory of rivers, free space, and primary materials. It is a territory where women can be wild and be themselves. While the OMT has never been a theatre only by or for women, it stakes it claim as outsiders who can easily redefine traditional theatre because it was never theirs. References Babnich, Judith. (1988) Megan Terry and Family Talk. The Centennial Review, 32, 296–311. Birringer, Johannes. (1991) Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Bruffee, Kenneth. (1984) Collaborative Learning and the “Conversation of Mankind.” College English, 46, 635–652. Carlson, Susan. (forthcoming) Collaboration in the Heartland: The Omaha Magic Theatre Shaping a Theatre for the 1990s. In Feminist Theatres for Social Change. Eds. Tracy Davis, Susan Bennett & Kathleen Davis. Clark, Gregory. (1990) Dialogue, Dialectic and Conversation: A Social Perspective on the Function of Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. Ede, Lisa and Andrea Lunsford. (1990) Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. Gere, Anne Ruggles. (1987) Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. LeFevre, Karen Burke. (1987) Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. Martone, Michael. (1988) The Flatness. In A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest, ed. Martone, pp. 29–33. Iowa City, Iowa: U of Iowa P. Omaha Magic Theatre. (1992) What We Do: Artistic Statement. Phelan, Peggy. (1991) Money Talks, Again. TDR 35, 131–141. Rorty, Richard. (1979) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton UP. Schmidman, Jo Ann. (1992) Interview, Omaha Nebraska. Schmidman, Jo Ann, Megan Terry & Sora Kimberlain. (1991) Interview, Omaha, Nebraska. Schmidman, Jo Ann, Sora Kimberlain & Megan Terry. (1992) Right Brain Vacation Photos: New Plays and Production Photographs 1972–1992. Omaha: Omaha Magic Theatre. Terry, Megan. (1988) Interview. In In their own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights, ed. David Savran, pp. 240–256. New York: Theatre Communications Group.

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Terry, Megan, Jo Ann Schmidman & Sora Kimberlaim. (1990) Body Leaks. ——. (1992) Sound Fields: Are we Hear. Zivanovic, Judith. (1989) The Rhetorical and Political Foundations of Women’s Collaborative Theatre. In Themes in Drama, vol 11: Women in Theatre,ed. James Redmond, pp. 209–219. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

SUSAN CARLSON is a Professor of English at Iowa State University where she teaches drama, contemporary British literature and women’s literature. She has published Women of Grace: Henry James’s Plays and the Comedy of Manners and Women and Comedy: Rewriting the British Theatrical Tradition and has most recently been writing on collaboration in the theatre and on the cultural context in which theatre is evaluated.

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Figure 1 Sound Fields: We are Hear. Photo: Megan Kerry

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Figure 2 Body Leaks. Photo: Megan Kerry

Songs of the Twentieth Century: The Plays of Ludmila Petrushevskaya Béatrice Picon-Vallin Translated by Catherine Dale

Banned under Brezhnev, Ludmila Petrushevskaya’s plays are disturbing. The force of her Songs of the Twentieth Century lies in the urgency of the cry it emits within the context of the 1980s. Following in the tradition of Gogol and Vampilov, she conducts her plots on the level of Soviet everyday life at its most banal, whilst contriving to create suspense and a sense of the uncanny in an extreme concentration of time and space. Her novels and plays are similar in that they both demand from their reader-spectator the most attentive hearing, for it is primarily through language that their hybrid characters are completely and subtly defined. The corruption and turgidity of the often breathless discourse, compressed by the violence of everyday life, reveal the disordered state of society and the degradation of human relationships between families, couples, generations and groups. Her work is a tragicomic dramaturgy which resounds with lucidity and cruelty, but also with the compassion that is still awaited from its producer. KEY WORDS U.S.S.R—censorship—prose—society—fantasy—tragicomedy—infralanguage. ‘My place of work is the public square, the street, the beach…With the people…That’s where I work. Even if it is uncomfortable…But I am a poet all the same, I see each one of you. I share in your pain.’1 In the U.S.S.R. where totalitarianism has proved an equal burden in the social and private lives of men and women alike and has worn them down to precisely the same degree, a specifically female mode of discourse has only been able to emerge following the complete regeneration of individual discourse, a discourse of resistance against the type of Orwellian ‘Newspeak’, in which the most realistic observations and the most fanciful figments of the imagination may be combined, and the different genres and stylistic levels that the stereotyped, cliché-ridden language of authority seeks to keep strictly apart may be mixed. Any specifically female concerns have given way therefore to the need for a more general consideration of the plight of civil society in which everyone is plunged in the same bloodbath and is a prey to the same daily problems and unscrupulous conduct. In the theatre, this resistance appears all the more pronounced since the written word that may be reverently stored away in some secret drawer or deep recess of the human memory, or circulated clandestinely by the underground press (samizdat), must, in order to achieve 1

Unpublished remark by Ludmila Petrushevskaya. Cited in Maya Turovskaya, Pamyati tekushchego mgnoveniya (Memories of the Moment Past), (Moscow, Sov. Pisatel’, 1987), 164.

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theatrical existence, be boldly embodied on stage before a voracious and acquiescent public who are all the more eager to comply since they know that this free and vibrant truth has had to slip through the net of the Brezhnevian censor in order for it to enjoy any degree of success or to exist at all within the domain of the avant-garde, a domain that is frequently activated by amateur companies whose performance may sometimes be the only one a play will receive and of which the public may be informed only by word of mouth.2 Petrushevskaya’s works have played a full and leading role in this resistance. Although she has been writing for more than twenty years, it was not until 1988 and 1989 that two collections of her works finally appeared in print.3 The first, Immortal Love (Bessmertnaya lyubov’), contains short stories, and the second, Songs of the Twentieth Century (Pesni XX veka), is a collection of plays. This later collection was followed, at the end of 1989, by a further volume which returns to some of the earlier ‘songs’ whilst including several previously unpublished ones too, and, like its predecessor, it bears the title of one of the plays it contains: Three Girls in Blue (Tri devushki v golubom).4 Banned under Brezhnev, Petrushkevskaya’s work was nevertheless performed in a few scattered locations,5 the first professional theatre to stage one of her plays being the Norsooteatr in Tallinn, which presented Cinzano in Estonian translantion in 1978. In 1980 Love was produced almost simultaneously by Raĭkhengauz, Kamenskaya and Artsybachev in three of Moscow’s professional theatres: the Theatre of the Miniature, the Ermolova and the Taganka respectively. Since the beginning of the 1980s Petrushevskaya has been acknowledged—albeit with certain reservations regarding the disturbing immanence of her themes and modes of speech—in Soviet theatrical circles for the force and originality of her writing, observed at random from the few sporadic performances and publications of her work. Although published, her plays were nevertheless still found disturbing in 1989, since those in The Dark Room (Temnaya komnata) cycle which discuss death and capital punishment, and occur at the end of Songs of the Twentieth Century, came close to being censored by the editorial board as too melancholy, too hard… From Prose to Theatre If Petrushevskaya’s characters often appear to be women spanning three generations in age, it is because she perceives daily ‘survival’ to lie in their hands. Her principal concern, however, is to give voice to the muffled cry of all those who, regardless of background, age or sex, endure a life in which need and violence are the daily lot of a society in which the elderly and the very young are the most ill-treated and deprived members. Old people and children are thus frequently generic to her plays. Her concern to give expression to every member of society on the basis of a sympathetic and attentive hearing, gives rise to a

2 For example, in November 1981, on the eve of the 64th anniversary of the October Revolution, two short plays, Songs of the Twentieth Century and The Glass of Water, were performed in an overcrowded room whilst the march past and enforced cheers were being rehearsed for the following day in nearby Red Square (see Beatrice Picon-Vallin, “Lettre de Moscou”, L’Annuel du théâtre, 1981–82 season (L’Aire Théâtrale-Les Fédérés, 1982). 3 Some bibliographical information: prior to 1988 a few short stories appeared in journals such as Avrora, Druzhba narodov and Novyi mir. Love was published in Teatr in 1979; finally, a collection of works published in collaboration with Viktor Slavkin in 1983 contained two of her plays, Music Lessons and The Stair Well. In addition to these two books, a further collection was published in Biblioteka ogonëk, no. 48 (1990). 4 This play was produced in 1983 by Mark Zakharov at the Lenkom Theatre in Moscow after a two-year battle against the censors. 5 See the examples in notes 2 and 17.

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lucid and uncompromising style, described by some as cruel even, in which the cries of aborted, unborn children punctuate the dialogue.6 A journalist by training, Petrushevskaya began writing short stories in the mid-1960s and came to theatre almost by chance, as a result of a commission from the Moscow Art Theatre. A close link between these two genres which, in her hands, complete and resemble one another, soon appeared, however, and she conceived one of her stories, Building a Life (Ustroit’ zhizn’), as a sequel to her play Cinzano through the continuation of the life of one of its characters, Pasha.7 Petrushevskaya’s output of plays and short stories is supported by a more marginal one of stories and plays for children, poems, and two film scripts—the remarkable Tale of Tales and The Overcoat by Gogol—written for, and in collaboration with her friend, the renowed Soviet film director Yuri Norstein.8 Occasionally she moves from a type of story that she classifies as a ‘monologue’9 to the theatrical monologue, to text recited by a single character alone on stage or in the presence of a largely silent interlocutor. In one and the same breath she passes from the interior to the theatrical monologue or dialogue, perceiving the latter as a much freer form. Nevertheless, a common feature of everything she writes is brevity. The stories are aften very short and the plays in a single act. This brevity is not the result of an inability on her part to master extended forms, however, since she has already written two “full” plays: Three Girls in Blue, a two-act comedy in eight scenes, and The Moscow Choir (Moskovskiĭ khor), staged in 1988 at the Moscow Art Theatre. The truth is that a woman does not have time to write ‘at length’: Petrushevskaya writes on the hoof, in between her family’s illnesses, sometimes in a single night, quickly and fluently. There is a sense of urgency about what she has to say, a sense of urgency about a woman’s time that passes so quickly…Perhaps she will write a novel, but not yet…This degree of brevity corresponds to the logic of her poetics, in fact, for it absorbs and concentrates the expansiveness of Romantic writing. Behind the wish to give voice to all her characters, the different forms of expression assigned to each one are significant: Petrushevskaya’s drama may be defined as one of contrast, on the one hand, with the mechanical, ideological discourse that is grafted onto an experience of life that reveals itself at every turn, and Western drama, on the other, in that it is rooted in the Russian tradition of Gogol, Erdman and Vampilov, which, unlike that of Chekhov, did not succeed in implanting itself in the West. Within the context of this strong tradition, Petrushevskaya’s work constitutes a radical departure, and her point of view as a Soviet woman is apparent in her choice of themes and motives, her way of combining these and of constructing the language of her characters. Although her plays create a feeling of the chaos that pervades the unbearable routine of everyday life, she nevertheless entitles them ‘songs’: originating in heard and spoken discourse, these ‘songs’, in which all intimacy and introspection is forcibly constrained by the social aspect, constitute the minor key chants that underlie the xtriumphant hymns, and the corruption and turgidity of their frequently poetic or droll, free and inventive language speaks volumes about the social entropy and moral bankruptcy of the so-called communist system.

6

See Smirnova’s Birthday in Tri devushki v golubom (Three Girls in Blue), (Moscow, Iskusstvo, 1989), 137. Published in Sintaksis, no. 30 (Paris, 1991). 8 Norstein has made several rare but great films. The Overcoat is in preparation. Petrushevskaya also wrote the scripts for I Will Buy You a Wife and Silver Spoons, directed by Ilyukhin. 9 The Rumanian writer Gabriela Adamesteanu has published similar interior monologues expressing the woman’s point of view in a volume of stories entitled Vara-primavara (Bucharest, 1989). 7

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The Dramaturgy of the Cry The primary concern of playwrights belonging to the movement known in Russia as the ‘new wave’—a rather indistinctly defined movement that emerged in the 1970s and embraced Petrushevskaya—was to oust the ‘positive hero’ from the stage and replace him with the ordinary victims of the system, not the dissidents condemned for their anti-Soviet opinions, but the outcasts of that great communist Utopia who are the real products of the system and contrast so strongly with the stereotyped models of socialist realism (the exploits of Stakhanov can now be seen as pure fiction, a media invention of Stalinist propaganda). Amongst the dramatists of this ‘new wave’, such as Aleksandr Galin, Viktor Slavkin and Nina Sadur, who place their work outside the domain of politics in order to address the ‘human factor’, according to an expression made fashionable by Gorbachev in the early days of perestroika, Petrushevskaya stands apart. It is undoubtedly she who, with the greatest degree of skill and accuracy and the most acute powers of observation, reveals the decaying state of human relationships between couples, families, neighbours, different generations and social groups, in the brief fragments she occasionally places together. Grandmothers’ Blues (Babul’ya Blyuz) is thus composed of five smaller plays, and Columbina’s Appartment (Kvartira Kolombiny) and The Dark Room (Temnaya komnata) of four. This method of fragmentary construction is effected either at the moment of writing itself or, alternatively, after the event, Thus, Cinzano, subtitled Italian Vermouth without Interval, and Smirnova’s Birthday (Den’ rozhdeniya Smirnovoy), written four years apart in 1973 and 1977, constitute the two acts of the same play, and are performed by different characters, first the men and then the women who are connected with them in some way. In 1990 she wrote The Wedding Night or the 37th May (Brachnaya noch’) as the sequel to one of her earliest plays, Love (Lyubov’) (1974). In her work Petrushevskaya attempts to capture the breathless speech of people trapped and rejected by the breaking up of family structures, exiled in remote districts on the outskirts of town, in a tumbledown dacha with a leaking roof as in Three Girls in Blue, or a flat in no man’s land, furnished only with a torn bus seat, where the three down-and-outs in Cinzano gorge themselves on this imported liquor stumbled upon in the corner shop in a stroke of luck that smacks of both a miracle and the ineptitudes of the distribution network. She depicts humanity in a state of permanent anxiety, constantly hurrying in pursuit of a wretched three roubles, a bottle of strong drink, or a mohair sweater (a rare luxury to be found on the black market in the 1970s), a nation thrown into confusion by a dull nervousness and the stress created by want, a society broken and exhausted by more than sixty years of striving in vain for ‘a radiant future’. This perpetual struggle merely results in survival or drinking. The greatest happiness imaginable is that of a breathing space:10 insoluble daily problems spill over into professional life, its worries and joys alike; work is just one way of scraping a living, an epiphenomenon, and in Three Girls in Blue the specialization of one of the characters in rare languages (such as Gaelic) appears all the more absurd within the context of the situation in which the young woman finds herself. In her private life she is caught up by the maelstrom of need for everyday items, from an appartment to a pair of boots, food, medicines, a coffin or a passport…And without any time or space to herself, she can only steal a few moments in which to dream or to imagine herself as a woman, so that when she does succeed in appearing seductive, it is often in spite or herself. All Petrushevskaya’s plays present a shrewd description of the disorder and irregularity of a society plagued by a total lack of professional conscience, an aversion to work, problems with supplies, hospitals and housing, turbulence in the mixture of social classes, chronic alcoholism, and family difficulties created by marriage crises, women abandoned by their husbands, children deserted by their fathers, and conflicts between three generations living cooped up in one room. They expose, moreover, the consequences of the

10

Cited in an interview with Petrushevskaya in Art Press, no. 135 (Paris, April 1989).

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formal emancipation of women in a world of chronic shortages and outdated taboos, a society which has not given any thought to sexuality or birth control, and which still carries out abortions by repeated and brutal curetting without anaesthetic. ‘Women prove to be that half of humanity of whom life has taken the greatest toll’, writes Turovskaya.11 Life? Survival more like, each woman struggling to bring up her only child as best she can, for the reality of raising a child is not an act of heroism, but a readily admitted sentence of ‘penal servitude’. As for the men folk, they frequently desert and choose the way of vodka. If Petrushevskaya’s description of the male race is not entirely flattering, her view of women is no less unkind. Her lucid observation of a dejected, paradoxical and enslaved matriarchy does not imply and hatred, however, for Petrushevskaya loves her characters, who still remain, in the words of one of them, ‘men (in the sense of mankind)’, in spite of their extreme negation of humanity. All the ‘social’ content in this observation is aimed at the ‘colloidal state’.12 It is impossible to categorize her plays as ‘problem plays’ or ‘moral theatre’, as certain critics have attempted to do. For although Petrushevskaya was one of the first writers to lift the veil in public on the underworld of the Soviet system, she does not in any way seek to portray real people or present a sociological study. Her work for the theatre goes beyond the framework of a simple ‘drama of everyday life’. The three cousins in Three Girls in Blue represent the ironic and ‘degraded’ (in the Kantorian sense) echo of Chekhov’s three sisters. Just as Masha shocked the contemporaries of Chekhov by drinking and taking snuff, the behaviour of the characters in Petrushevskaya’s play scandalized certain conservative critics in the 1980s: in particular, the lover of Ira, one of the girls in blue, offers proof of his love by building her a private lavatory close to the dacha since the rest of the family refuse to allow her to use theirs. But, beyond this similarity, it is as though, in Three Girls in Blue, the characters of The Three Sisters have been ravaged body and soul by the wars, revolutions, massed events, concentration camps and exterminations of the twentieth century. Trailing behind each of Petrushevskaya’s women is a whole tribe of noisy, rancorous, shabby relations, and a child whom they desperately try to push to the fore in an attempt to shield, protect and keep it safe with their meagre resources or other complex strategies, as in the short story Svoy krug. The relationship that receives the greatest priority in Petrushevskaya’s work, unlike that of Chekhov (from which she nevertheless borrows the recurrent image of the abandoned home), is that of the reciprocal relationship between mother and child, regardless of age, and with particular emphasis on the mother-daughter relationship. A child is not seen primarily as a source of hope, moreover, but as a burden, a cause of anxiety, worry and pain. The themes of procreation and motherhood are fundamental to the play; animal maternity (the mother cat with her kitten, lost then found, forms a leitmotiv throughout Three Girls in Blue) and motherhood that is accepted passively or entered into solely for the purpose of claiming child benefit connects the characters with their relatives, friends and acquaintances in a solid chain of interlocking misery that is somehow overcome. If Petrushevskaya situates her dramas within the context of the harsh realities of Soviet daily life, and makes the problems of motherhood, in the widest sense of the word, the central theme of her work, four ‘rules’ enable her to focus her observations and analyses and create a sense of suspense out of which the most agonizing and bizarre events may arise.

11 12

Turovskaya, op. cit., 174. Ibid., 172.

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Concentration of Time and Place, Enigma and Language Petrushevskaya’s plays are concentrated, or, rather, taut like a coiled spring, in structure as a result of the contraction of time and space. Time is always circumscribed. An extreme example of this contraction occurs in Love where the entire duration of married life is compressed into a single hour, a mere half evening, in which a pair of young newly-weds, returning home from the sinister wedding palace after a meal in a restaurant, find themselves once more in their lodgings, the room that the girl shares with her mother. Following a discussion in which they reveal their profound disagreement, they decide to get divorced, but the unexpected return of the mother, who has gone back on her word to leave them alone on their wedding night at least, brings about a reconciliation of the couple, and, reunited, she drives them from her home. A corollary of this rule regarding time is a rule of place. The reduced space in which the plays are set corresponds not only to the restricted nature of the stage itself, but also to the reality of the housing crisis in Moscow. Petrushevskaya seeks to emphasize this lack of space and the feeling of complete disorientation it brings. In Music Lessons (Uroki muzyki), for example, a grandmother is turned out of her room by her grandson who, on returning from the army, establishes himself in his parents’ home with his girlfriend. They set up a campbed in the kitchen for the old lady, which is, she claims, the ‘last stop before the cemetery’. The plays swarm with characters, either literally or merely by allusion, living in overcrowded housing, and create an impression of a stifling world in which ‘there is never any room’.13 Time and place thus constitute the threads of a daily life so constricted that there is no escape. The third “rule” concerns the paradoxical structure of Petrushevskaya’s plays. Based on a plurality of dramatic motifs, they present their themes in the manner of a detective story, now concealing, now revealing the facts like an accordion folding in and out, as motifs come into view then disappear out of sight again. The audience is forced to ask questions, to try to solve the enigmas, and Petrushevskaya plays on the reversal of situations in order to create a sense of suspense. On the surface, nothing appears to happen. The characters simply exist, chat or, as in Cinzano, drink, or seem to be concerned only with drinking. The underlying and skilful arrangement of hidden dramatic motifs forces the latter to the surface of the dialogue from time to time in the most extraordinary ways, however, for beneath this surface lie the most horrific truths. Thus, certain succinct, incisive, enigmatic or totally absurd remarks made by Pasha cut across the sombre yet humorous tales of debts and drinking in Cinzano. These remarks concern his mother, her illness, her stay in hospital, and the flowers he wants to buy for her. The number of a death certificate found in her pocket is taken for a sum of money, and amidst the delirium of the conversation dulled by alcohol and the confusion of the three men forced to face up to their own lives as much as to the death of their mother, they realize that she is in the mortuary, that Pasha is drinking the money intended to pay for the funeral, and that ‘the most important thing is not to think about it’… Finally, Petrushevskaya manipulates language like a goldsmith, shaping the bubbling sub-language of liquid gold that springs up on every street corner and in every kitchen, in spite of or perhaps thanks to the rolling of this molten liquid to which the dead language of authority forces her to submit. This creative elaboration of everyday speech distinguishes her work from the simple tape-recording of conversations to which certain Soviet critics sought to reduce it at first sight.

13

Three Girls in Blue in Tri devushki v golubom, 169.

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Dialogue as Action Dialogue is the most important form of action in Petrushevskaya’s work. She has claimed that, however poor her sight may be, her sense of hearing is, on the other hand, extremely acute,14 and she demands the same acuity of hearing on the part of her audience. Pared down by the daily violence to which her characters are subjected, and the ‘rules’ of dramatic writing, the language of her dialogues becomes at once comic and cruel, poetic and terse. And it is through their manner of speaking, their abuse of syntax, their inventive vocabulary and bold combinations, that Petrushevskaya’s hybrid characters are wholly revealed. The cast lists of her plays indicate only the first name (Cinzano), followed occasionally by the age of the character (Three Girls in Blue), and only rarely do they give their surname or profession, sometimes designating a character by their initials alone. Within the context of these neutral scenarios, it is the use of language that individualizes Petrushevskaya’s characters. All the action takes place within this language which is littered throughout with foreign words originating from capitalist countries, and figures denoting loans, purchases, barters and thefts, all of which express an ever eager but never satisfied need to consume. Her language is full of incorrectly accented words, errors in pronunciation, abbreviations, ungrammatical acronyms and monstruous constructions. Through her rejection of accepted norms and the manipulation of slang expressions, spoken language acquires a bizarre quality that throws it into a state of utter turmoil. Indeed, in matters of language Petrushevskaya fully appreciates the creative abilities of children, old people and alcoholics, who are without doubt her preferred characters. It is through language, moreover, that the social identity, standard of education, and profession of a character are revealed, and this question of identity is the first enigma that the audience must solve. The sordid world that passes before them is not one composed of tramps and drunkards, but of scientific researchers, or bureaucrats recently returned from England, of a whole cross-section of society that forms a kind of mediocre ‘semi-intelligentsia’ whose material, moral, cultural and sexual misery may occasionally be glimpsed by the audience. Finally, it is through language that, as Vladimir Nabokov observed of Gogol, an ‘orgy of secondary characters’15 permeates the already overcrowded spaces. In spite of the dislocation of family bonds, each one of Petrushevskaya’s characters exists within a tangled wed of family ties, and her use of language serves to bring these endless chains of humanity to life. Thus, in Isolation Unit (Izolirovannyĭ boks) the breathless monologues of the two terminally ill women evoke the myriads of characters who appear in their own individual dramas, but who nevertheless remain invisible to the audience. The Surpassing of Everyday Life Petrushevskaya’s plays are located within the Slavonic tradition of the fantastic established by Gogol, which the author reinterprets in an entirely personal way. She elicits laughter through comedy of situation, word and gesture in order to set her audience at ease, and then, when they are off their guard, she seeks to move them, to make them cry. Her treatment of time, space and language, her piecing together of dramatic motifs in the manner of a detective story, and her preference for the celebration as the moment in which to assemble her characters on stage—a celebration held amidst poverty, a shabby affair from the start, that only serves to intensify the feelings of loneliness and exclusion—all concentrate everyday life to such a

14 This claim was made during a discussion organized to mark the publication of Songs of the Twentieth Century in March 1989 at the Meridian Palace of Culture in Moscow. 15 Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (Connecticut, New Directions, 1944), 48.

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degree that it appears not as a naturalistic, medical or sociological vision, but as a tragic metaphor of the human condition, Soviet or otherwise. This surpassing of daily routine is achieved also by the regulation of the chaos and spoken delivery of her plays by means of refrains or the repetition of words, phrases, themes or voices, as in the case of the offstage voice of the little boy reciting short fairy-tales, almost counting rhymes, such as those of the flying octopus, the winged wolf, and the moon that could fly faster than the birds, in Three Girls in Blue, or the ringing of a small bell, the resonant gestures of ‘silent scenes’, or the sudden appearance of strange characters. Rhythmicized in this way, suffering is turned to music in these ‘songs of the twentieth century’. The introduction of the absurd is a logical consequence of this method of construction. At the end of Music Lessons, huge swings descend from the flies, swaying to and from above the furniture in the Kozlov’s council flat. Their son Kolia’s two ‘fiancées’, Nadia and Nina, whom the Kozlovs have rejected, are sitting on the swings, the one with her mothers’ child, the other with her own, which has been born without head in an attempt to abort it. The movement of these swings, increased by Kolia’s pushing, lends Petrushevskaya’s work a metaphorical status; and in her most recent plays, the absurd is no longer the consequence, but the point of departure for her work, which enables her to intensify relationships and dialogues from the outset. A Theatre of Challenges The full force of Petrushevskaya’s theatrical writing lies in its urgency: she seeks to challenge her audience directly. The repeated exclamations, such as ‘Come off it!’ or ‘Are you crazy?’, with which the characters constantly interrupt one another are, in fact, addressed to the audience, and people may often be heard squirming uncomfortably in their seats or leaving the auditorium during a performance in which they cannot bear the open and frank presentation of a reality that borders on a nightmare. (These were indeed the reactions of a considerable number of people at the first performances of Three Girls in Blue at the Lenkom Theatre in Moscow.) Such direct and personal challenges cause each member of the audience to suddenly recognize themselves, on stage, or to identify individual feelings with a particular attitude or turn of phrase. In The Moscow Choir, for example, far from simply unbolting the statue of Stalin, Petrushevskaya questions the audience on the possibility of destroying the Stalin element hidden away inside each one of them. Her apparent indifference and neutrality in the face of the ‘inhuman’ behaviour of her characters, induced by the perplexing daily situations in which they are enmeshed, is simply an expression of the interest and love she bears for each one of them, down to the least significant. Beyond this degree of detachment, Petrushevskaya’s plays may lay claim to a moral, but absolutely not a moralising role within a society whose foundations have been well and truly shaken; she makes her stand or exercises forgiveness on the grounds of understanding alone and not through any sense of anger or indignation. When Petrushevskaya’s theatrical work finally emerged from the secret drawers of confidentiality,16 it thus presented a variety of problems to the public. The critics too experienced certain difficulties, and, in accordance with the view of the Brezhnevian censor, a number of them reproached her with an excessively pessimistic vision of life, dismissing her work merely as a denunciation of the social defects of the regime, a dissident testimony, a sociological document. Her work finally proved problematic to producers, whom Petrushevskaya distrusts to the point of not hesitating to ‘ban’ certain performances herself. For how should the producer stage these plays in which the 16

Music Lessons was written in 1973. Death Penalty (1976), The Glass of Water (1978) and Isolation Unit (1978–80) were all performed in The Dark Room cycle at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1991.

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real world of want, greyness and misery is transformed into the world of the theatre, richly peopled with characters and details, a world whose structure seems to lie at the very crossroads of the theatrical and the romantic? How may a producer find his own place within a drama in which the author, a concerned and compassionate demiurge, follows her everyday characters and their acquaintances step by step through each painful and unavoidable experience? Few producers have really known how to respond to these questions,17 in spite of numerous attempts in theatre and television during more than seven years in Russia and elsewhere (Germany, Poland, America, Bulgaria, Finland, Italy, Great Britain, France, The Netherlands, etc.). Condemned by the conservative press at its first performances as a collection of neo-realist, even naturalist, ‘tittle-tattle’ plays in which the characters are completely lacking in ideals, Petrushevskaya’s work in fact to the surgeon’s knife, presents a clear, and bold razor-sharp picture of human relationships in the throes of extreme distress, and questions in Three Girls in Blue, how existence is possible in an unbearable world that cannot be transcended. In the Russia of 1991 where Petrushevskaya was acknowledged definitively as a writer and playwright to the extent that the journal Russkoe bogatsvo devoted its entire third issue to her, her work for the theatre is surpassed in absurdity, tragi-comedy and cruelty only by life itself, by the daily apocalypse that the people are forced to undergo as they witness the rapid disintegration of social structures and living conditions around them. Petrushevskaya’s plays no longer represent that powerful truth that suddenly burst into the open, stamping out the endemically false discourse of the ‘stagnation’ years or the early days of perestroika. In the face of the violence and social instability and this life ‘on the edge of the precipice’ that the Russian politicians seek to describe, Petrushevskaya’s plays have not escaped the crisis that has affected the theatre worldwide, for, in a period in which the floodgates of free speech have opened to reveal an overwhelming wealth of unbearable evidence, an attentive hearing of the text alone is no longer sufficient for her plays to make any impression on an audience, when theatre bills are now more concerned with satisfying the public’s demand for entertainment and amusement. An inventive production that turns to reality the strange visions, images and rhythms of Petrushevskaya’s plays in the most ‘pared down’ of ways still remains to be created, so powerfully do her plays reveal the despair, the chaos and absurdity of a world in which the characters flounder about without hope or future. Such a production would not only be inventive but light-hearted too, in the manner envisaged in 1987 by Anatoly Vasilyev, who has not yet produced any of her work: ‘If I were to produce a play by her one day, it would be performed in such a way that she herself would laugh all the way through. Her works are alltoo frequently made into dull, heavy affairs, whereas they should be performed gaily. With tears, but gaily’.18 (1990–1992) Translation of bibliographic notes on Beatrice Picon-Vallin: Béatrice PICON-VALLIN is Director of Research at the CNRS, the Research Laboratory into Performing Arts. She specialises in modern theatre and in particular Slavic theatre. Her major works are: Le Théâtre juif sovietique pendant les années 20 (L’Age d’Homme 1973); Meyerhold, Les Voies de la création théâtrale, Vol. 17 (Editions du CNRS, 1990); Introduction, Preface and Notes for Vol. IV

17 Some of the most interesting productions have included Viktyuk’s staging of Music Lessons at the Moscow University Theatre in 1978 and Kozak’s production of Cinzano at the Chelovek Theatre-Studio in Moscow in 1987. Kozak’s production scored a huge success at both the Munich and the Parma Festivals in 1988 and 1989, and has also toured a number of foreign circuits (Paris, 1990). 18 Cited in an interview with Viktor Slavkin in Damas (Yugoslavia, 13 October 1987).

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Ecrits sur le théâtre (1936–40) by V.Meyerhold (Lausanne, L’Age d’Homme, 1992, in 4 volumes); a number of articles and studies in specialist reviews: Théâtre/Public; Art press; Travail théâtral; L’Art du théâtre; Cahiers théâtre Louvain; L’Avant-scène Opéra: Teatr; Moskovskij nabljudatel’; ComedieFrançaise; Les Cahiers; etc. She has also published another work on L.Petrushevskaya “Amère revanche des corps à l’Est” in Le Corps en jeu (a collected anthology, Paris CNRS Editions, 1993).

Bloody Hard Work: Women in Nontraditional Work in Theatre Peta Tait Lecturer in Drama, School of Arts, University of New South Wales

Women in nonperformance and nontraditional areas of work in theatre believe their achievements are due to hard work, tenacity and determined effort. This study of 80 women in Sydney theatre reveals deliberate enterprise in their work although as women, they receive only minimal support and recognition for their abilities. While they are often initially attracted to working in theatre by a belief in its social and political significance, the women who maintain positive attitudes to their work are more likely to have experienced a childhood attraction to theatre. Women will put up with inequities based on gender divisions, difficult working conditions, inadequate pay and low status in their field of work because they love theatre. KEY WORDS Women, theatre work, nontraditional employment. Disclosing Talent Women work with dedication in nonperformance and nontraditional areas of theatre. Yet paradoxically they receive very few indications of support and encouragement from their colleagues. Nearly all the 80 women taking part in my qualitative research study of women in Sydney theatre describe their own individual effort and hard work as the main reason for their achievements.1 Whether they are working in technical, administrative or artistic fields—mainstream or fringe—these women conveyed the same purposeful commitment to their work and indicate that their own individual effort is the principal reason for their

1

A total of 350 four-page questionnaires were sent out to Sydney theatres, agents, unions, organisations and women working in theatre. 80 women (23%) responded: 52 from mainstream theatre, 13 from fringe, 12 from community, and 3 from experimental. Some respondents did not complete the second part of the questionnaire, which involved writing answers to 12 open statements; there was an average of 10% blank responses on these written responses. The questionnaire asked women to specify their category of work: 16% of responses were technical (e.g. stage management, lighting/sound technicians, costume, set construction); 50% of responses were artistic (e.g. playwrights, directors, lighting/sound/set/costume designers); 34% of responses were administrative (e.g. publicists, front of house, managers, administrators). The second stage of the research involved more in-depth interviews with 17 women. A telephone survey of 16 Sydney theatres in June 1991 indicated that there were 275 women (56%) employed in nonperformance areas of work in these theatres at that time.

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achievements. These women are highly committed to theatre although their attitudes to their work are often expressed in emotional language which reflects conflicting feelings and considerable ambivalence about the personal and professional rewards which are to be gained from their work. Notwithstanding these reservations about the conditions of work, they continue to value theatre because of what they identify as its unique power to communicate heightened emotional states, and conceptual ideas and abstract meanings, to an audience. My research study has a feminist orientation which seeks to find out what it means to be a woman working in Australian theatre in the 1990s, given that there is now a sizeable group of women working professionally in nonperformance areas.2 I wanted to investigate the motivation of this group of women and look at how they view their work and achievements. I was aware that some areas of theatre work such as directing and writing (artistic) seem to attract a considerable number of women, but promote very few, whereas other areas like publicity and marketing (administrative) have a predominance of women while technical fields appear to still be dominated by men. Theatre is both a workplace which employs women and the site for the production of the art. Women’s hard work and effort within theatre raises a number of issues connected to women’s traditional gender role as the nurturer of artists and art rather than as the artist, and the lack of recognition given to women’s work in society as a whole. The 1992 Parliamentary enquiry into the status of Australian women found that: Much of the concern regarding recognition has to do, not just with the way in which women are recognised but, what they are recognised for. Women from all walks of life expressed frustration at being either utterly invisible or recognised for all the wrong reasons.”3 The collaborative nature of theatre means that the way women’s work is recognised within theatre is significant, since the contribution of nonperformance areas of work to the whole production is often relatively imperceptible to an audience and the outside community. Recognition for work in these fields is accorded by those who work in the profession, so that the support and encouragement of colleagues is crucial to advancement. There is an inherent danger that women’s contribution to theatre will be overlooked in ways which perpetuate women’s traditional gender positions, since most women in this study do not volunteer the information that their colleagues give them support and encouragement. Where women’s work in nonperformance areas of theatre is still seen as auxilliary to the main artistic enterprise, their effort is doubly invisible because of the nature of the work and continuing divisions based on gender roles. The reasons given by these women for their achievements in a wide variety of different occupations contained overwhelming similarities and suggested that they understand their endeavour in theatre to be difficult and to some extent burdensome. As part of my research, I asked the women to finish the statements, “My achievements in theatre are due to…”. Twenty nine out of the 80 women replied, “…hard work” or “… very (bloody) hard work”. This is not simply a statement of the time commitment of long hours as indicated elsewhere in this research, because their extended comments confirm that the experience of work can be

2

Jayaratne, T.E. “The Value of Quantitative Methodology for Feminist Research” in Bowles G. & Klein R.D. (1983) Theories of Women’s Studies. Routledge & Kegan Paul: London. I am using a feminist approach which utilises the quantitative results of this study to inform the qualitative responses. This research looks at women’s perceptions of their work and I justify this focus on women, with the expressed intention of increasing awareness of women’s presence and contribution in theatre. 3 The Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia (1992) Half Way to Equal. Report of the Inquiry into Equal Opportunity and Equal Status for Women in Australia. Australian Government Publishing Service: Canberra. p. 21.

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perceived as unpleasant and not a gratifying process. Phrases such as “plodding on”, “slogging it” or “doing lots of homework” are used together with notions of being tenacious and single-minded about their goals. These responses also convey their ambition, which offers an underlying reason for women accepting such difficult work conditions. Since most of these women have changed direction at some point in their careers—some quite markedly from careers such as in teaching or welfare—and others must supplement their income, this group of women do have comparative experience of work outside theatre which qualifies their comments. These statements about hard work are not being made in isolation. Nevertheless these women have chosen to work in nonperformance (nontraditional) areas of theatre. This unequivocal agreement amongst their responses on work prompted me to try to establish whether these women believe their effort is justified. Are these women being fully recognised within nonperformance areas of work in Australian theatre and being given opportunities for continuing professional advancement? Women in this study say their biggest difficulty is getting work, and some women identify this as connected to issues of gender inequities in the workplace. I was surprised at the vehement opinions expressed about the perpetuation of gender stereotypes in theatre both onstage and offstage because I thought that the increased presence of women in nonperformance work in recent years would have changed workplace expectations of women derived form traditional gender roles. One woman from my research study who works in administration indicated that women are: …replacing traditional stereotypes with modern ones in equal ignorance of the issues and inequalities”. Women taking part in this study express frustration at the low level of opportunities for women in the artistic categories of nonperformance (nontraditional) work outside low-budget productions. What then, motivates some women to continue to make this kind of commitment to their work, when they do not believe they are currently being given adequate work opportunities? The attitudes of these women can be aligned with liberal democratic beliefs which assert that opportunities and choices are available to anyone in Australian society who is prepared to work hard. However, the assumption that these women believe their work-related choices are “gender-neutral” is undermined by their responses in another part of this research.4 Women in administration believe they compete equally with men for the same work, while women in artistic and technical fields believe they have to be better than men to get work. This pressure to work harder than men for access to the same jobs is also substantiated by research on women working in Australian film production.5 From this study most women believe their level of achievement is determined by their preparedness to work, and, as women, they must be prepared to work harder than men. A handful of women did indicate that in conjunction with their own effort their workplace provided an environment which was conducive to their achievement, but this is not the same as receiving specific support and encouragement from colleagues for the development of their careers. Only one woman indicated that men and women had given her support as a woman, and she valued this encouragement. Overall, the women in this study indicate that they are

4

Pringle, R. & Watson, S. “Fathers, Brothers, Mates: The Fraternal State in Australia”. In Watson, S. (1990) Playing the State. Allen & Unwin: Australia. p. 230. 5 Ryan, P.Eliot, M. & Appleton, G. (1983) Women in Australian Film Production. Women’s Film Fund: Australia. p. 4. “Some women feel that they have to work much harder and longer than men, be more highly skilled and maintain consistently higher quality of output in order to gain the same degree of credibility, prestige and reputation as men in comparable situations.”

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responsible for their own achievements and cannot depend on other people to assist them with their longterm goals and ambitions. All nonperformance areas of work require specialised skills and talents, from publicity through to set construction, and there is a strong correlation between access to resources and large budgets and the involvement of theatre professionals from all different fields who are recognised for their skills in their particular field. Thus: “…resources mean people, very skilled people, the best in the business.”6 Only seven women in this study—across artistic, administrative and technical fields—made a specific reference to talent as a reason for their achievements in conjunction with their individual capacity to work; a further three mentioned ability. While most women clearly define their work ethic, they barely acknowledge any special aptitude or personal knack they bring to their work. (Is this reticence about acknowledging their talent and ability restricted to Australian women in nonperformance areas of theatre, or is it more widespread?) The extent to which perceptions of talent and ability are dependent on the direct acknowledgement of other people is relevant here. In their investigation of research studies into perceptions of women’s self-confidence, Veronica Nieva and Barbara Gutek conclude: “Women tend to underestimate their abilities when no clear information is given them regarding their abilities, before an unfamiliar task…When clear feedback is provided, however, there are no sex differences in reported levels of self-confidence…”7 The low number of women in this study who specify their own talent and ability as a factor in their achievement seems to be directly related to their perception that colleagues do not support or encourage them. Since more women acknowledged having personal qualities such as honesty, originality, intelligence or creativity—attributes that people in their lives outside theatre would recognise and commend them for—it must be assumed that perceptions of ability and talent in relation to work need to be reinforced by colleagues who work in theatre. Clare Burton summarises studies of gender-specific attitudes to men and women’s efforts in work: “Men and women tend to rate men’s work more highly than women’s, and men’s performance on tasks more highly than women’s identical performance…good female performance is perceived as due to effort and good male performance as due to ability.”8

As she suggests, if women’s achievements continue to be principally linked to effort, this is a major obstacle to their advancement in the workplace. Where function and achievement in the workplace are attributed to effort it remains the work of that individual woman in isolation and can be considered a temporary behaviour and no indication of that woman’s potential in the future. Alternatively, where men are identified as having ability they are given an advantage over women in the workplace. Men and women may

6

Seymour, D. “Box of Tricks” in Todd, S. (1984) Women and Theatre, Faber & Faber: London. Nieva, V. & Gutek, B. (1982) Women and Work. Praeger: New York. p. 100. 8 Burton, C. (1991) The Promise And The Price. Allen & Unwin: Australia. p. 18. 7

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both have to work hard, but if men are perceived by other men and women to have ability and women are not, then they will not be equally recognized for their hard work. Instead, preference will go to men who are perceived to be developing their talent and gifts. Women in theatre who identify their achievements as due more to hard work than ability reflect the hegemonic values surrounding gendered behaviour in the workplace. If the dominant ideology in society reinforces men’s capacity to do the work, it also allows them to be judged to have ability because they are men. Thus: “It is not possible to speak of the fortunes of individual women without reference to the structure of relationships between men and women in our society.”9 Women’s work in theatre is dependent on forms of peer assessment, but no matter how hard they work there are structural factors in place which will counteract the results of their effort. Only 17 per cent of women in this study said they are involved in determining artistic policy. Decision-making in theatre is still largely male-dominated, which has significant implications if the continuing perception is that men have more ability than women. Under these circumstances, evaluation of the work of a woman or her ability and talent as either good or inadequate invariably reflects a gendered subjectivity. Undoubtedly there is a link between the acquisition of skill and achievements in determining women’s ongoing professional advancement in artistic and technical fields. But only two women nominated skill as contributing to their achievements. Similarly there was a noticeable absence of references to training in their explanations of achievement, although some opportunities to train must have been relevant to the initial decision to work in theatre and the majority of these women have tertiary qualifications. Obviously there is a link between the acquisition of skills in a particular field and hard work. Women are having to develop their record of achievement at the same time as they acquire skills in their area of work. The existence of differing perceptions of men’s and women’s ability becomes particularly important in this process of acquiring skills and opportunities for advancement. After all the recognition of ability would seem to be a major consideration in the provision of ongoing opportunities in theatre. If women’s work in theatre is being judged while they are still learning the skills of their particular field, and they are not recognised for their ability as men are, then they will not be allowed the liberty to make mistakes or to learn by trial and error in the same way as men. It will be harder for women to continue to gain work if they are not seen to be competent as knowing what to do from the outset. For this reason, women cannot afford to be seen to be learning the job while they work in the same way as men and will not be given continuing opportunities because they do not have the protection of colleagues who value and nurture them for their talent rather than their hard work. Judging by their overall responses, women in this study would place more value on their capacity to work with other people than on perceptions of ability or skills. Some explain how they are “able to respond well to all people”. Professional contacts are important, and responses to an earlier question indicate that the crucial factor is the opportunity to work. These women imply that they adopt a conciliatory attitude to colleagues and this capacity to get along with other people, supported by their hard work and personal qualities, determine their professional achievements and advancement. This appears to be closer to the attributes of women’s traditional gender roles than the demands arising from professional commitments in a wide range of differing types of work in theatre. Theatre is, after all, a collaborative enterprise, and women

9

lbid. p. 14.

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are disadvantaged in their continuing access to work if the expectations arising from gender roles position them in the supportive, understanding and nurturing role but do not give back the same degree of support and encouragement. Interestingly, a quarter of the women stated specified that they were invited to join their current position, and this applies noticeably to the area of administrative work, where it need not be applicable. This is obviously derived from the contractual and project-based nature of theatre work in the artistic categories. Yet it indicates that theatre is not an open field of opportunities, and under these circumstances considerable power is accorded to the decision makers in theatre. A comparative research study into the career paths of successful men and women concluded: “Women may be moved ahead more randomly than men because it is difficult for those evaluating them to determine their performance:…Thus the wrong women may be moving ahead for the wrong reasons, such as attractiveness, personality, and loyalty, while the more capable women are left behind.”10 This pattern of inviting people to work denotes problems around gender inequity which are specific to the arts, not just theatre practice, and must be addressed from within by the people involved in the industry. Women in technical and artistic fields of work accept they must work harder to compete with men and this provides them with an incentive to keep working harder despite some less than satisfactory outcomes. This explains why women attribute their achievements to hard work, while if they cannot fulfil their expectations, they may frequently believe that they did not have the same creative ability as men. The journalist Geraldine Doogue, who works in radio and television, commented: “As women start to edge closer to genuine power, there is considerable resistance among the poeple who currently hold power…”11

The frustration of some women about the perceived lack of options available to women for decision making outside low-budget productions in theatre cannot be changed through hard work if the practice of gender power relations are not confronted at the same time. The existence of such gender power relations may mean only certain women who conform to conciliatory sets of behaviours will be accepted within theatre. Women may be working hard in areas of theatre work which are resistant to their advancement. While professional contacts are important for gaining work, as I indicated earlier, women in this study do not attribute their achievements to other people.12 Although half the women were initially influenced by a teacher or a family member to undertake a career in theatre, such influences are not identified as subsequently contributing to their achievements. This presents a composite picture of women in nonperformance areas of work who are fiercely independent and show enormous strength of purpose and

10

Larwood, L. & Gattiker, U. “A comparison of the Career Paths Used by Successful Women and Men”, in Gutek, B. & Larwood, L. (1987) Women’s Career Development. Sage Publications: Newbury Park. p. 154. 11 The Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia (1992) Op cit. p. 166. Geraldine Doogue speaking about women taking positions on corporate boards. 12 A significant number of women (17) also indicated that no one had influenced them in their choice of career either by not answering that particular question or by stating that it was entirely their responsibility.

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determination. This corresponds with the qualities evident in studies of women who are high achievers working in other areas of employment: “All the women…had a strong sense of purpose or mission which provided them with direction.”13 Women in this study exhibit a sense of purpose in their lives and deliberate enterprise in their work despite receiving minimal support and encouragement. There is a dedicated professional attitude to the workplace across all three categories of theatre work, technical, administrative and artistic. Working in the Contradictions In this study, 41 per cent of women said they were initially attracted to their work because of the political and social significance of theatre.14 Their responses indicated an idealistic belief that theatre would offer meaningful work which was perceived to have an impact on the society. Again these responses correspond to the responses of women who have achieved recognition in fields outside theatre: “Many of the women interviewed believed in this power of the individual to make a difference in the world and their choice of work often reflected this belief.”15

Admittedly some of these women in nonperformance work indicated a childhood interest in theatre, but principally they were attracted to theatre as an art form because it could increase our understanding of social interaction and broaden the cultural base. Only a handful of women—mainly directors or writers—responded that they continued to work in theatre in a way that can be linked with this earlier response about being attracted to the political and social significance of theatre. As one woman explained: “Despite the pretty poor conditions, because it still energises and interests me, I still see it as an effective tool for social change.” One playwright described herself as a “cultural activist”, which confirms some sense of purpose and ongoing connection with an earlier attraction to theatre as a process of social change. Another woman stayed with a theatre because of “its policy of selecting new plays with social relevance”. Their responses were best summed up with the statement: “Because I believe in the power of theatre to reach people and involve people like no other medium.”

13

Szirom, T. (1991) Striking Success: Australian Women Talk About Success. Allen & Unwin: Australia. p. 49. “These visions often exhibit the nurturing role which women perform so well, their inclination towards negotiation and peace and their belief that change will come about through working together with others.” 14 In response to question 12:41% of women in this study were attracted to the social and political significance of theatre; 29% of all respondents were following a childhood dream of working in theatre; 21% of respondents came to work in theatre by chance; 5% were attracted by the excitement; 4% were blank responses. 15 Szirom, T. Op. cit. p. 47.

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It is clear that this small group of women continue to be motivated by this idealism and a belief in the importance of theatre as a reflection of social and cultural experience and as a vehicle for social change. Their responses imply a strong belief in the purpose of theatre. The majority of the women who were initially attracted to the social and political significance of theatre do not continue to work in theatre because of this belief. The reasons given by these women for staying in theatre are at variance with the expressions of their initial belief, and for some this represents a disillusionment with the abstract ideals surrounding theatre and the possibilities for gaining personal satisfaction from working towards such ideals. For others this represents a more realistic appraisal of the personal gains which can be derived from working in theatre. On the whole, women gave subjective responses determined by their disposition, predilection and personal interests as to why they continue working in theatre. Women’s single-minded pursuit of careers in theatre—given the reportedly poor work conditions, long hours, low pay and limited promotion opportunities—would need to be fuelled by some perception of reward. Over a quarter of respondents finished the statement “I stayed working in theatre…” with “I enjoy it” or “like it” or “love it”, “it’s fun/exciting” or “I’m personally suited to working in theatre”. Also: “It suits me more than an office job” or “I feel driven to it”. These are positive emotional responses to work and can be correlated with their childhood aspirations (over half of these women had previously stated that they dreamed of going onstage at an early age).16 Others indicated that they are committed to the creative process within theatre, with comments ranging from “it’s a beautiful explorable art form” to “theatre should become part of everyone’s life”. Similarly it was perceived as allowing them to express themselves “creatively”. These women like, enjoy or love their involvement in either the technical, administrative or artistic areas because their work is associated with theatre, an art form they enjoy. In contrast to these positive attitudes, almost as many women continue to work in theatre despite being unhappy about their circumstances. This group of women also uses emotional language, but they seem to be referring to their direct, specific experience of work rather than expressing their feelings about theatre generally. The responses of at least 10 women suggested they felt compelled to continue working in theatre despite considerable misgivings and doubts. Several explained as follows: “…because I’m mad.” One mentioned that it was only possible because of earnings from film and television. Some said that they keep on hoping that it will get better for women in the future. These women seemed to be suggesting that they could not leave and used words like “lethal drug” and similar phrases to suggest that working in theatre was addictive. Some explained they could not do anything else as effectively. It is interesting to note that these these responses were also framed to convey their personal feelings. A further seven women expressed a definite preference for leaving their theatre work or hesitancy about staying in theatre work. Some of their reasons were inadequate pay/remuneration and advancement opportunities for senior women administrators. One woman explained: “I can’t stand the bad pay, the gay (male) mafia, the job insecurity and the lack of a career path any longer.” Another said: “I work part-time in theatre and on my own terms only I will not be ripped off any more.” Significantly most of these women were in technical or administrative fields of work. While women in these areas are more likely to have come to work in theatre by chance, it is notable that these are the areas that are

16

Twelve out of 18 women who say they love, enjoy or like theatre had childhood dreams of going onstage.

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least visibly contributing to the production process. Ironically there is often more opportunity for women to find permanent or stable employment in these areas than in artistic fields. The women in this study who indicated that they continue working in theatre because they love it counterbalance a group who are disillusioned with theatre and think about their work negatively. The experience of working in nonperformance areas of theatre has certainly modified the idealistic perceptions initially held by some women, so that they have developed a more pragmatic and, perhaps, realistic view of theatre work. The women who still continue to glorify their own association with theatre are more likely to have experienced a childhood attraction to theatre, while others who are critical about the personal gains from working in theatre are more likely to have come to theatre by chance or to have initially been motivated by a belief in the social and political significance of theatre. “I Like Theatre…” Women in this study still appreciate the effect of theatre and surprisingly few indicated that they hold negative attitudes towards theatre despite expressions of dissatisfaction with their experience of work. I asked them to finish the statement “I like theatre…” with reference to the finished theatre performance. I was able to group the responses as follows: the enjoyment of ideas conveyed in theatre; heightened experienced states achieved when watching theatre; the delights of being backstage as the theatre production is realised; and pleasure derived from the escapism or fantasy found in theatre.17 There does not seem to be any correlation between the reason for their initial attraction to working in theatre and their liking for theatre itself. The women who found the content of theatre in some way challenging and who consider that theatre provides opportunities for learning and self-development were in the majority. At a personal level these women are stimulated and challenged by theatre work. These responses indicate they believe theatre “has the power to change people while enlightening them” or offers insight “when it’s fresh innovative-aliveenergized-well presented-thought through-real” or reveals “absurdities in society”. Theatre “educates”, “amuses, confronts” and “stimulates the audience to further thought”. As one woman explained: “It makes me think about people—their different realities in their different moralities—a microcosm of society.” For many of the women working in adminstrative and technical areas the ideas in theatre are personally satisfying and culturally significant. However, women working in the artistic areas are more likely to value theatre when it is experienced at a profound level. Their comments included words and phrases such as “touched”, “nourishment of the soul”, “passion”, and “a sacred event” leading to “higher awareness”. “It often conveys the images that hold those rare moments of poetry and truth that nourish the soul.” “…when the lights go down, I always expect a miracle.” “…because of its creative capacity to tap inner resources of the mind.” “…as a pathway to higher awareness.”

17

Responses to the open statement “I like theatre…”: 24 women conveyed an enjoyment of ideas in theatre; 19 experienced heightened states when watching theatre; 16 liked being backstage as the theatre production is realised; 8 found pleasure in the escapism or fantasy of theatre; 4 women don’t like theatre; 9 were blank.

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One woman explained she liked theatre: “…because its expression is illusion and magic qualities—you can create atmosphere that is not possible in any other medium.” Two women mentioned the smell; three, the “magic” of theatre; and four, the special nature of the communication between the performer and the audience. While these women are clearly responding to the effect that theatre has on them from the position of the spectator, it also means that the ideal of what they want to experience from theatre goes beyond a cognitive and intellectual response. These women seek a felt response—a heightened sensitivity to intuitive states of mind. Another sizeable group of women compromising a larger number of women working in technical fields specified their liking of theatre in terms of creativity and its fulfilment and the expression of their creative energy through the finished process. They described feelings of anticipation and excitement especially around opening night. They indicated that theatre appeals because it is not predictable or routine and remains unconventional and dangerous. One woman explained: “…before the audience arrives the set crackling and ready for action, the actors adrenalising, the crew on its mark—it’s very like the upswing before an orgasm.” These women are expressing their enjoyment of realising the goal from the process of making theatre, rather than perceptions of its effect as a finished product making sense of the world for others and the audience. This is a personal response arising out of their experience backstage that again indicates a felt response of heightened emotion and, at times, physical sensations. The descriptions from women that encompass fantasy and escapism suggest they want theatre to provide the outlet for states of mind removed from everyday reality. While this is not a large group of responses, it does represent a significant set of comments, because “anything may happen” and they valued theatre for its “escapism” or its “fantasy” and its imagined realms and spaces, exploring dreams. One woman explained: “…it offers me a world of illusion that is more truthful more real than reality itself.” These responses are akin to heightened emotional states, but they consciously seek an element of escapism. What is surprising, perhaps, about this category of responses is that women who work behind scenes should actually admit to liking theatre for reasons of fantasy or escapism at all. They are, after all, completely involved with the process of creating that fantasy and understand the mechanics of how the illusions of theatre are created. This understanding obviously does not detract from their personal enjoyment or ability to lose themselves in the illusions. It appears that despite their involvement in the making of theatre, some women can still be captivated by the experience of being a spectator to that theatre. Woman work “bloody hard” to achieve in their field of work in nonperformance (nontraditional) areas of theatre. They acknowledge the emotional and intellectual rewards derived from theatre as an art form, and this does provide some women with a level of personal satisfaction which encourages them to want to continue working in theatre. Many women, however, are sited in the contradictions brought about by their emotional responses to conditions which are probably the result of the continuation of gender inequities in theatre work. Their attitudes towards their work in theatre are not necessarily rational and run counter to their experience of theatre itself. As one woman said:

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“My love for it is greater than my hate.” The great majority of women in nonperformance areas of work indicate they like theatre, although not as many say they like or love working in theatre. Since the responses to the art form and work are framed in emotional language, it is important to interrogate the paradigm of social power and control in theatre. Traditional gender roles have demanded that women remain obligated to social/familial commitments without expecting recognition for their effort or hard work. Are women being expected to duplicate these patterns of behaviour for the sake of theatre as an art form, while they themselves believe that if they work harder than men they can achieve the same recognition as men? Certainly “bloody hard work” by itself is not going to bring about the recognition of women’s ability, and may in the end only serve to reinforce the entrenched misconceptions of women as always capable of doing the hard work but not being the creative geniuses. Women need to speak loudly about their own creative talent for their work and widely acclaim other women for their creative abilities and promise. Peta Tait is a playwright and lecturer in drama at the School of Arts, St George Campus, University of New South Wales. She is author of Original Women’s Theatre and Converging Realities! Feminism in Australian Theatre. The report on this research study into women in nontraditional areas of work is Women Behind Scenes.

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Mother Tongue: Colonized Bodies and Performing Cultures Susan Bennett

This essays presents and reads Mother Tongue, a theatre and performance work by Calgary-based writers/performers Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Alexandria Patience. Mother Tongue explores the history and genealogy of the two women and the implications of this for their participation in contemporary Canada. Patience, who emigrated to Canada from Scotland, and L’Hirondelle, a Metis woman born in northern Alberta, map the similarities and differences of their particular experiences and ask their audiences to engage with questions of racial identity and cultural pluralism. Bennett reads this work in the context of a federally and provincially promoted “Canadian multiculturalism” and suggests that Mother Tongue both points to the dangers of government-envisioned multiculturalism and to the possibility of less fixed notions of cultural diversity. KEY WORDS Canadian culture multiculturalism identity theatre and performance the beginning: language, a living body we enter at birth, sustains and contains us. it does not stand in place of anything else, it does not replace the bodies around us. placental, our flat land, our sea, it is both place (where we are situated) and body (that contains us), that body of language we speak, our mothertongue. it bears us as we are born in it, into cognition (Marlatt, 1984) place (where we are situated)1 Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The spring of 1992. Maenad, the city’s first and only women’s theatre collective, presents as the final show of its third season at the Pumphouse Theatre, Mother Tongue, announced as collaborative theatre and performance art created and performed by Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Alexandria Patience. Concurrent with the three-week theatre run, Mother Tongue is also “an exhibition of artifacts from the process of its creation. Assemblage, video and found objects, among others, will be on exhibit at TRUCK: an artist-run centre” (from the programme). Two weeks after the theatre run has closed, Mother Tongue reemerges as performance art (cutting loose its label of “collaborative theatre”) at TRUCK. This performance version plays only once, on a Saturday afternoon.

1

I am grateful to Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Alexandria Patience for their willingness to talk about their work with me and for the provision of photo documentation.

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Figure 1 Alexandria Patience and Cheryl L’Hirondelle Mother Tongue at the Pumphouse Theatre Photograph by David Scollard.

Mother Tongue is inspired by the autobiographies of the two writers/performers. L’Hirondelle was born in northern Alberta; she is Métis. Patience grew up in Scotland and emigrated to Canada some fifteen years ago. Their co-creation of the multiform Mother Tongue facilitates a reading of their “mothertongues,” but it is a reading which is always in tension with notions of self and nationality. Elsewhere L’Hirondelle has written: “Being Métis, the difficult thing I find is working against becoming somebody’s archaelogical dig. People want the goods, the gems. My heritage is Cree, Iroquois, Saulteaux, German, Polish and French and Scottish, but I’m a Métis woman. Yet I have to tell the entire history”.2 And, for Patience, there is the task of giving voice and image to Scotland, for British history has long been an English-conceived and owned history. In Mother Tongue, Patience positions her own exile on a continuum of Scottish emigration, a journey that has been undertaken both willingly and unwillingly by Scottish people from the earliest European settlement of what was to be constructed as “Canada”:

Alex: Cheryl

The country is darkened by the smoke of the burnings and in one year 54 emigrant ships sailed from the western sea lochs. (as Countess of Sutherland): Some of our people are wantonly leaving the Highlands for the western hemisphere when recruits for our standing army and

2 This is taken from “Vision of Community: Native Women Making Theatre” by Amethyst First Rider, L’Hirondelle and Robin Melting Tallow. This piece will be included in the forthcoming Feminists, Theatres, Social Change, edited by myself, Tracy C.Davis and Kathleen Foreman.

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Alex:

Cheryl:

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militia are hard to find. In one year, 58,000 people have left Britain for Canada alone. The cost of the voyage is high and the ships are crowded and so rotten that we are able to pick away its timbers with our finger nails. Surviving smallpox, dysentery, cholera. Finally there is no food, no water; only deaths and the promise of this magical tree we will find in Nova Scotia… …that will supply fuel, soap and sugar. Magical maple.3

Magical maple, the emblem of Canada borne on its national flag. Yet for Mother Tongue the performance site of Canada inscribes cultural difference which was historically outlawed in favour of nation, itself a concept and practice created and dispensed by the same colonial powers which erased the speaking of Gaelic in nineteenth-century Scotland and (still) the right of the Scottish people to self-government. Simultaneous with the inscribed past, this site is the contemporary nation which supposes post-colonial status and which has in more recent years concerned itself with a redefinition of the nation as a more inclusive and equitable “Canada.” Indeed, contemporary Canadian culture, particularly as advertised and promoted by the federal and provincial governments, prides itself on a commitment to multiculturalism. In fact this “multiculturalism” is a crucial agent in its contemporary self-definition: unlike its more powerful neighbour to the south, Canada does not apparently demand homogeneity of its population but asks instead that all Canadians celebrate their own and others’ cultural diversity. Yet we must remember the dangers Graham Huggan points to in an “unconsidered multiculturalism (mis)appropriated for the purposes of enforced assimilation rather than for promulgation of cultural diversity (1989; 127). With that in mind, it seems peculiarly Canadian to parade the multicultural ideal with such zeal (and, frankly, with substantial funding), but I account for this as surely part of a global trend which is fascinated with the cultural production of the “other.” Trinh Minh-Ha reminds us: Things often look as though they have radically changed; whereas they have just taken on opposite appearances, as they so often do, to shuffle the cards and set people on a side track. The move from obnoxious exteriority to obtrusive interiority, the race for the so-called hidden values of a person or a culture, has given rise to a form of legitimized (but unacknowledged as such) voyeurism and subtle arrogance—namely, the pretence to see into or to own the others’ minds, whose knowledge these others cannot, supposedly, have themselves; and the need to define, hence confine, providing them thereby with a standard of self-evaluation on which they necessarily depend (1991; 66). In their creation of Mother Tongue, L’Hirondelle and Patience challenge the hegemonic practice of “obtrusive interiority” and (re)claim ownership of the complex of body, place and language. Moveover, the self-consciously different forms of Mother Tongue challenge the evaluative and restrictive categories of

3 The Mother Tongue script (as performed at the Pumphouse Theatre) is available through the Alberta Playwrights Network or from L’Hirondelle and Patience, c/o Maenad Productions, Box 4642, Station C, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2T 5P1 All quotations are taken from that text. This excerpt is an adaptation of correspondence between the Countess of Sutherland and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Further background may be useful: the infamous Sutherlands, powerful landowners of three-quarters of a million acres of Scotland, cleared tenants and their subsistence farms in favour of the more profitable sheep. Moreover, the speaking of Gaelic was outlawed in favour of the

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specific art forms (theatre, performance, art) as they are used to define and contain the “others” of multiculturalism (for multiculturalism is ultimately always about the mainstream’s Other). Through an exploration of body, place and language as constituted by Mother Tongue, I hope here to explore the questions the performers ask of the possibilities of nation and self as well as the spaces open to them as (Canadian) women giving voice to their own stories. that body of language we speak Both L’Hirondelle and Patience interrogate language in Mother Tongue through personal narratives and oral histories specific to their own cultural experience. It is immediately telling that Patience seems to own a larger repertoire. Always marginalized and little known outside its own geographic boundaries,4 Scottish culture has an extensive history of production and celebration in resistance to a London-generated homogeneity. Patience recounts the local legends and family history of her hometown “at present called Fraserburgh” (because here, as elsewhere, the naming of territory has been the prerogative of the colonizer). For L’Hirondelle, the Métis heritage is altogether more difficult to know: I had no choice. My parents left it up to us kids, “do what you want, be who you want.” Although they gave me the option, the choice, I had none. I was trying to sleep one night and a woman came to me. She was wearing a dress, much like the one I’m wearing, only blue, and she very sharply told me she wanted “strawberries, I want strawberries!” and so, in my sleepy stupor, I got her some. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t strawberry season, and that I had none in my fridge, as it is of no consequence that I was alone in my apartment. I got her strawberries! She started visiting me more and more often, always demanding strawberries as she arrived. And the more I saw her, the more I realised she looked familiar, like she was related to me. A cross between my Aunties: Teresa, Celeste and Dolores. As time passed, she not only demanded strawberries, but began to tell me things to remember: lesson, remedies, sayings and secrets about life in general and my body in particular. I had no choice with this woman, I couldn’t shake her, nor did I try. “Choice” is often at stake in Mother Tongue. Patience introduces one of her stories “[t]here are as many slight variations on this story as there are families in that town because, as with any spoken story the teller focuses on what they want telling.” The unstable oral history is a “tactical strategy in the decolonizing process” (Katrak; 1989, 173), but it is not a strategy that has been (or, yet, is) always available. At one startling moment in Mother Tongue, L’Hirondelle tapes over her mouth with a large “X,” a physical representation of the denial of sanction by “Canada” to tell her story except perhaps at those prescribed moments when she becomes the object of someone’s dig, of someone’s “obtrusive interiority.” Slight variations in the telling of a tale are repositioned as a site of luxury and L’Hirondelle’s body signifies its Other, a mainstream culture that outlaws her story; she is silent/silenced. We recognize why her stories are

King’s English. This early nineteenth-history was reclaimed in dramatic form for British audiences in 7:84 (Scotland)’s The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil. Originally produced in 1973, Methuen (London) published “the definitive edition” of the play in 1991. It was also produced on BBC television in the “Play for Today” series. 4 Patience tells in the theatre verion of Mother Tongue of her search for and final discovery of a National Geographic issue on Scotland as a sort of definitive recognition that the country does, indeed, have its own, distinct culture.

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harder to tell. In place of giving voice, she passes to each audience member a small piece of paper. On each is written: In the words of Carl Jung, the psychologist, the Métis “were a question mark addressed to the world” and because they were prevented from communicating their answer, they have been dependent on the world’s answer (Redbird 1980, 5–6). If Patience has more access to her stories, she nonetheless confronts an unstable language in which they could be told: My great-grandmother. Shetland Islands. Gaelic speaker. Crofter Fisher. My grandmother. Shetland Islands. Gaelic speaker. Crofter Fisher. My grannie. The Black Isle. Avochie speaker. Fisher. My mother. Brocher. Doric speaker. Fisher. She reads self as a shifting identity, dependent on community and on the ability to effect translation. She tells of the conflict as a child in speaking Doric with her family and English with her friends—and her constant sensitivity to one community’s conception of the other. And Canada as site of performance does not resolve the language tension; she has (again) to learn the English language: Canadian voice. [Take the mirror out of the case and look at yourself.] Mirror. Mirror. Mear-ror. Mear-or. Mearr. Mear. I look at myself in the mear. “Mirror” with a Canadian accent sounds as “mear” and it is a notoriously effective way of separating the immigrant English-speaker from the Canadian born. But it is an obviously pointed choice of example. Patience sees herself (her self) as she translates through language to another identity: the Scot made English made Canadian, but who, asks Mother Tongue, can that be? The most loaded, both literally and metaphorically, of Mother Tongue’s props are the barrage of suitcases, bags and boxes used on stage. They constitute obviously and somewhat wryly the performers’ cultural baggage. Their contents, along with projected images (primarily family photographs which are also displayed in the theatre foyer), refer to the women’s genealogy. As such they literalize what Michel Foucault has identified as a mode of resistance: “Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body” (1977; 148, my emphasis). In this way the artefacts of past function to recover the past for the present in these two women’s lives. The theatre version of Mother Tongue is, indeed, an enactment of that genealogy and it is an event which encourages audience knowledge and participation. Spectators are allowed an “interiority” but one that is controlled by the performers and dependent on our (performers and audience) agreement to community. That, in short, is the territory at stake. At the opening of the show, spectators are brought into the theatre from outside by a piper; at the intermission they are led through the backstage area by the performers to the foyer where tea awaits all; at the end of the show, spectators join performers outside where they build and light a fire. The programme charges the audience member to “join us at the end of the performance in a gathering/ Ceilidh. Your participation is important to us.” This is not an entirely unproblematic offer of community. At moments in

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Figure 2 Alexandria Patience and Cheryl L’Hirondelle Mother Tongue at the Pumphouse Theatre Photograph by David Scollard.

performance, when the security of stage-auditorium separation is transgressed, spectators are jolted into responsibility for the construction of identity positions. L’Hirondelle asks, for example: “I am Métis; who are you?” We are reminded, too, of the oppression of the Métis in their own country, Canada, and our complicity in “history’s” failure to acknowledge their crucial role in the forming of nation. But, for the most part, stories are shared, as are points of connection and of difference to the performers, and this is finally a literal co-creation as all mingle around the fire at the end of the evening. If we compare the stories of L’Hirondelle and Patience and then compare with our own, the effect is to explode dualities of identity (Canadian/non-Canadian; white/non-white) into multiple fragments of complexity and richness. The focus of our celebration is a heterogeneity which no longer relies on a mainstream/Other regime for its existence. body (that contains us) In the later “performance” version of Mother Tongue, at TRUCK, the dynamic is very different. The dislocation of theatrical codes and the back-channelling of language in preference of “performance art” establishes another mode of engagement. Here the primary and privileged signifier is precisely the “foreign” body. As Johannes Birringer recently puts it, As a form of cultural production, the textlessness of performance art generally shifts critical attention toward the visual, or toward the perceived relationship between body, space, sound, light and objects. This attention to the visual construction of the performances, and the functional relationships between

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Figure 3 Alexandria Patience and Cheryl L’Hirondelle in front of a photography of L’Hirondelle’s grandmother, Rose Delima L’Hirondelle Photograph by David Scollard.

the manipulation or display of the body, and the manipulation of space, must be considered crucial in terms of the historical trajectory of performance art (1991; 221). This trajectory is undoubtedly useful to the Mother Tongue project. In its theatre version, difference is, as I have suggested, articulated primarily through language encoded by patterns of speech. Patience tells her stories in Doric as well as English (Scottish-English, Canadian-English, King’s/Queen’s English); L’Hirondelle spoke of the problem of representing Métis in the world through a reference to urbanized Native Canadians as “apples”—red on the outside but white on the inside. She then asked the audience what kind of fruit a Métis—white on the outside, but red on the inside—might be, and in many ways this question bridges into the performance version. We are undoubtedly more aware of racial identities constructed out of visual apprehension but when the “foreign” body appears as white, spectatorial focalization is not as self-consciously troubled. The performance Mother Tongue foregrounds a cultural commodification of the female body and what Lenora Champagne has identified as the “under-the-skin experience of oppression.”5 The relationship of perception to prejudice and fear is at once signalled and reframed.

5 In her introduction to Out from Under: texts by women performance artists (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1990), she writes: “Beneath the powerful writing [of the performce artists] is the under-the-skin experience of oppression for being “other”—a Jew, a black, a lesbian, and always, a woman” (x).

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Upon entry to the large gallery space, the spectator confronts its division into many small and irregularly-shaped spaces by temporary walls and suspended sheets which extend to a height of 10 or 12 feet. The spectator is informed that s/he can choose any place from which to view the performance: exterior walls are “safe” and the ladders (some propped up against some of the fixed walls and others freestanding between particular spaces) may be used. When L’Hirondelle and Patience enter and move through the space, they are bound by a long rope. At times, they both occupy the same section of the gallery; at other times, they are in separate areas, the rope running underneath one of the dividing sheets. Their manipulation of space in this performance effects the kind of revision that Huggan names as specifically post-colonial:6 “[where] he or she acquires the freedom to engage in a series of ‘territorial disputes’ which implicitly or explicitly acknowledge the relativity of modes of spatial (and, by extension, cultural) perception” (1989; 128). In the configuration of territory in the TRUCK space, the viewer is immediately and always aware of the act of viewing. Visibility of the performers’ bodies may or may not be possible. The spectator must take responsibility to wait until the performer comes into view or to move to a different location. Those who chose to climb the ladders (and it was interesting that only male spectators had made this choice) had the ability to oversee all spaces and to utilize flashlights left atop of ladders to “shed light” on the performance. In either case, choice (here the prerogative of audience) explicitly confronts a spectatorial desire to fetishize and consume the performing body; the taking on of a “superior” viewing position is surely a particularly obvious marking of that voyeuristic pose. John Ellis (albeit in the context of the cinema spectator) notes that “[v]oyeurism implies the consent of the object watched, as well as…the complicity of an anonymous crowd” (1982; 88). Here, then, there might have been consent, but there was no community. The division into small spaces prevented the audience combining as a single group in the way that the theatre version both demanded and celebrated. This relationship was refashioned as complicity in the objectification of the performing body. Nonetheless, the recycling of images, properties and textual fragments of the theatre Mother Tongue reasserted the cultural specific context of the performers’ actions and reminded the audience of the hegemony of perceived “whiteness” as marker of cultural power. The suitcases and other baggage reappeared in the performance Mother Tongue and this time contained paint which the performers used first to map their bodies on the suspended sheets and then to paint themselves. These spatial and corporeal traces of self signified the necessarily persistent struggle they encounter in occupying cultural space. Moreover the reappearance of these particular props reminded those spectators who had aleady seen the theatre Mother Tongue that cultural baggage is not an optional extra; it must be carried everywhere and, as the spatial construction foregrounded, it occupies too much territory and necessarily limits the actions of its bearers. The second version of Mother Tongue, then, rewrites the contract of the first. We can celebrate our plural identity positions but we can only do so in recognition of the colonialism which is in our history and in our present. We are also asked to recognize our motivations in consuming the other as art and to question the production-reception logic of different representational strategies. Again Trinh Minh-Ha: The question is…not that of merely “correcting” the images whites have of non-whites, nor of reacting to the colonial territorial mind by simply reversing the situation and setting up an opposition that at best, will hold up a mirror to the Master’s activities and preoccupations…The question, rather, is that of tracking down and exposing the Voice of Power and Censorship whenever and in whichever

6

In his article, Huggan explores the map topos in Canadian and Australian post-colonial literature. Nonetheless the more literal mapping of both environment and body in Mother Tongue seems to me another manifestation of the “‘disidentification’ from the procedures of colonialism” that post-colonial cultural production attempts.

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side it appears. Essential difference allows those who rely on it to rest reassuringly on its gamut of fixed notions. Any mutation in identity, in essence, in regularity, and even in physical place poses a problem, if not a threat, in terms of classification and control. If you can’t locate the other, how are you to locate your-self? (1991, 72–3) Mother Tongue performs such mutations. The space the multiformed work creates is one where we can only be less fixed in our thinking about our own and others’ mothertongue. References Birringer, Johannes (1991). Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Ellis, John (1982). Visible Fictions London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul. Foucault, Michel (1977). Nietzche, Genealogy, History, language, counter-memory, practice, edited by Donald F.Bouchard. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Huggan, Graham (1989). Decolonizing the Map: Post-Colonialism, Post-Structuralism and the Cartographic Connection. ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 20 (4), 115–131. Katrak, Ketu H. (1989). Decolonizing Culture: Toward a Theory for Postcolonial Women’s Texts. Modern Fiction Studies 35 (1), 157–179. Marlatt, Daphne (1984). Musing with mothertongue. Touch to my Tongue. Edmonton: Longspoon Press. Minh-Ha, Trinh T. (1991). When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics. London: Routledge. Redbird, Duke (1980). We Are Métis. Willowdale, Ontario: Ontario Métis and Non-Status Indian Association.

SUSAN BENNETT is an Associate Professor in The Department of English at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (Routledge 1990), Shifting Shakespeare: (Dis)Articulating the Past as Contemporary Performance (Routledge 1995) and is currently co-editing a book on feminist theatre and social change.

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Women’s Theatre in Italy Susan Bassnett

KEY WORD: Archetype Traditionally, the greatest strength of the Italian theatre has never come from its playwrights. From the Renaissance onwards, there have been a few writers who have contributed plays to the Italian repertoire, writers such as Machiavelli, Bibbiena, Isabella Andreini, Goldoni, Alfieri, Pirandello, D’Annunzio, Ugo Betti and Dario Fo, but there is nothing comparable to the body of dramatic writing existing in most other European languages. There are a number of explanations as to why this should have been the case for so long, and why, in fact there is still so little playwriting in Italy today. Reducing those explanations to the lowest common denominator, what becomes apparent is that the history of the Italian theatre is both a history of improvisation, an anti-text theatre, and a history of music. In the Renaissance, the great Italian companies of players whose work was known throughout Europe worked not from lengthy, scripted plays but from sketchy scenarii, to which each actor would bring his or her own well developed stock in trade repertoire and playing conventions. The ability of Italian actors to improvise, a quality much admired abroad as well as at home, meant that greater status came to be attached to the actor’s capacity for unscripted playing than to the careful following of a predetermined text. The early manuals on acting give instructions on how to perform stock roles, on how to create particular characters and particular moods but without the mainstay of a written text. In the nineteenth century, when Italy was full of small local touring companies, the common complaint was that most of the literary talent and almost all the money available went into lyric opera. The principal theatre writers produced opera libretti, not plays, and when the great international touring companies began to travel extensively with stars such as Adelaide Ristori and Eleonora Duse, what was very apparent was the lack of a repertoire of native Italian plays. The need to extend the repertoire and to create a tradition of Italian drama inspired the ill-fated collaboration between Duse and Gabriele D’Annunzio, and some thirty years later it was also a principal motive behind Pirandello’s attempt to set up an Italian Art Theatre in 1925. Today the situation is not so very much different, despite the development of a number of excellent regional companies and the emergence of several internationally known directors (many of whom, however, still prefer to work in opera). There were no followers of Pirandello, and his plays did not inspire another generation to go on writing. The old system of the mattatore, the star actor around whom the rest of

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the company had to collect, often serving as little more than props, still lingers on and has by no means been eliminated, despite decades of effort and good intentions. What has happened, however, is that the Italian theatre has expanded to take on board another anti-text tradition, a development that has mainly taken place in the 1970s and 1980s. The impact of the Living Theatre and spin-off groups in the 1960s in Italy cannot be underestimated. Dozens of small theatre groups began to emerge in the period immediately following the student unrest of 1968, and when Eugenio Barba, founder of the seminal Odin Teatret and himself an Italian, coined the term ‘Third Theatre’ to describe the companies of players whose performance work and daily life are inextricably linked in a non-commerical relationship, nowhere else in Europe had that phenomenon taken so strong a hold. There are probably more experimental theatre centres in Italy today than in any other European country, and the number of alternative theatre festivals, street performances and impromptu theatrical events, is very large indeed. But what there is not, is a body of dramatic writing, and the new trend for Third Theatre groups has exacerbated the existing anti-text tradition, creating a new set of reasons for avoiding the playscript. With such a situation prevailing in the theatre overall, it is not therefore surprising that there should be very little in the way of playwriting by women. The Italian women’s movement, which emerged with great strength in the early 1970s, resulted in a wealth of writing and translating. Women’s centres were set up throughout Italy, women’s bookshops flourished, and in Rome, for a time in the mid-1970s there was a women’s theatre, La Maddalena, and a women’s newspaper. I have analysed at some length the growth of the Italian women’s movement (see S.Bassnett, Feminist Experiences: The Women’s Movement in Four Cultures, Allen and Unwin, 1986) and its particular characteristics, but what is clear is that the main body of writing by women has been in the field of prose fiction and theoretical works, not in drama. Indeed, it is probably true to say that most Italian feminists would think more readily of the names of English women playwrights, such as Caryl Churchill or Pam Gems, than of any Italian equivalents. Dacia Maraini has written plays, but is far better known for her novels and stories; Franca Rame, probably best known of all Italian women theatre practitioners internationally, has always been associated as the other half of the Dario Fo-Franca Rame team in Italy rather than as a playwright of separate standing. Moreover, much of the Fo-Rame work clearly derives from the improvisation tradition and the texts are often little more than scenarii for the two performers to use as a base from which to work in very precise political situations. The starting point for their work is always the context, and in this respect they may be seen as part of the tradition of agit-prop theatre. Some of Franca Rame’s one woman pieces and some of Dacia Maraini’s plays have been translated into English. In selecting a text for this journal, I therefore decided to bring to the attention of readers outside Italy a piece which is in many ways absolutely typical of the best of Italian women’s theatre work in the 1980s. Demeter Beneath the Sand is a two hander, which uses a series of archetypal characters to explore the culture of women and to relate the present day realities to female life to ancient myths. It relies heavily on the acting skills of the two performers, and is typically Italian in assuming that performers will indeed have considerable technical ability to augment the basic framework provided by the play itself. The work of the Milan based Teatro del Sole is well known and widely respected, and both Serena Sartori and Renata Coluccini are highly experienced performers. The play is inspired by a range of literary depictions of the five mythical protagonists, but the final script is the work of both player-writers. Susan Bassnett

Demeter Beneath the Sand written and performed by SERENA SARTORI and RENATA COLUCCINI of the TEATRO COOPERATIVO DEL SOLE

The play is performed by two women, S and R. Both use a sequence of gestures that become meaningful signs when related to the playing space and the elements of the performance. THE ELEMENTS are:

—Sand, as earth, as primordial element, as mother. Sand signifies time, born out of the erosion of the ages, like eternity. Sand because in many ancient traditons and religions (and sometimes in contemporary ones too) if the first born child was female she was buried alive “beneath the sand”. —Water, as original liquid, as amniotic fluid, as water of life, as the unconscious. —Blood, because it is linked to female nature, blood as childbirth, menstruation, wound, suicide and murder. THE COLOURS are: white, red, and black, the colours of the ancient myth of motherhood, the colours of the phases of the moon. COSTUMES: clothing is like a change of skin, a transformation: it enables one to enter into or be possessed by a character or a memory. The everyday characters wear neutral, timeless white, the mythical characters wear ancestral black. PROPS: all reminders of a female world—a rocking chair, a vase, a pair of scissors, a mirror, paint, fans, razor blades, washing hung around… MUSIC: the musicality of women’s voices; singing, weeping, laughter, screams and whispering. THE SPACE: the action takes place in a stylized room in Hades, the ancient Greek Hell. It is a woman’s room, full of sheets and washing. The two women have been condemned to “eternal Sunday afternoons”, where time hangs uselessly and feeling is almost blotted out. Their punishment compels them to relive fragmented memories, to reincarnate female archetypes, experiencing boredom, playfulness, affection and tragedy. Through great traumas and through trivia, the two souls try together to break the white world that forces them into an almost childlike state. And behind the whiteness, underneath the sand, they discover their roots, the link with memory which they experience in flashes. The words of these ‘memories’ are taken from classical and modern texts. THE CHARACTERS THAT RETURN TO LIFE are:

DEMETER: the Earth Mother, from the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Text written by Serena Sartori.

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PHAEDRA: the conversation with Hippolytus prior to his suicide. Based on Giannis Ritsos FOUR LITTLE POEMS and Marguerite Yourcenar’s FEUX. HECUBA: as she buries Polydorus, her last surviving son. Inspired by Aeschylus’ THE TROJAN WOMEN and Christa Wolf’s CASSANDRA. Text written by Serena Sartori. CLYTEMNESTRA: after she has killed Agammemnon, Clytemnestra addresses the Chorus. One Clytemnestra is an avenging mother, the other is a lover. Based on Aeschylus ORESTEIA and Marguerite Yourcenar’s FEUX. PENTHESILEA: the final clash between the Amazon and Achilles. Text by F.Von Kleist. Prologue White sheets are hung around to make a room. Old and new sheets are hanging alongside an assortment of women’s white clothes. There is one exit at the rear, on the left hand side. Sand on the floor. In one corner there is a neoclassic vase made of white plastic with a black and white radio resting on top of it. A white rocking chair is covered with a white embroidered blanket. In one front corner is a white teapot and two white cups. A figure is standing against the light, wrapped in a black mackintosh, holding a white rake in its hand. Silence. Female voices suddenly begin to whisper from the radio, and the figure in black begins to move, raking the sand slowly round. Memories are hidden in this sand. A second figure in black enters, with a wheelbarrow, which she pushes to the centre of the stage where she unloads more sand, spreads it around, then exits. She comes back, uncovers the rocking chair, exits again. The whispers grow into wails, then into shrieks and music. THE WHISPERING Here they are,…look at them…Just look at them…Here they are…those women VOICES with no memories in them…now they’ll have to remember our stories… They’re flitting from one memory to another, one to another, with their false pearls and frowsy feathers…Look at them…they’re coming…sand…sand… memories—dancing on the memories means dancing on the sand… The first figure has been raking the sand until she finishes her task, then she stretches out her hand towards the exit, takes hold of an arm and drags R. onto the stage. R. is dressed in white, more or less in evening dress, with white tennis shoes. R: looks round, sizes up the room, controls herself: the time has come! She moves to the exit, extending her hand and slowly pulls on S. also dressed in white. S. is wearing lace and frills, rather like an oriental doll, with white make-up. S. tries to turn back. She is stunned. The two women move slowly round, facing each other as though each were looking in a mirror. Then both stare out through space astonished by what they see. S. sits down on the rocking chair. R. turns off the radio and then starts to play upstage with a pearl necklace. The slow sound of the rocking chair and the rattle of the pearls assume a rhythm in time. S: is bored, she hums. R. is irritated, goes back to the radio, turns it on again. Loud music comes from the radio, completely unexpectedly, possibly a samba. S. continues to rock in the chair totally absorbed in her own thoughts, while R. is taken over by the new rhythm and begins to dance, slowly at first, them more

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wildly, as she forgets where she is and goes into a trance. Becoming possessed she falls down, gets up again. S. interrupts her by turning off the radio. Not yet, it’s too soon. Wait. You’re always in such a rush. Me, I wish time needed even more time, because I certainly do. When this wave of remembering starts I never want it to happen, and then when it stops I wish it didn’t have to end. But it goes on, starting and stopping, starting and stopping. You know, sometimes I think I haven’t actually chosen this time, these seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, centuries, thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, thousands of thousands of years, 7525, 7526, 3515 and so on… (stands quite still, suddenly, lifts her hands to her forehead, as though provoking someone in game) Nooo, I don’t want this, I don’t, and besides, you know I never guess right. (doesn’t move a muscle, she is trying to win the game telepathically) (giving in) 715? No…it’s between one and 10. 11…no, I mean, 10. Between 1 and 9. 8. 1 and 8. 3 3 and 8. 6. 3 and 6. 4. 4 and 6. FIVE! That’s right! Why five? Five because there were five of us in our family before father went blind. (As she says this, she folds the sheet that was covering the chairs. They look at each other, playfully.) There was my father, me, my sister, yes…her…and my two brothers who died. Shhhh! (They both look round as though they can hear voices and sounds in the air that are trying to stop them talking. R. continues. S. is gradually taken over by this memory, and as the other woman speaks she starts to undress, removing the childish white garment to reveal a long, tragic black gown. Her face, gestures, expression all change too. S. is becoming the Mother, her body relives the rape and loss of her daughter, Persephone. Mother and daughter, dual aspects of a single essential being, theirs is the first great female separation. ) I remember when we were young and we were playing one evening and someone in the heat of the dance had the idea that we should put on each other’s clothes, the boys should wear our clothes and we girls should wear theirs. I such a strange sense of fulfilment and peculiar freedom when I changed clothes…My mother’s dress. I remember that. It was a lovely yellow dress, my mother was

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wearing it yesterday, it had been left on a chair…all the light and silence in the room were gathered into that dress…My mother…my mother…my mother… My daughter (S. now transformed lives out the scene) My mother (moves to S.) My daughter. (as though she wants to push S. even deeper into her trance, make her touch bottom). When mother came home she found the house deserted, the doors were torn off their hinges, the windows hanging open, the clothes torn to shreds…and all…all was shrouded in silence… My daughter. My daughter. She’s my daughter! Give her back to me! (Shouting) My daughter, the other half to myself! The daughter I longed for, the daughter I loved, created by me. The daughter I was myself before I became mother! Stolen from me! My golden haired spring, the ripe corn of my harvest. I want her back! Now (Shouting) Gone! Stolen! Why? for some dark desire of violence, a hyacinth of deceit. Where are the divine laws now? I want to scream, but I cannot. Because losing you, I have lost the sound of my own voice, my mirror, my rainbow. My little girl, without you I can do nothing but claw at the ice that holds me back from your smile. Life of my death, death of my life, life of my death… (rocking herself, clutching her own pain, like a helpless child, while R. dresses her in white again, slowly, affection ately. Both women gradually return to their rhythmical gestures of daily boredom, one rocking in the chair, the other raking sand. Music. A time of emptiness. Small women’s things—S. finds some nail varnish hidden in the sand and starts to paint her nails. R. studies her skin carefully, then they play flirting games with fans made of feathers. Their gestures must be carefully timed and performed on a very small scale. ) (touching her face, muttering) I’ve stopped dying my hair, my face is full of wrinkles, deep wrinkles, lines around my eyes. There are hairs around my mouth. I no longer gaze into mirrors. It is as though another being were alive inside me, I no longer look into mirrors. (as though looking into a mirror, full of dreams and desires. She is trying to provoke R.) Tell me, tell me your desire, now. (reluctantly) Right now? Yes, now, right you. Your foremost desire. I…would like to love and be loved by a man close to me. What? Love and be loved by a man close to me. What about you? I would like to be somewhere, I don’t know where, I have no idea what it might be like, I only know I want to go there now. (irritated). I don’t understand a word of this. I want to go somewhere, but I don’t know where it is, I don’t even know how to get there, but I know the place exists and I know it’s wonderful and I want to go there right away. Now. I simply don’t understand how you can want to go somewhere when you don’t know what it’s like. You don’t know where it is.

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I don’t know what it’s like, but I do know it’s there, I know it’s there and I want to go and see it now, only I don’t know how to get to it. It’s a marvellous place… (more annoyed than ever, contradicting her in a loud voice). You know what you really want? You want everything made easy for you, beds of roses and silver spoons… I don’t want beds of roses at all. The grass is never greener on the other side of the fence. You said it. Oh, I said it, did I? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. No. No. I didn’t…ever since I was a little girl they always told me the grass was never greener in anyone else’s garden, but I didn’t care. All I wanted was grass to grow in my own garden, even though I didn’t have one, but I did have a balcony and a lot of flower pots and I used to look and see if anything special was growing out there. Did it? No. You see. I wanted beds of roses too. And silver spoons? Yes. Did you ever get any? No. (Pause. Boredom creeps in again. The two women swiftly change tack). Right. Let’s have a test. A test! Alright. (She puts on her white clothes again) But let’s not do the ‘are you good mothers’ one. No. Let’s do the ‘are you normal women, are you frigid or do you have a strong sex drive’ one. Who’s going to start? Mmmm…ink, pink, pen and ink…who made that dreadful stink. (she counts herself out) Right. You’re sitting on a fantastic beach, with a girl friend who just won’t leave because she never wants to leave and she can’t ever bring herself to leave. Then all of a sudden he appears. Amazingly handsome. He looks you right in the eyes and says ‘Kiss me here’ Here where? (The two women play with double meanings) Right here. Oh, I see…kisses right THERE. So what do you do? Do you: A) say no. B) tell your girl friend to turn round a minute. C) Agree right away. Not B…not C either…B…no, wait… B or C?

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C…C! No…B…no…it’ll have to be C. Yes, right, C. OK. A) You say no—you score 2836 points…you’re normal. B) Tell your girl friend to turn round a minute—you score 71 points…you’re frigid. C) You do it there and then—you score one point…you’re a tart. A tart? Me? (she laughs) Next question: you’re alone on a desert island. Then he arrives, and he’s magnificent, a superb specimen, much better looking than the other one was, with curly golden hair all damp with salt water, and a muscular chest and suntanned legs covered in fine golden hairs, and he’s all gleaming with sweat, he’s just been hunting or fishing, something or other, but he’s come back. He gazes into your eyes and then he says: “Woman, I’ve only got five minutes, just five minutes. Say you’ll be mine.” But there’s a problem—you’ve only got one big bed and there’s sand in it. What do you do? (Whilst S. goes on with her tale, becoming more and more caught up by the sensuality of it, R. finds a letter in the sand.) A) you waste some time and shake the sand out of the sheets; B) you go ahead and actually change the sheets; C) you just throw yourself into bed with him sand and all, into his arms and you roll around together until you lose yourselves in each other, until five minutes becomes eternity and eternity no more than five minutes and everything… (interrupting) I must speak to Hippolytus. What, now? Yes. I must. But why now? Leave him alone, he’s only fifteen years old. Nearly sixteen. Will you do my introduction? (She hands a letter to S.) (turns on the tape recorder from which there will shortly come an incessant croaking of frogs, and begins to read the letter which is written in large red handwriting. She turns to R). Her astonishment at the sight of Hippolytus is that of a voyager. She detests him, yet she is bringing him up. She is jealous of his arrows, or rather of his victims. She is drunk with the taste of impossibility. Faced with Hippolytus’ indifference, she does as the sun does when it clashes with crystal and becomes a spectrum. She no longer inhabits her own body except to inhabit her own hell. He owes her nothing but death. She is torn with unquenchable agonies. (with her back to the audience, finds an old severely cut black lace jacket under the sand. She undresses and puts it on. R is transformed, hardened, into Phaedra with a bitter expression. She takes a lipstick and a mirror out of the sand and plays with the reflected light for a minute. She catches the eyes of a member of the audience in the mirror, then begins her speech to Hippolytus, addressing that member of the audience. S. at stage rear listens, caught up in the memory. She lights a candle that she takes out of the sand. Everything Phaedra says must be marked somehow by S’s gestures) I have summoned you. I don’t know where to begin. I am waiting for night to fall, when the shadows will lengthen in the park and creep into the houses, and I shall hide my face and my hands and my words which are still unformed, still lingering…words which I do not know and which I fear…It was different in Athens, I felt at home there. You were still awkward then, so dreadfully shy and

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yet so very kind. Here you are the lord, with your dogs and your slaves and the statues of your gods. This house is full of your shadow. The house is a body, I touch it, it touches me, it throws itself upon me, especially when night comes. Flames from the torches lick at my thighs, they linger with subtle shuddering behind my left ear, they bite my nipples. Their saliva glistens, it burns me, restores me, brands me. I no longer know where to conceal myself. The house is a body, it is your body and yet it is also mine. I no longer know where to look. Faces, hands, hair, mirrors, walls are all spattered with blood. I am the sole thing on which the blood leaves no trace, because I am completely soaked in blood, within and without. (R paints her lips dark red, letting the lipstick slip down her neck onto her chest, tracing a line of blood) No, I cannot regret either you or my destiny. I cannot endure this pretence. I cannot endure these spring evenings. The vapours rise out of the earth, they condense, press upon you softly, flesh upon flesh. Can you hear the frogs down in the lake? They are half crazed, they too must know something. It is night already. Darkness has descended. I can no longer see your face. So much the better! In the shadows, I can guess at your contempt, your outrage. What a fool I am to remember this. Whoever suffered deeply knows the way to revenge. Night has come with such bitterness. Go now, go and wash away the dust and sweat from your hunting triumphs. Oh, yes tonight, like every night, I long to join you in your bathing, washing you with my own hands. If only you were aware of my hands…Go, go now, because I can no longer endure the outrage of your silence. Go, because faced with your coldness I must do as the sun does, when it clashes with crystal and becomes a spectrum. (R. collapses onto a chair and takes off her jacket) My confession is ended…I have thrown it at his feet. (playing ironically with the candle) Ghossstsss, murderssss, for ssssex, sssex, sssuicides, murdersss. Listen, don’t you think I pronounce my Ss well? Ess, ghost, sex, murders. Look, the flame is moving… (R. goes across to her, interrupts her with a savage slap. S. is stunned, touches her cheek, then takes off her jacket threateningly. R. and S. confront each other, aggressively at first, in a sequence of brutal, fighting movements. They pretend to shoot one another, then their aggression turns into a wild game, as they shriek and yell and make battle noises, throw handfuls of sand at each other in great clouds. S. starts to laugh while imitating the sound of a machine gun, A. lets out a piercing scream, falls to the ground and lies motionless. Silence. S. looks at her appalled, is overcome with guilt, covers her face with sand like a tragic mask. Then she takes R.’s body, lifts it up in her arms and looks towards the rear of the stage, answering an invisible questioner. The game has become a memory, the memory of Hecuba holding the dead body of her son Polydorus. (speaks in a harsh whisper) I? But how could I possibly have this absurd game? I, dead before my own death, burying the children to whom I gave birth, the men I loved. I, who know only how to weep and mourn, crying unheard words to the wind. How can I possibly prevent this cruel game? I, who am still afraid of the sound of my own voice, who does not know how to say that between killing and dying there is perhaps…perhaps…a third way…living…living.

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(Then she lays down the body and falls across it, exhausted. Silence. Slowly, R’s hand begins to move over S’s body, tickling her. S. tries to resist, then gradually comes out of the memory, until the two women start playing and laughing. They stop abruptly and sit motionless, bent forward, hands hiding their faces, whispering ): They’re coming? Can you hear them? No, nobody’s coming. I tell you they’re coming. No, they aren’t… They are, I can hear them. (She moves upstage, shouting) Get away, go on, get away! (interrupting her violently) No, not now! (crosses to front of stage, sits down. S. who seems to be coming out of a trance, slowly crosses to join her. S. sits down and rests her head on R’s shoulder. A few moments of empty tenderness ) Would you like a cup of tea? (looks knowingly at R. then at the teapot) Tea! Of course, tea! (The tea is poured with ritual gestures. Blood flows out of the teapot into the two cups, filling them to the brim. R. puts her cup down on the sand. Suddenly, the two women both start to get ready for a meeting with a lover. S. sits in the rocking chair, R. sits beside her. S. dips her fingers in the cup and paints her face with the blood-red liquid. R. puts on one black stocking, then another, which is laddered, so she takes if off again. ) No what? No, let me do it. (turns round, slaps S’s leg) You? Not a chance, I’ll do it myself. I’ll do it, because I know, I feel it. I feel it too. …and don’t touch me, it gets on my nerves. (The argument intensifies, to the point where the two women literally have hold of one another by the hair. Then they abruptly break off the fight and each falls back into her own train of thought. R. moves further away, sits down near the radio and starts to cut up a man’s jacket with a pair of scissors. S. shaves her legs with a razor. A shudder runs through them both, their bodies change. ) This is my husband. (S. studies the razor, muttering. Both women are remember ing Clytmnestra. When they speak, their words mesh together into a single whole comprising two separate experiences ) I killed him. They talked about rivers of blood, but in fact he hardly bled at all. I bled more than that when I brought son into the world ( throws the jacket to S. ) I killed him, I struck him twice. He uttered two groans as he died. (to the audience) Now you condemm me to be hated by the citizens, despised by all the people. You condemn me!…

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If I’d had the courage, I would have killed myself before he came back, so that I would not have to see in his eyes the disappointment of finding my beauty gone. He came back, he barely glanced at me, but he was still beautiful, like a bull instead of like a god. You condemn me, and you can find nothing to say against him, the man who sacrificed his own daughter before he went away, sacrificed her like lamb. His daughter! Ahh! She was my daughter! Beloved, painful fruit of my womb! My daughter! And for what! For a wind from Thracia to help him to his war! ( throws the razor away from her ) A sort of gigantic idol, consumed by the caresses of Eastern women, spattered with mud from the trenches. There isn’t a woman among you who wouldn’t have dreamed of taking my place just for one night! Me! You condemn me! You’re a cruel judge if you only consider the blows I struck and what I did and forget the part he played. I wanted to force him to look me in the face at least in the moment of his death. Look me in the face. (shrieks) A-a-ga-memnon! (R. throws the cup of blood against the sheet at the rear of the stage. The scream and the gesture are so violent that both women remain stunned, silenced, immobile for a few seconds, as the red stain spreads across the sheet. Then S. begins to swat invisible insects in the air. She hits herself, harder. R. does the same, ) Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Look! Look how many there are. The place is alive with them. Ah! There are still thousands of the things. Did you notice, they’re all trying to die near you, no, wait, the ones dying near you are the males and the ones near me are the females, the mothers. (ironically) How can you tell if they’re mothers? Look at them. Their bellies are full of blood on which to feed their young. (As she says this, she starts provocatively to sing a lullaby, miming the movements of a pregnant woman. R. goes over to the vase, moves the radio, bends down, puts her hands in the water then wets her face, arms and hair. Then she crosses to the chair, combing her hair with her hands. Her rhythms create the sense of a sacrificial rite that is about to begin with the singing of the lullaby. Behind her, S. covers her face and body with a black shawl and crosses to stage centre, singing all the time. She slowly pulls out (gives birth to?) a naked, white doll from beneath the shawl, and places it on the sand. She caresses it, still shrouded in the shawl. The radio gives a sudden burst of sound, female voices screaming. The lullaby breaks off in a violent gesture. This is the moment of Medea killing her children. S. carries out her ritual action, then despairs, tears at herself, buries the child, reaches out for understanding of the horror of what she has done, performs a dance of life and death. Her hands and gestures speak for her. Her face is still covered by the shawl. The voices recede, all that can be heard is a weak cry coming from R., whose mouth is stained with blood. S. lets the shawl drop slowly, looks at her in puzzlement, then makes a strange sound; the two women start

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another game, using funny voices. The topic of conver sation is the making of a cake, a ‘chocolate log’. This should be a lively game, full of double meanings, like two little girls playing on a Sunday afternoon.) What do we need? Let’s see…Is there any flour? There you are! (throws sand onto the shawl on the ground) Sugar? There you are! Milk? Here it is. Powdered milk! Chocolate? No…We don’t have any chocolate. No chocolate? It’ll be a pretty revolting chocolate log then. But I’m really hungry. (offended) Then eat. I’m hungry… (shouting) Eat… (A shudder again passed through them, breaking into the game. Eating evokes memories. R. goes into another dark trance. She takes an X-ray plate from the sand, her voice rattling in her throat. S. undresses her down to her slip, then holds the X-ray plate against her. It is like a suit of armour that exposes her heart and her bones, a symbol of absolute nakedness. This is Penthesilea, the woman warrior who, in her search for absolute love and absolute freedom underwent a macabre rite and ate the body of her beloved, Achilles. R’s voice cracks into raucous whispers, the fragments of her confession seem to be dragged out of her. S. cowers down, appalled, and tries to hide) I…I…Achilles. I…I, Penthesilea, I who from henceforth will no longer have a name, I went forward to meet the young man who loved me and whom I loved, I hurried in the passion of my youthful feelings, with the horror of battle and the burning desire to possess him. I came, and with my bow in my hand and all the strength of madness, I pulled back the bow until the two ends met and let fly. My arrow struck him in the neck. The wretched man fell, with my long arrow sticking through his throat. He staggered up choking, and fell again, he pulled himself up once more and fled. But I was already calling to my hounds, and the whole pack fell upon him, they fell upon him as though he were a bitch in the heart of the pack, and one tore at his throat and another tore at his chest. And he, drenched in his own blood, touched my sweet face and said: “Penthesilea, my bride, why have you done this to me? This is not the day of feasting you promised me.” But I had torn off his breastplate, and sunk my teeth into his white breast, competing with the hounds. His blood ran from my mouth and hands, and I kissed him to death. I kissed him to death (she collapses) (slowly, watching her). How many women there are who hang round their loved one’s neck and say they love him so much they could eat him. But then they realise they’ve had so much they can’t stomach any more. She was not like that. She did it literally.

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(after a long pause, gradually coming round, getting up again and starting to collect some of the things, trying to tidy up). Right, that’s it. It’s all over. Over? How can it be over? It’s too early. It’s over. All over and done with. (turns away, she is in a hurry now). (despairingly) No, look, it can’t be over. It isn’t over for me. (She rummages in the sand, picking up objects). It can’t be over, I’m still searching for it…It can’t be, I have to find it…I need to find it… (S. becomes increasingly upset at R’s determination. R. starts to leave, S. rushes over to the radio in the hope that she can be granted more time by the music. Sounds of hoarse women’s laughter come from the radio, which goes on and on, eventually driving S. off the stage once she has tidied up and set everything back in order, ready for it all to start again.) Susan Bassnett is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Centre for British and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. She has published extensively in theatre and women’s studies. Books in these areas include two studies of Luigi Pirandello (Macmillan, 1983; Methuen 1989), Magdalena: Women’s Experimental Theatre (Berg, 1989) and jointly with John Stokes and Michael Booth, The Actress in Her Time: Bernhardt, Terry, Duse (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Her most recent books are Shakespeare: The Elizabethan Plays (Macmillan, 1993), Comparative Literature: A critical introduction (Blackwell, 1993) and with Jennifer Lorch, Pirandello: Documents of the Theatre (Harwood Academic Publishers). She has translated plays, novels and poety from Italian, Spanish, French and Polish, and also writes poetry. Together with Tracy Davis, she is editor of the Routledge Theatre and Gender series.

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Index

A Dead Woman On Holiday 42 Any Woman Can 58 l’Amazone de la Revolution 16, 17, 20 Amazons 22 D’Annunzio G. 109 Antony & Cleopatra 5, 8, 13 Arts Council iii, 61

The Dark Room 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 86 Declaration of the Rights of Man 48 Death on Lesbos 60 Demeter Beneath the Sand 109, 112 Desire by Design 60 Drill Hall 60 Doogue G. 93 Dry Rot 53 Duse E. 109 The Dybbuk 41, 43

Barba E. 111 Baylis L. 2 Body Leaks 64, 67, 70 Brezhnev L. 78, 79 Brook P. 2 The Beauty Myth 9 Building A Life 80

Elles étaient citoyennes 16, 17, 19 Enragés 22 Erdman N. 80 Fabien M. 17–27 Final Solution 41 Des Françaises 16, 17, 25, 25 Frankenstein 61

‘Canada’ 103, 106, 106 Castledine A. 3 Le Chant de Retour 48–53 Channel Islands 41 Chekhov A. 81, 82, 83 Colombina’s Apartment 81 Christie A. 4 Churchill C. 12, 111 Cinderella, The Real True Story 60 Cinzano 81, 84, 85 Cleopatra 5 City Limits Magazine 2 Cixous H. 8, 29, 32, 33, 35, 37 Conference of Women Theatre Directors and Administrators iii, 3

Gay Sweatshop 58 Germany 41, 41 Glass Ceiling iii Goethe Institute 3 Ghandi M. 29–35 Gems P. 111 Gogol N. 80, 85 Goona, Goona 64 Her Aching Heart 60 Horniman A. 2 Hall P. 2 125

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L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge 29 Immortal Love 79 L’Indiade 32 Isolation Unit 85

Regional Arts Association iii Rame F. 111 Reveillon M. 17, 20–27 Ristori A. 109 Robespierre M. de 48 Royal Court Theatre 57

Kaut-Howson H. 3 Kantor (ian) T. 82 Kegger 64 Kelly J. 3 Klarsfeld S. 37

Sea of Forms 64 Songs of the Twentieth Century 79 Steinem G. 2 Shakespeare W. 4, 5, 8, 57 Shelley M. 61 Sound Fields: Are We Hear 61, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70 Sihanouk N. 29–35

Lang J. 4 Lepeu M. 17–27 London Arts Board 61 Littlewood J. 2, 53

Tale of Tales 80 Theresa 37, 40, 41, 42 Three Girls In Blue 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 86 Toubon J. 4

Mabou Mimes 65 Madonna 12, 12, 14, 15 Maraini D. 111 Métis 99 Mnouchkine A. 3, 29 Monroe M. 12 The Moscow Choir 80, 86 Mother Tongue 99, 103, 104, 104, 108 Music Lessons 83

Williamson J. 12 Woolf N. 9 Wooster Group 65

Jewish, Jews 40, 41, 41

Nabakov V. 85 National Endowment for the Arts 70 National Theatre 2, 2 Nazis 24, 25, 37 Nebraska Arts Council 70 Nietzche F. 51 Nuremberg Laws 37, 40 Nuremberg Trials 42 Observer newspaper 2 Ooh, Missus! 55, 58 Orange Tree Theatre 2 Oval House Theatre 60 The Overcoat 80 Portrait of Dora 29 Pirandello L. 109

Year Zero/L’Année Zero 42, 45

CONTEMPORARY THEATRE REVIEW AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL

Notes for contributors Submission of a paper will be taken to imply that it represents original work not previously published, that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere and that, if accepted for publication, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in any language, without the consent of editor and publisher. It is a condition of acceptance by the editor of a typescript for publication that the publisher automatically acquires the copyright of the typescript throughout the world. It will also be assumed that the author has obtained all necessary permissions to include in the paper items such as quotations, musical examples, figures, tables etc. Permissions should be paid for prior to submission. Typescripts. Papers should be submitted in triplicate to the Editors, Contemporary Theatre Review, c/o Harwood Academic Publishers, at: 5th Floor, Reading Bridge House Reading Bridge Approach Reading RG1 8PP UK

or PA 19047 USA

820 Town Center Drive Langhorne Tokyo 169

or

3–14–9, Okubo Shinjuku-ku Japan

Papers should be typed or word processed with double spacing on one side of good quality ISO A4 (212×297 mm) paper with a 3 cm left-hand margin. Papers are accepted only in English. Abstracts and Keywords. Each paper requires an abstract of 100–150 words summarizing the significant coverage and findings, presented on a separate sheet of paper. Abstracts should be followed by up to six key words or phrases which, between them, should indicate the subject matter of the paper. These will be used for indexing and data retrieval purposes. Figures. All figures (photographs, schema, charts, diagrams and graphs) should be numbered with consecutive arabic numerals, have descriptive captions and be mentioned in the text. Figures should be kept separate from the text but an approximate position for each should be indicated in the margin of the typescript. It is the author’s responsibility to obtain permission for any reproduction from other sources. Preparation: Line drawings must be of a high enough standard for direct reproduction; photocopies are not acceptable. They should be prepared in black (india) ink on white art paper, card or tracing paper, with all the lettering and symbols included. Computer-generated graphics of a similar high quality are also acceptable, as are good sharp photoprints (“glossies”). Computer print-outs must be completely legible. Photographs intended for halftone reproduction must be good glossy original prints of maximum contrast. Redrawing or retouching of unusable figures will be charged to authors.

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Size: Figures should be planned so that they reduce to 12 cm column width. The preferred width of line drawings is 24 cm, with capital lettering 4 mm high, for reduction by one-half. Photographs for halftone reproduction should be approximately twice the desired finished size. Captions: A list of figure captions, with the relevant figure numbers, should be typed on a separate sheet of paper and included with the typescript. Musical examples: Musical examples should be designated as “Figure 1” etc., and the recommendations above for preparation and sizing should be followed. Examples must be well prepared and of a high standard for reproduction, as they will not be redrawn or retouched by the printer. In the case of large scores, musical examples will have to be reduced in size and so some clarity will be lost. This should be borne in mind especially with orchestral scores. Notes are indicated by superior arabic numerals without parentheses. The text of the notes should be collected at the end of the paper. References are indicated in the text by the name and date system either “Recent work (Smith & Jones, 1987, Robinson, 1985, 1987)…” or “Recently Smith & Jones (1987)…” If a publication has more than three authors, list all names on the first occurrence; on subsequent occurrences use the first author’s name plus “et al.” Use an ampersand rather than “and” between the last two authors. If there is more than one publication by the same author(s) in the same year, distinguish by adding a, b, c etc. to both the text citation and the list of references (e.g. “Smith, 1986a”) References should be collected and typed in alphabetical order after the Notes and Acknowledgements sections (if these exist). Examples: Benedetti, J. (1988) Stanislavski , London: Methuen Granville-Barker, H. (1934) Shakespeare’s dramatic art. In A Companion to Shakespeare Studies , edited by H.Granville-Barker and G.B.Harrison, p. 84 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Johnston, D. (1970) Policy in theatre. Hibernia , 16 , 16

Proofs. Authors will receive page proofs (including figures) by air mail for correction and these must be returned as instructed within 48 hours of receipt. Please ensure that a full postal address is given on the first page of the typescript so that proofs are not delayed in the post. Authors’ alterations, other than those of a typographical nature, in excess of 10% of the original composition cost, will be charged to authors. Page Charges. There are no page charges to individuals or institutions.