Contemporary Women Playwrights

Into the 21st Century

Penny Farfan, Lesley Ferris

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137270795
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350316430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Breaking new ground in this century, this wide-ranging collection of essays is the first of its kind to address the work of contemporary international women playwrights. The book considers the work of established playwrights such as Caryl Churchill, Marie Clements, Lara Foot-Newton, Maria Irene Fornes, Sarah Kane, Lisa Kron, Young Jean Lee, Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks, Djanet Sears, Caridad Svich, and Judith Thompson, but it also foregrounds important plays by many emerging writers. Divided into three sections-Histories, Conflicts, and Genres-the book explores such topics as the feminist history play, solo performance, transcultural dramaturgies, the identity play, the gendered terrain of war, and eco-drama, and encompasses work from the United States, Canada, Latin America, Oceania, South Africa, Egypt, and the United Kingdom.

With contributions from leading international scholars and an introductory overview of the concerns and challenges facing women playwrights in this new century, Contemporary Women Playwrights explores the diversity and power of women's playwriting since 1990, highlighting key voices and examining crucial critical and theoretical developments within the field.

Part I

Histories

1 Feeling the Loss of Feminism: Sarah Kane’s Blasted and an Experiential Genealogy of Contemporary Women’s Playwriting

Elaine Aston

Introduction: feminist impressions/impressions of feminism

In 1977, Ann McFerran, theatre editor for Time Out magazine, published interviews with nine UK-based women playwrights under the heading “The Theatre’s (Somewhat) Angry Young Women.”¹ The “somewhat” signaled the possibility that the future was beginning to look a little brighter for women playwrights, as their work benefited from the “fashionable” moment of feminism and gained in cultural visibility. However, the expectation that this somewhat better future for women playwrights in the late 1970s and 1980s would herald the 1990s as the decade for women playwrights in British theatre was overturned by the emergence of a new wave of “angry young men,” Jez Butterworth, David Eldridge, Martin McDonagh, Antony Neilson, and Mark Ravenhill significant among them.

In 1997, exactly twenty years after McFerran’s interviews and reacting to the outcrop of young male angries in British theatre, Heidi Stephenson and Natasha Langridge published Rage and Reason, a series of interviews with twenty women playwrights.² The title of the collection gestured to the “rage” of women playwrights over the continuing gender inequalities of the theatre industry, making this one compelling “reason” for the collection. Designed to celebrate the “titanic achievements” of women playwrights in “broaden[ing] the agenda of British drama” despite the continuing gender inequalities of the profession, ³ Rage and Reason demonstrates that without paying particular attention to gender, women playwrights risk, yet again, becoming invisible. The achievements may be “titanic,” but they can so easily sink almost without a trace.

In the introduction to the interview collection, male directors are called to account for the 1990s gender gap. In response, Royal Court Theatre director Stephen Daldry suggested that women dramatists were not “capturing the zeitgeist of fashion,” and that “work within the context of feminism is unfashionable.”⁴ Equally, Mike Bradwell of the Bush Theatre pointed to how women playwrights were “battling a false perception that their work is ‘breast-beating, worthy or proselytising.’”⁵ Coming from the male directors of London’s two most prestigious new-writing venues, such observations highlight the risks to women playwrights of being branded as “unfashionable” feminists.

Beleaguered by this reductive horizon of gender and feminist expectation, women playwrights understandably were anxious not to be over-determined by the “woman” label. As the late Sarah Kane objected, “I have no responsibility as a woman writer because I don’t believe there’s such a thing.”⁶ That Kane rehearses her objection in Rage and Reason is significant for the ways in which it signals the tension between “belonging” in the book to a specialist, women-only category of writers, and resistance to the homogenizing impulse to be categorized as a “woman writer.”

While on the surface this tension might appear as a genealogical rupturing of a women’s playwriting tradition, looking back at the views of the “angry young women” playwrights of the 1970s proves that they too shared similar concerns about the effects of the gender label. “In the best of all possible worlds one wouldn’t be thought of as a male writer or a female writer but as a writer,” argued Cherry Potter. ⁷ “I think the phrase feminist writer is absolutely meaningless,” offered Pam Gems.⁸ A more cautiously optimistic Caryl Churchill owned the “feminist writer” identity, but she made a crucial distinction between “somebody who is a feminist using writing to advance that position” and her view that “what I feel is quite strongly a feminist position and that inevitably comes into what I write.”⁹ This distinction is important, because it draws attention to the difference between theatre that is “ism” or issue-based, and playwriting, such as Churchill’s, where feminist impressions are formed dramaturgically rather than polemically.

In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed reminds her readers that “[w]e need to remember the ‘press’ in an impression.” She explains that this is because “[i]t allows us to associate the experience of having an emotion with the very affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves its mark or trace. So not only do I have an impression of others, but they also leave me with an impression; they impress me, and impress upon me.”¹⁰ Picking up on Ahmed’s point, we might then think of the “impressions” feminism has left and how these affect work by subsequent generations of playwrights. These introductory remarks already have touched on some of the impressions feminism has made, from the writers in the 1970s whose remarks reflect that feminism did not “press” upon their work in equal measure, to Bradwell’s view of women playwrights “as battling a false perception [or impression]” of feminism as “breast-beating, worthy or proselytising.” To summarize: although women playwrights in the 1970s might have had mixed feelings about feminism, it generally had an enabling affect, creating unprecedented opportunities for women playwrights to get their work staged. By contrast, subsequent generations of women playwrights, as my earlier comments suggest, have to contend with a false impression of feminism as an unfashionable “ism.”

Since the 1970s years of the Women’s Liberation Movement, it is undoubtedly the case that feminism increasingly has failed to impress younger generations of women. The reasons for this are complex and variously include the demise of feminism as a political movement; feminism’s self-reflexive critiques of its failure to recognize differences in the category of “women”; the sociocultural backlash against feminism; and widely circulating ideas of postfeminism that unhelpfully foster an erroneous belief that feminism is redundant and over. The false impression that postfeminism has made on younger generations of women is one that concerns a number of feminist academics, including Angela McRobbie. In her most recent publication, The Aftermath of Feminism, McRobbie details her troubled feelings about what she identifies as a kind of “faux-feminism”: the sociocultural appropriation of feminism by media and popular culture that translates “words like ‘empowerment’ and ‘choice’... into a much more individualistic discourse.” In a worst-case scenario, McRobbie argues, this could result in “the demise of feminism, in such a way that it will never again rise from the ashes.”¹¹

Equally, the plays by women that I turn to here reflect a need to “press” upon audiences the damaging consequences of a postfeminist impression of feminism. However, because of the unfashionable perceptions of feminism as outlined in this introduction, I argue that from the mid-1990s to the present, attachments to feminism are not explicitly made by contemporary women dramatists, and neither do they advocate a “new” kind of feminism. Instead, their work lays claim to a renewal of feminism through the adoption of various dramaturgies and aesthetics that work affectively on audiences so that they might feel the loss of feminism, and all, as McRobbie’s fears suggest, that this loss might entail.

With this in mind, I offer a cross-generational mapping of Churchill’s short play This is a Chair (1997) and Kane’s debut play, Blasted (1995). Disinterring Blasted from a masculine cult of “in-yer-face-ism,” I move to propose a genealogy of contemporary women’s playwriting on the British stage that is characterized by an experiential drive to feeling the loss of feminism – an experiential drive, I propose, in Ahmed’s sense of meaning “the experience of having an emotion,” and of the affect that “leaves its mark or trace” or is impressed upon spectators as “bodily sensation, emotion and thought.”¹² As Kane observed of Blasted, “the form puts the audience through the material it presents.”¹³ To “put the audience” through the experiences of rape and war presented in Blasted is to make viscerally and emotionally charged connections to thinking about the damaging and dehumanizing consequences of sexual violence and epic warfare. Tracing this experiential drive through to millennial women’s playwriting, I arrive at politically angry debbie tucker green, whose theatre voices a savage critique of a world scarred by an acute lack of altruistic feeling for “others,” and I leave with brief reflections on the “titanic” efforts new women writers continue to make in order to claim a space on the British stage.

Political disidentifications: This is a Chair

The 1990s in Britain are commonly identified as a decade characterized by a loss of political certainty, as the years when political identities forged by attachments to socialism and feminism came undone. Nationally, years of Conservative government under the Iron Lady meant that Thatcherism had done its utmost to discredit socialism; internationally, the 1989 overthrow of communist rule in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 undermined the credibility and viability of socialist ideologies and regimes. At the same time, feminism, as deftly illustrated in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1982), was a casualty of Thatcher’s right-wing “superwoman” – the individual, materially successful woman privileged above any altruistic concern for women’s collective welfare – and of the international, transatlantic backlash against its women-centered ideologies.¹⁴ Heralding cultures of postmodernity and heavily invested in global capitalism, the 1990s, in brief, witnessed the dismantling of the “grand [political] narrative” that previously had woven together different sets of socially progressive interests – feminist interests included.

While there are any number of studies one might reference to evidence the 1990s disintegration of (feminist) political identities, I turn instead to a dramatic work that captures the 1990s zeitgeist of political disidentifications: Churchill’s poignant twenty-minute play This is a Chair, directed by Daldry and performed at the Duke of York Theatre in London shortly after New Labour’s 1997 victory. This is a Chair gestures to a political ideal – to an idea of society principled by freedom and equality¹⁵ – as a casualty of both the Conservative past and New Labour’s designs on selling socialism short by rebranding left-wing politics into a “Cool Britannia” future. The play is a series of eight scenes: snapshots of personal moments that have no obvious, explicit connection to one another. Equally, each of the scenes has its own Brechtian-styled political title, such as “The Labour Party’s Slide to the Right” or “The Northern Ireland Peace Process,” but none of the titles bears any relation to the personal moments that accompanied them. The directorial decision to have the action played in the auditorium, and to dislodge the audience from its traditional comfort zone of viewing by positioning it onstage, gestically figured the spectators as looking back at “themselves” as a politically disconnected “body.” At once a gesturing to the Brechtian landscape that had long informed Churchill’s socialist dramaturgy, This is a Chair also positions that political perspective as vanishing from view. Brecht’s critical distancing technique of “disillusioning”¹⁶ is turned on the spectator as a politically disinterested or disillusioned subject.

As Churchill reveals the divorce between the personal and the political and the dissolve of a Brechtian-inflected dramaturgy, she opens up the question of how to form attachments to political identities. Coming from the dramatist whose reputation for politicizing strategies of theatrical inventiveness is unsurpassed in modern British theatre, the question Churchill rehearses in This is a Chair is one that resonates for all playwrights concerned with what forms of theatre might serve to disillusion audiences of dehumanizing, self-serving interests that conspire against the possibility of making sociopolitical connections to “others.” Moreover, coming from the playwright who pioneered a feminist theatre culture in British theatre, Churchill’s question has a particular resonance for women’s playwriting that remains committed to what Janelle Reinelt has termed a “feminist residue from the Second Wave – serious issues [that] have been identified and are still present but... are ignored, pushed aside or simply denied.”¹⁷

In respect of a “feminist residue,” one scene in This is a Chair is particularly significant. It appears twice in the play and features a mother and father pressuring their daughter to eat. “Yes, eat up, Muriel” is the mother’s refrain that endorses the threatening, patriarchal insistence that the girl eat.¹⁸ The doubling of this tiny scene suggests a patriarchal haunting of the contemporary landscape. By showing the masculine “remains” as a threat to the girl reluctant to be nourished by “a special bite” from “daddy’s” plate,¹⁹ Churchill disillusions the spectator of a healthy feminine by gesturing to a disempowered feminine at the patriarchal table. McRobbie’s analysis of “post-feminist disorders” and of the “illegible rage” of young women still confined to the patriarchal table though without recourse to a feminist politics now lost to the postfeminist “illusion of positivity and progress”²⁰ affords a persuasive diagnosis of Muriel’s trouble. How are young women to cope with the patriarchal “leftovers,” given the loss of feminism? Churchill’s question is one that arguably underpins women’s playwriting by younger generations of women dramatists whose response, I maintain, is to offer an experiential, viscerally and emotionally charged articulation of feeling the loss of feminism.

Enter the experiential: feeling the loss of feminism and Blasted

All theatre, whatever form it takes, has designs on the experiential. Ideally, playwrights want audiences to feel involved in or a part of their plays. In British theatre during the 1990s, however, the experiential became a byword for “in-yer-face” theatre: the “shock fest” of violent, taboo-breaking drama by a new wave of angry young men, and just a handful of angry young women – most significantly Sarah Kane. Early feminist interest in Kane’s theatre was delayed arguably because of the way in which, as the “bad girl” of the British stage, she was grouped with the young male “angries,” and because of how, as I argued earlier, her position on the “woman writer” label was (mis)interpreted. Subsequent assessments and re-assessments of her theatre, my own included,²¹ have, however, paid more attention to the ways in which gender concerns are very much a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Histories
• Part II: Conflicts
• Part III: Genres
• Bibliography
• Index