Public Spheres After Socialism 9781841502120, 9781841502885, 184150212X

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Wyllie

Sex On Stage Gender and Sexuality in Post-War British Theatre By Andrew Wyllie

With its full treatment of this important aspect of British theatrical history and exploration of the intense relationship between theatre, gender politics and society, Sex on Stage will appeal to academics and students of drama, gender studies and cultural studies. Andrew Wyllie is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of the West of England.

ISBN 978-1-84150-203-8

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intellect / www.intellectbooks.com

S E X ON S TAG E

In the post-war period, theatre provided an important critique of the way in which British society engaged with issues of the politics of gender and sexuality. Sex on Stage examines how British playwrights brought gender politics, including women’s sexuality and gay and lesbian issues, to the cutting edge of drama after World War II. Through a close reading of playwrights such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Terence Rattigan, alongside accounts of their socio-political context and public reception, Andrew Wyllie reveals that this more progressive age was also one in which masculine anxieties and a consequent reaction were discernible.

Sex on Stage Gender and Sexuality in Post-War British Theatre

Sex on Stage Gender and Sexuality in Post-War British Theatre

Andrew Wyllie

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First Published in the UK in 2009 by Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2009 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2009 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover Design: Stereographic Copy Editor: Rhys Williams Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire ISBN 978-1-84150-212-0 EISBN 978-1-84150-288-5 Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

Contents

Acknowledgements

6

Chapter 1 Introduction

7

Chapter 2 The Emergence of the Female Canon

21

Chapter 3 Masculine Anxieties

51

Chapter 4 Gay and Lesbian Plays

83

Chapter 5 Gender and Farce: Ayckbourn and Orton

113

Conclusion Bibliography Index

143 147 155

Acknowledgements

For permission to reprint extracts from copyright material the author gratefully acknowledges the following: Casarotto Ramsay and Associates Limited for The Sport of My Mad Mother © Ann Jellicoe 1958 and 1964, Relatively Speaking © 1968 by Alan Ayckbourn, How the Other Half Loves © 1972 by Alan Ayckbourn, Just Between Ourselves © 1972 by Alan Ayckbourn, Plenty © David Hare 1978 (USA); Nick Hern Books Ltd for Lovesick and Schreber’s Nervous Illness by Caryl Churchill, in Churchill: Shorts, Coming Clean by Kevin Elyot in Elyot: Four Plays, and My Night With Reg by Kevin Elyot, The Deep Blue Sea, Separate Tables and Variation on a Theme by Terence Rattigan all published by Nick Hern Books Ltd, www.nickhernbooks.co.uk; Faber and Faber Ltd for Plenty © David Hare 1978 (UK), Timberlake Wertenbaker The Love of the Nightingale, The Grace of Mary Traverse, Our Country’s Good, Three Birds Alighting on a Field, and The Break of Day, John Osborne Look Back in Anger (UK), The Entertainer (UK), and Inadmissible Evidence (UK), Sharman MacDonald When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout, David Hare Plenty (UK), Alan Ayckbourn Woman in Mind, Man of the Moment, Wildest Dreams, Harold Pinter The Birthday Party (UK), The Homecoming (UK), The Lover (UK), Celebration (UK); in the USA the following used by permission of Grove/Atlantic Inc The Birthday Party © 1959, 1960, 1965 by Harold Pinter, The Homecoming © 1965, 1966, 1967 by H. Pinter Ltd, The Lover © 1963, 1964 by H. Pinter Ltd, Celebration © 1999 by Harold Pinter, Entertaining Mr Sloane © 1964 by Joe Orton, Loot © 1967 by Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw © 1969, 1976 by the Estate of Joe Orton; Gordon Dickerson for John Osborne Look Back in Anger (USA), The Entertainer (USA), and Inadmissible Evidence (USA); A & C Black for Maureen Duffy Rites (UK), Sandra Freeman Supporting Roles, Patrick Marber Dealer’s Choice and Closer, Phyllis Nagy Never Land, Joe Orton Entertaining Mr Sloane (UK), Loot (UK), What the Butler Saw (UK), Mark Ravenhill Some Explicit Polaroids, Philip Ridley The Pitchfork Disney and The Fastest Clock in the Universe; Simon Kane, Casarotto Ramsay and A & C Black for Sarah Kane Blasted and Cleansed; in the USA material from Rites © 1969 Maureen Duffy is reprinted by kind permission of Jonathan Clowes Ltd, London, on behalf of Maureen Duffy; Amber Lane Press for Steaming © 1981 by Nell Dunn and Another Country © 1982 by Julian Mitchell; Judy Daish Associates Limited and Oberon Books for Howard Barker The Castle, The Love of a Good Man and Ursula, Fear of the Estuary; Oberon Books for Pam Gems Queen Christina; The Agency (London) Ltd for Olwen Wymark The Gymnasium and Lunchtime Concert; Alan Brodie Representation Ltd for Noel Greig and Drew Griffiths As Time Goes By. Further reproduction of any of the above extracts may only be undertaken with proper authorization from the rights holders concerned. Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the author will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. I would like to thank my colleagues from the University of the West of England for their support and help in enabling me to get this book written, and especially Scott Fraser, Rebecca D’Monte and Pamela Karantonis of the Department of Culture Media and Drama and William Greenslade of the Department of English at UWE for the advice, time and energy that they provided.

1 Introduction

The post-war era is one in which gender and sexuality have been among the central preoccupations of British society, and the theatre has been at the forefront of bringing those preoccupations to the surface of the national consciousness and debating them. The nascence of a politically aware body of women playwrights has been both caused by, and has hugely furthered, the emergence of gender and sexuality as theatrical topics. Similarly, plays which demonstrate a positive attitude towards lesbian and gay sexualities have both been enabled by a changing societal outlook and have probably been an instrument in bringing about further change. In fact, in terms of cultural development, there have been few more significant nexuses in Britain over the past fifty years or so than that of gender and sexuality within the theatre. However, this nexus and its era may prove to have ended in the late 1990s or early 2000s as new theatrical concerns have come to the fore in the post-in-yer-face era. The personal has perhaps shifted from being the political back to being merely the personal as far as theatrical discussions of gender and sexuality are concerned. A related point is that the greatest vitality in British theatre in the early 2000s emerged from black writing, which has made its belated move to the centre of the innovative stage, and thus the perspective on gender and sexuality changed from that which had prevailed. This study is concerned primarily with plays first produced in the period 1950–2000. It may be helpful to begin with a discussion of one or two basic terms and an explanation of how they are used in what follows: ‘Drama’ is almost exclusively used to describe text-based work for live performance in the theatre. Brief discussion of one or two films is also included, as is passing reference to a couple of television shows, but live theatre is the principal focus. Almost all of what follows is based on text, including stage directions, with very occasional references to live performance values. Another point here is the evanescent nature of performance, which makes it necessary to rely on memory, or on a third party’s account, or to work from video, all of which present complications over and above those involved with working with texts. Performance interposes at least one layer of interpretation – that of the performer or director – between the ‘text’ and the reader.

8   | sex on stage

‘British’ in this context means first produced in Britain, regardless of the nationality of the playwright. The one or two plays discussed which were first produced in the US are indicated as such. Correspondingly, the dates quoted for plays are of the first British production; any deviation from this is made clear. ‘Post-war’ theoretically covers a period beginning in 1945 and ending on whatever date this is read. In practice, the earliest play that I have considered at any length is dated 1954, and I have considered few plays dating from later than 2000. My expectation had been that the significance of 1968 would compel the bulk of this study to be a consideration of material dated later than that (indeed, it seems a number of writers on the theatre have considered the post-war period to commence in 1968)1. In practice, however, the latent content of plays from the 1950s proved so rich that 1968 is, at best, a sort of hinge, with roughly equal attention given to material on either side of it. ‘Sexuality’ is a difficult term, discussed at some length both later in this chapter and elsewhere. While recognizing the inextricability of the link between sexuality and gender, I have mainly used the term where there is an indication of sexual attraction. It is not a term that has been considered solely in the context of sexual orientation – though that consideration is there, too – but more generally as a driver in people’s lives. ‘Gender’ is the most difficult term of all: ‘a much contested concept, as slippery as it is indispensable, but a site of unease rather than of agreement,’ as David Glover and Cora Kaplan have put it (Glover and Kaplan, 2000: ix). Where it is significant, I take the gender of a playwright to map directly on to their sex, as straightforwardly male or female. Gender and gender identity discussed in relation to individual plays, however, are much more complex than that: an initial consideration of that complexity follows later in this chapter. The words ‘politics’ and ‘political’ arise often, and are used in more than one sense. A political play may be one which is self-consciously and openly aimed at exposing or analyzing a state of affairs, and which has a clear intention as regards its effect on the audience. A less open agenda is often present, however, in plays whose effect may also be profoundly political: examples of plays whose politics are more or less covert occur on both the progressive and reactionary fronts. In an effort to avoid unwieldy phraseology, there are occasions throughout the book where the term ‘gender political’ is used to cover a conflation of attitudes towards sexuality and gender. The large majority of plays that I read and considered in researching this book were first produced in Britain between 1945 and 2001. The ones I have chosen to write about at any length are those which combine significant gender political content – latent or overt – with the dramatic force to put across that content. Both the significance of the content and the dramatic force of the play depend largely on the social context in which they were first produced. In most cases that relationship to cultural and critical forces is apparent from the degree of commentary to which the plays have been subject. A minority of the plays discussed, however, which are remarkable for their cultural critique or dramatic form, have attracted little attention

Introduction |   9

from commentators; the extent of their achievement is often illuminated by comparing them with their better known contemporaries. Turning now to the chapter headings used in the book – Chapter 2, The Emergence of the Female Canon, and Chapter 4, Gay and Lesbian Plays – are probably self-explanatory in this context. With Chapter 3 – Masculine Anxieties – the significance of the sexuality and gender political content of male-authored, non-gay plays was an obvious topic to explore as a counterpart to Chapters 2 and 4. In the case of Chapter 5 – Gender and Farce – farce was the factor which linked two men, Ayckbourn and Orton, each of whom called for such extensive analysis that neither would have fitted comfortably into either Chapter 3 or 4, where they would otherwise have belonged. This link through farce provided an opportunity to bring the matter of genre briefly within the purview of the book. Leaving aside the etymological connection between genre and gender, I do not think that any single genre is dominant in the field of gender and sexuality, since none seems to escape the presence of some significant gender political content, whether latent or overt. That said, two types of play in particular stand out: the first arises from the extent to which Brechtian techniques are in evidence in the polemical dramas of the 1970s. This phenomenon is characterized by Elaine Aston, for example, as ‘a tradition of British feminist theatrical practice and playwriting rooted originally in socialist/Marxist politics and the Brechtian style, and which subsequently…provided a political and aesthetic framework…for materialist feminist explorations of gender’ (Aston, 1995: 73). This adoption of the Brechtian style also transmigrated from feminist theatre to other polemical/radical theatre of the 1970s. The second exceptional type is farce: it is difficult to think of a farce that does not have sexual content. Among male playwrights, the contribution of Ayckbourn and Orton to the critique of social attitudes in Britain towards gender and sexuality has been of the first importance. Theory and Polemic A major exercise in the writing of the book has been to select and marshal historical and critical material so as to highlight and contextualize the content of the plays. This has involved consulting contemporary theatre reviews, and other contemporary newspaper reports, as indicators of the prevailing social climate within which they were first being produced. Some social history texts have also contributed to this process. In practice, however, the most substantial material on the interaction between social attitudes and plays in production has been provided by literary commentaries directed to single authors or works. The other major source of input has been more generalized literary theory, largely gay and feminist criticism over the past twenty years or so. In writing this book, it has not proved altogether possible to occupy a position of neutral objectivity. I attach values to the way in which different plays engage with gender and sexuality, and awareness of that results in value judgements becoming apparent throughout: I have not felt inhibited from endorsing plays that evoke positive politics in this area. However, despite claims that it is possible to simply opt for change in gender identity, the plays that most

10   | sex on stage

compellingly examine the question serve to underline the real practical difficulties involved in making the attempt, as is demonstrated by looking back at the history of theatre over millennia. The similarity in outlook between the quotidian male in one era and his latter-day counterpart might be taken to imply a failure on the part of theatrical and other cultural initiatives to resolve or make progress with the issue of masculine identity. Perhaps progress is made from time to time, and then a reaction sets in. It may be that gender identity is doomed always to recur as an issue; indeed, the human condition may have as one of its facets the need to wrestle with gender identity. Going further, on the cultural level this could be orthogonal with a sort of permanent revolution, which may be the necessary outcome of any attempt to grapple with the constraints imposed by concretized gender identities. That said, one factor that may be uniquely significant in post-war Britain is the presence of women playwrights. For all the doubts engendered by the apparent durability of patriarchal attitudes in the theatre hitherto, the presence of women writers means that the situation in post-war Britain is radically different from any that has prevailed before. At the very least, an additional strand now runs alongside the surviving patriarchal mainstream, a strand that broadly questions existing hegemonies. Although I am reluctant to pin my colours to any particular theoretical mast, it is the case that the outlook of this book has been informed by aspects of queer theory. Thus, it may be useful to briefly consider some of the implications of the term. As Stephen Seidman puts it, ‘queer theory has accrued multiple meanings, from a merely useful shorthand way to speak of all gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered experiences to a theoretical sensibility that pivots on transgression or permanent rebellion’, and ‘queer theory aspires to transform homosexual theory into a general social theory or one standpoint from which to analyze social dynamics’ (Seidman, 1996: 11–13). The multiplicity of meanings that Seidman refers to probably has its roots in the breadth of Teresa de Lauretis’s 1991 discussion. Lauretis has it that queer theory ‘conveys a double emphasis – on the conceptual and speculative work involved in discourse production, and on the necessary critical work of deconstructing our own discourses and their constructed silences’ (de Lauretis, 1991: iv). Both this deconstructive approach and Seidman’s notion of a general social theory provide a plausible way forward. Mining texts for references to lesbian and gay sexualities is all very well in its way, but as a critical procedure it is limiting. To explore multiple meanings of sexuality in a text offers considerably more scope for detecting the social dialectics of that text. An analogy with race may help here. In the reasonably recent past in Britain, it was widely acceptable to apply the term ‘coloured’ to non-white people. The implication, of course, was that the white population was colourless. The colourless majority thus became invisible to analytic method and critique. Similarly, if queer theory is taken to refer to a set of critical antennae pre-programmed to quiver only at lesbian and gay stimuli, then the assumed heterosexuality of the bulk of the population remains unquestioned. An even more serious problem emerges if considerations of gender are stirred into the mix. If only the gay, bisexual, transgendered and female are problematized, that leaves straight men free to conduct themselves as they wish, by virtue of their unproblematized invisibility-through-strength. And invisibility-through-strength allows for an increased strength-through-invisibility. In short, if the holders of power are immune from scrutiny, that seems to create a risk of patriarchy being allowed to bolster itself at the expense of its traditional victims. Expressed in perhaps slightly

Introduction |   11

paranoid terms, the disempowered must ensure that we know what the empowered minority are doing to us. Of course, it is not as simple as that, since everybody participates in at least one group which is above the bottom of the hierarchy – even if new priorities of self-pride have to be asserted in order to make this true of the tabloid press’s ‘disabled, black lesbian’ caricature. However, if straight white men have tended to rule the roost – as they clearly have – then they no doubt continue to possess more power than other groups. Thus they remain more in control and more dangerous than others, and the need to subject them to close examination is correspondingly greater. Ki Namaste describes an approach to queer theory which is usefully wide in its scope: ‘Poststructuralist queer theory analyzes the manner in which cultural texts privilege heterosexuality over other sexual identities.’2 A further ramification is provided by Joshua Gamson: ‘It is socially produced binaries (gay/straight, man/woman) that are the basis of oppression…Disrupting these categories, refusing rather than embracing ethnic minority status, is the key to liberation.’3 However, a significant body of lesbian and gay opinion, at least, is opposed to the loss implied by this refusal of identity, a point I deal with in Chapter 4. SueEllen Case makes the point that ‘queer theory, unlike lesbian theory or gay male theory, is not gender specific. In fact, like the term homosexual, “queer” foregrounds same-sex desire without designating which sex is desiring,’ and ‘striking at its very core, queer desire punctures the life/ death and generative/destructive bipolarities that enclose the heterosexist notion of being’ (Case, 1991b: 2, 4). On that basis, the attack that queer theory mounts on heterosexuality, by implication, extends to the whole of gender identity. The bind that queer theory may find itself in, however, is that the very useful expansion of its ambit from the confined pink space of lesbian and gay theory into the wider world also risks inflating the term to the point of meaninglessness. Deconstructing the silences of texts from a specifically gay or lesbian point of view is a lengthy and laborious enough task in itself. Include the total resistive potential of the new ambit of queer theory, so that the exercise embraces gender – and, in some interpretations, class and race4 – as well, and the task for the reader of each text becomes almost infinite. Nevertheless, the contextualizing of plays within a dynamic of social attitudes in which they themselves participate – the dialectics of stage and society – has helped to determine the aspects of particular plays at particular times that are most significant. By trying to identify where theatrical and social significance intersect, this book therefore attempts to present an analysis of those plays whose relationship with social attitudes has reached the most intense pitch. Dialectical Theatre Throughout its history, the theatre has been a contentious space – one in which society has aired its anxieties, calming them or fomenting crises, which have enabled progressive or reactionary alterations in the prevailing ideology to occur. Changes in cultural attitudes have affected the nature of the theatre, resulting in a continuing dialectical relationship between the theatre and the society in which it operates. The theatre has also been a gendered space, and a place in which gender conflict stages itself, consciously or unconsciously. As Hanna Scolnicov puts it: 

12   | sex on stage

the representation of the theatrical space within as the outdoors, the male space, lends itself naturally to a plot, the goal of which is man’s conquest of the house. Reversing the scene so that it represents the female indoors tends to change the drift of the action in the opposite direction, to woman’s struggle to sever her bonds and abandon the house. (Scolnicov, 1994: 8) Whatever is done with it, and whether indoors or outdoors, the theatre is essentially a public space, and is subject to masculine dominance. As a public arena, then, the stage has conventionally been a space in which male actors have performed under the aegis of male directors working with scripts written by male playwrights. Yet from Aeschylus to Arnold Wesker, the concerns dealt with on stage have not excluded gender. That is to say that, in exploring matters associated with their own identity, predominantly male playwrights and their characters have necessarily had to explore the nature of the other – the female. Michael Mangan makes the point: ‘[Hegemonic masculinity’s] characteristic tactic is [a] kind of definition-throughopposition, and the marking off and marginalizing of the “other”.’ (Mangan, 2003: 13) Since World War II, gender identity and relations constitute a central continuing preoccupation unparalleled in the history of the theatre. To a gender-aware reader, the latent or covert gendered content of plays across the millennia is now readily graspable. But, as I have indicated, that gender-awareness has only grown up over the past thirty or forty years. A more difficult matter is the dialectical relationship between the production of a theatre whose gender content is overt, and the production of a gender-aware reader/audience. In the writing of the post-war era, the process of turning material which had been latent in earlier plays into overt subject matter has been achieved by exploiting a number of stylistic vehicles – with Brechtian techniques and farce particularly prominent, as noted above. Another substantial change that has occurred over the past fifty years is the advent of the gender-aware female dramatist, a phenomenon whose influence on the gender political debate both inside and outside the theatre has been out of all proportion to the numbers involved. Although women’s writing for the stage has occurred in other eras, this is perhaps the first period in which overt gender political content has featured in the work of female playwrights. In fact, the percentage of plays staged in Britain which are written by women remains dismayingly small. Lynda Hart makes the point that ‘the latter half of the twentieth century has seen an emergence of women playwrights in numbers equal to the entire history of their dramatic foremothers’. (Hart, 1989: 2) Be that as it may, it remains the case that less than 20 per cent of plays produced in Britain are written by women, with fewer still in the commercial sector.5 The post-war period has been a time of great turmoil as regards gender identity and relations (though such times of turmoil recur periodically). Outstandingly great strides have been made over the past fifty years or so in ameliorating the most oppressive effects of a very longstanding patriarchal tradition. Certainly, a comparison between the 1950s and the 2000s shows a colossal shift in attitudes. In respect of feminism in the 1950s, Jean McCrindle observes: ‘I just don’t know why women were so absent, so silent – there was a pathological absence

Introduction |   13

of women, silencing of women, in those days.’6 That absence and silence came to be filled and shattered with the rise of feminism, the questioning of conventional gender roles and an almost riotous efflorescence of cultural – perhaps especially theatrical – output, which exposed patriarchy and celebrated challenges to its entrenched power. It is worth noting that in gender terms the masculine defence of the status quo began before the feminine assault on it. In taking Osborne’s Look Back in Anger as a significant misogynistic expression of threatened masculinity, there is a danger of putting the cart before the horse. As I discuss in Chapter 2, some plays by women staged in the early 1950s met with a degree of popular success. Given the relatively small number of these, however, the question remains why Osborne should react defensively against a threat which had not yet emerged. Indeed, why should feminism in Britain take so long to find a voice? Lynne Segal says that ‘gender and second-wave feminism were born together, at the close of the 1960s’ (Segal, 1999: 38). Not only does this serve as a reminder of the time-lag between the end of World War II and the outset of feminist debate, it is also an indicator that much of the theorization of gender relations had also taken a long time to emerge. Part of the reason for the delay may be that women had initially been compliant with the overriding political imperative of a return to a ‘normality’ in which women’s domain was the private, interior, domestic space. This process was complex, in that industrial employment of women remained markedly higher in the post-war than in the 1930s, with ‘the proportion of married women at work in the censuses of 1931 and 1951 – up from 10 to 21 per cent’ (Pugh, 1992: 283). But it is clear that a significant number of women who had been working in industry during the war returned to being housewives in the 1940s. It is reasonable to assume that they did so on terms rather different from those that had prevailed in the 1930s. Penny Summerfield provides accounts of women who were no longer satisfied with the traditional role of wife and mother after the wartime discovery of their true identities [and who] found new ways of life subsequently. Their ‘modern’ feminine style, based on companionate marriages and a combination of paid work and domesticity, was less secluded and confined than the traditional version. The curtains had been lifted on their lives, they had been let out of the cage. (Summerfield, 1998: 282) However, as Summerfield acknowledged in an earlier work, ‘the assumptions and ideologies of policy-makers and employers about women and work [moved] in the direction of the idea that women could combine paid and domestic work…without undermining the concept that their first responsibility was to their homes’ (Summerfield, 1989: 188). The expectations of such women, of ‘companionate marriage’ and a partnership approach, were evidently at odds with the expectations of the establishment, which saw women as willing to shoulder a double burden, as they had during the war; indeed, women were subjected to a barrage of propaganda aimed at ensuring that they formed a docile constituency. More subtly, the potential for the rise of women’s political consciousness may have been subdued by the consumerist ethos of the ‘never-

14   | sex on stage

had-it-so-good’ 1950s. Both of these factors might have contributed to the apparent absence of a collective feminist voice in the 1950s. Martin Pugh, though, observes a continuing feminist consciousness bubbling away under the surface, subdued by the propaganda of the day:  The conventional assumption that feminism was a spent force that petered out in a decade of conservatism and materialism, though not without empirical foundation, is a considerable exaggeration. The post-war backlash against feminism flourished through the 1950s, especially in the pages of the women’s magazines. (Pugh, 1992: 284) Clearly, the experience of working in industry and agriculture during the war years, and the new group identity that this engendered, transformed the outlook of many women who went through it. However, the very different ways in which World War II was experienced by women, on the one hand, and by men, on the other, would have militated against the expression of any very turbulent feminism in the immediate post-war era. For women had experienced the exhaustion and loss of war, without fully participating in the victory men had experienced. Martin Pugh cites evidence of this difference: ‘wartime surveys of morale showed women to be fairly consistently more dispirited and resigned than men’ (Pugh, 1992: 266). According to conventional wisdom, men were returning as heroes, ready to vote for a welfare-state paradise in pursuit of a brave new world. Women had gone through years of struggling to make ends meet in a wartime economy, holding families together while undergoing bombing, working a full week, and all the while enduring the fear of bereavement. Exhausted, many women understandably did not protest at the prospect of a return to a more normal, less stressful life. But the balance of power within the home had changed radically since the 1930s. Housewives of the late 1940s had been part of an industrial workforce, had come to realize their own ability to be a breadwinner, and had experienced the camaraderie of the workplace. The return to the domestic scene was clearly marked by those experiences. If this scenario does not assume a public articulation of feminine discontent, it does suggest a domestic atmosphere in which men began to feel that their former privileges were under threat. Furthermore, those post-war years were inflected by a general sense of disempowerment in society at large. The Labour victory of 1945 has often been attributed to the votes of returning soldiers, enthusiastic to establish a new society in which their voices would be heard. Instead, what they got was a welfare state that treated them as clients rather than participants. Lynne Segal describes a feeling among men in the 1950s of ‘the system trying to trap, tame and emasculate men,’ and men ‘turn[ing] their anger against the ideals of hearth and home… against women, against the powerful mother in the home…with all the hatred and resentment they felt towards what they called “the establishment”’ (Segal, 1988: 80). Indeed, the whole propaganda effort of the late 1940s to bring about an increased level of domesticity might be seen as an attempt to defuse the possibility of any real participatory socialism coming to the fore. The ideology of domesticity at its peak in the late 1940s and 1950s is discussed in Chapter 3. I suggest that these masculine anxieties, which were eventually given literary expression through the ‘angry young men’, had their roots in the presence of less biddable women at home – and now, to an increasing extent, in the workplace as well. Disillusion with

Introduction |   15

public policy was also a factor here, and may have had a gendered component, as indicated, say, by the derogatory use of the expression ‘the nanny state’, which was particularly prominent from the mid-1960s onwards. John Osborne was among the first to articulate a feeling that men were under threat from a source, which, in 1956, was only vestigially foreshadowed and which remained largely untheorized, even largely unarticulated, for several years thereafter. There is some irony in the idea that Osborne and the ‘angry young men’ may actually have been instrumental in showing the proto-feminists of the 1950s the possibilities of theatre in particular, and literature in general, as vehicles for the articulation of social discontent. Also, one might expect the stark misogyny of Look Back in Anger to provoke a dissenting feminist voice, though there is little sign of any such reaction at the time. Of the plays which succeeded it, written by women, Delaney’s A Taste of Honey and Jellicoe’s The Sport of My Mad Mother had a different genealogy and prompted a different set of responses, as I discuss in Chapter 2. In the case of the Jellicoe play, there may be a debt of sorts to Osborne, as suggested by Michelene Wandor,7 but the outcome is very different. In the end, by whatever route gender politics came first to be the subject of theatrical comment, its importance as a crucial theme of post-war drama became very clear over the period in question. Gender Politics in Post-War Britain While these changes have been occurring in the theatre, the past fifty years have also seen profound changes in the scope and nature of debates about gender. The publication of the English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in 1953 was a particularly significant event. For perhaps the first time in English, the notion of gender as a social construct was promoted, bringing the entire question of gender identity more into the public domain than previously. While the extent to which de Beauvoir’s book directly influenced writing for the theatre is unclear, it nonetheless opened up the terms of a debate in which theatre came to play a major role. Entwined with the discussion of gender was sexuality – a topic more and more openly debated in the theatre. This debate was partly a product of women’s consciousness-raising, a process which, arguably, had been catalyzed by the involvement of women in traditionally masculine areas of work during World War II. Increased awareness of the unfair constraints to which women’s lives were subject, naturally led to an attempt to reclaim female sexuality from patriarchal control. Moreover, this period witnessed the relatively level-headed, even sympathetic, discussion of homosexuality. Critical to the legitimization of homosexuality as a topic for debate was the formation in the mid-1950s of the Wolfenden Committee. In the theatre, male homosexuality moved from a sympathetic but covert treatment in Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables (1954), through a neutral but overt representation in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958), to a sympathetic and overt characterization in the 1960s. Issues around the reclamation of women’s sexuality and lesbian and gay rights have therefore been important recurring topics in post-war British drama, and are considered at various points

16   | sex on stage

in the chapters that follow. More fundamental aspects of sexuality, however, are intimately bound up with gender identity, with discussion of one tending to be subsumed within discussion of the other. ‘Without a concept of gender,’ says Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, ‘there could be…no concept of homo- or heterosexuality.’(Sedgwick, 1991: 30–1) Much the same point is made with tremendous polemical verve by Monique Wittig: ‘The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual always meant to refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or not,’ and ‘it is the class struggle between women and men which will abolish men and women. The concept of difference has nothing ontological about it. It is only the way that the masters interpret a historical situation of domination.’(Wittig, 1992: 13, 29) Gender and sexuality, then, are so bound together that one will always imply the other, to a greater or lesser extent; any attempt to draw a hard and fast distinction between the two is probably doomed to fail. A continuing theme in gender political discourse has been the performative nature of gender. From de Beauvoir’s comment that ‘one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman’ (de Beauvoir, 1972: 295), to Judith Butler’s reaffirmation that ‘gender is…an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts’ (Butler, 1988: 519–31), performativity versus gender essentialism has constituted an important feature in the landscape of the gender debate. It may well be that the ingrained effect of acculturation dooms us to role-play our gender identity without much possibility of challenging the nature of the role that we play. If we accept that the performative nature of gender does compel us to engage in role play, it may be that the theatre – the place of performance and role play – has a peculiarly acute function as a site for the critique of more everyday kinds of performance. For both women and men, acceptance of the need to avoid inflexible and constraining gender identities may also mean having to accept a state of permanent revolution. That is to say that breaking out of one stable gender identity may not lead to the formation of another, but to a permanent process of refusing a single identity. This effortful continuing process might itself become overtly performative – lives becoming a kind of personal theatre. A perhaps rather grandiose account of the significance of the politics of gender and the influence of the theatre might run like this: if contemporary British or western society finds itself trapped in a cul-de-sac, one of the reasons is that it is overwhelmingly masculinized and heterosexualized. The process that has brought about this state of affairs is articulated by Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick:  It may be…that a damaging bias toward heterosocial or heterosexist assumptions inheres unavoidably in the very concept of gender…Although many gender-based forms of analysis do involve accounts…of intergender behaviors and relations, the ultimate definitional appeal in any gender-based analysis must necessarily be to the diacritical frontier between different genders. This gives heterosocial and heterosexual relations a conceptual privilege of incalculable consequence. (Sedgwick, 1991: 31) Subjecting texts to scrutiny aimed at identifying that masculinization and heterosexualization is, then, a task that needs to be carried out if the nature of the cul de sac is to be established and the way out found. This is the critical task that some queer theorists have set themselves.

Introduction |   17

Women’s and Men’s Approaches to Gender Politics What follows is an attempt to categorize the most obvious positions taken on gender politics in the post-war period. Including both feminists and non-feminists, women’s responses to the gender debate can be characterized as ranging from: first, a reactionary essentialism which abhors attempts to interfere with the natural order; second, a straightforward attempt to better the lot of women within a largely unchanged patriarchal framework; third, a separatist feminism which seeks to devolve to women the powers that could shape their lives, while leaving men to go to hell in their own way; and, fourth, a recognition that men may be able to contribute to the process of generating the framework within which new and more flexible approaches to gender may be developed in future. In a continuing sequence, the corresponding positions among men can be described thus: fifth, fearful resentment at the fact that the topic is under discussion at all; sixth, recognition of the need for a reassessment and an attempt to control that reassessment on terms which bolster the dominance of patriarchy; seventh, a nervous acceptance that change must take place and that it will inevitably mean that men are no longer automatically top dogs; and, eighth, a welcoming of this discourse as providing an opportunity for men to break out of the constraints imposed on them by patriarchal role play. The following examples may serve to illuminate the ways in which the above categories can be reinforced or undermined. All are considered at greater length in the various chapters that follow. In Cloud Nine, Caryl Churchill simultaneously illustrates and critiques reactionary essentialism. Her Betty and Clive in Act I are stereotypical products and victims of a system designed to reinforce patriarchal power structures. Their endorsement of the status quo, however, is drastically undermined by Churchill’s farcical treatment of them. Subsequently, in Act II of the play, Churchill presents us with a series of radical alternatives, thus effectively endorsing the attempt to find new and more flexible approaches to gender identity. Churchill’s Top Girls, meanwhile, explores the pros and cons of attempting to better the lot of women within the existing framework, in that the play both conveys the excitement of being a woman who makes a successful career in a man’s world, and simultaneously exposes the destructive aspect that may underlie that success. Sarah Daniels’ Neaptide endorses the feminist separatist position, in that the play exposes the oppressive aspects of masculine behaviour through the actions of her male characters, but does not envisage the possibility of men being possessed of redeeming features. The male standpoints described above can also be exemplified (albeit tentatively). Fearfulness about any discussion of gender is, colourably, the principal underlying feature of the laddishness of Patrick Marber’s Dealer’s Choice, in which braggadocio and male bonding serve as substitutes for real communication among the male characters or for positive contact between them and women. John Osborne’s The End of Me Old Cigar contains a recognition that feminism had come into being, and presents a male fantasy about the subversion of its aims, in what can be seen as an endorsement of a pro-patriarchal reassessment of gender relations. An edgy nervous acceptance of change is central to Pinter’s The Homecoming, in which ambiguity and veiled threats serve as an exposé of the shortcomings of competitive masculine relationships, while Ruth’s apparent dominance at the end of the play may or may not herald a better future. A masculine welcoming of the opportunity to reassess gender roles and relations is well represented by Wesker’s Trilogy: its

18   | sex on stage

mixture of despair and hope still offers a convincing polemic in favour of the benefits of men and women learning from one another. From the mid-1990s, there also emerged a further series of post-feminist positions, which ranged from a lament for the mainstreaming and consequent loss of vibrancy of the radical sexual polemical theatre of the 1970s, to a bleak insistence that any political stance in a play is a distraction from its theatrical integrity. There is an uncompromising post-feminism in this statement from Sarah Kane:  I don’t think of the world as being divided up into men and women, victims and perpetrators. I don’t think those are constructive divisions to make, and they make for very poor writing. The problems I’m addressing are the ones we have as human beings. An over-emphasis on sexual politics (or racial or class politics) is a diversion from our main problem. Class, race and gender divisions are symptomatic of societies based on violence or the threat of violence, not the cause. (Stephenson and Langridge, 1997: 133–4) This seems to take a step beyond the gender politics that I have characterized above. Kane’s perspective is symptomatic of the in-yer-face refusal of political positions8 in gender relations, as in other areas of life, following the collapse of any credible grand narrative in British national ideology. Kane’s position might suggest that the most intense gender political phase of the British theatre is one which, for the avant garde at least, has largely run its course. A widespread response among men to the rise of gender and sexuality as topics for debate was one of dismissal. A consequence of this ostrich approach is that there is a relative dearth of critical writing on gender written from a masculine perspective. That is not to diminish the significance of some very important work written by men that does exist in this field,9 but it is undeniable that, while the post-war British stage has been dominated by the work of male playwrights, critical writing about gender politics has been largely the preserve of women. It is also a necessary recognition of the inevitable fact that women were the first to develop a voice critical of a cultural tradition that had marginalized and excluded them. Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick puts it this way: ‘I see feminist analysis as being considerably more developed than gay male or antihomophobic analysis at present – theoretically, politically and institutionally.’(Sedgwick, 1991: 16) Sedgwick is evidently disinclined to countenance the possibility of straight men who do not have an antihomophobic stance having anything to say worthy of the name of analysis. And her point of view is a compelling one. That said, the rise of the non-masculine10 – especially feminist and gay plays – as the well-spring of significant strands of post-war theatre may have spurred apparently heterosexual male playwrights to display interesting and varied degrees of neurotic anxiety in their writing for the theatre. In some cases, this anxiety displayed itself in the form of overt misogyny and homophobia. Other masculine reactions in the theatre have been more subtle. A feature of some plays has been anxiety over the self-destructive and sterile nature of crude masculinism. Both in the postwar era, and during a number of previous epochs, this particular approach to gender politics

Introduction |   19

has often advocated appropriation by men of feminine attributes. If masculinity’s options were being narrowed by its own overly defensive/aggressive response to the non-masculine, then a straightforward way of widening those options was to expand the notion of masculinity to embrace hitherto non-masculine attributes. Just as Orestes is shown by Aeschylus to adopt Elektra’s attributes in addition to his own, so the phenomenon of the new man of the 1980s is a latter-day instance of the same form of self-defence. But alternatives to misogyny and attempted hegemony have also been apparent. As indicated above, one such is a kind of resigned acceptance that patriarchy has had its day – that men must now reap the harvest of finding themselves subordinate to women as the price to be paid for a whole history of patriarchal oppression. Finally, as, for example, in Howard Barker’s The Castle (1985), which I discuss in Chapter 3, there is an approach whose starting point is supportive of women’s endeavours to establish for themselves a more satisfactory future society. A possible outcome might be the dismantling of some of the more oppressive aspects of the existing patriarchal framework. Progressive gender political theatre has played an important role in exposing how damaging subjection to such oppression can be. I suggest that theatre also has the potential to generate a continuing dialectic that might serve to prevent the imposition of new sources of stasis and oppression. Notes   1. For example, Michelene Wandor (1987) uses 1968 as a starting point, as does Lizbeth Goodman in her introduction to Berney (1994b), although the latter does not go so far as to specifically equate post-war with post-1968.   2. Namaste, Ki (1996), ‘The Politics of Inside/Out: Queer Theory, Poststructuralism, and a Sociological Approach to Sexuality’, in Seidman, pp. 201.   3. Gamson, Joshua (1996), ‘Must Identity Movements Selfdestruct?: A Queer Dilemma’, in Seidman, pp. 396.   4. For example, the view that “‘multicultural, bisexual, lesbian and gay studies” should…be named “queer studies”’ is recorded in Steven Epstein’s ‘A Queer Encounter: Sociology and the Study of Sexuality’ in Seidman (1996: 154).   5. Long, Jennie (1998), ‘What Share of the Cake Now? The Employment of Women in the English Theatre (1994)’, in Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay, pp. 104–106. The figures still appear to be correct, or slightly optimistic, for the proportion of plays produced in London that are written by women in the 2000s, based on listings in Time Out and The Guardian.   6. Segal, Lynne (1990: 2).   7. Wandor refers to the play’s reprise of ‘Osborne’s fearful look at threatened masculinity’ (1986: 144).   8. A refusal that Graham Saunders eloquently describes as ‘a disengagement and dismantlement from recognizable forms of political engagement by the new generation of young dramatists’, in the introduction to D’Monté and Saunders (2008: 3).   9. Three outstanding examples being Connell (1995), Horrocks (1995) and Mangan (2003). 10. Perhaps the term ‘non-hegemonic-masculine’ makes the point more comprehensively.

2 The Emergence of the Female Canon

The late 1950s was a crucial period in the formation of what is now the canon of produced plays written by women, with the production of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958) and Ann Jellicoe’s The Sport of My Mad Mother (1958). There are a number of interesting ideas in circulation as to why comparatively little of the work of female playwrights from earlier than this has survived in the canon, of which the most significant is the gulf between the public nature of the theatre stage and the private nature of the woman’s space as conventionally viewed. A compellingly theatrical exploration of this view occurs in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale, with the cutting out of Philomele’s tongue by Tereus. Elaine Aston writes of this incident in the play that ‘The…silencing of Philomele…is…paradigmatic of the violent silencing of women.’ (Aston, 1995: 18) Thus, the removal of women from that most public of spaces, the theatre, reinforces their incarceration in the private space of the home. The task facing women playwrights of the 1950s was a formidable one. There was considerable cultural inertia to overcome: the deep-seated attitudes and oppressive role of those entrusted with maintaining them had to be challenged by that sector of the population which had been most systematically disbarred from the theatre. Once the walls of the citadel had been breached, however, a quantity of challenging and exciting, innovative work by women began to be staged, as the 1960s brought a readiness to consider at least a new feminism, if not a more enlarged view of gender politics. However, it was in the 1970s that women’s writing for the British theatre really established itself as a radical force. The political and theatrical environment of the 1970s had been brought into being by a complex combination of factors, from the global unrest of 1968 and the abolition in Britain of theatre censorship the same year, to the formal birth of the British Women’s Liberation Movement in 1970 and the more parochial, but nevertheless crucial, Women’s Festival of Theatre at the Almost Free in 1973. In the 1980s opposition to the reactionary politics of Margaret Thatcher became a metropolitan duty so routine and widespread that swathes of the West

22   | sex on stage

End mainstream theatre became what, in the 1960s, would have been called counter-cultural. In the 1990s an even more paradoxical effect could be observed, whereby the triumph of capitalism was so complete that conventional opposition on the economic front had effectively disappeared from the theatre; meanwhile, the mainstreaming of gender politics had situated gay male, lesbian and radical feminist playwrights among the West End boulevardiers. In their introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights (2000), Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt observed that in the late 1990s, women are not writing the issue-based theatre out of the feminist moment twenty years ago, nor are they working in the climate of anger from ten years ago, when playwrights, just before the 1989 collapse of socialism in Central Europe, were protesting against the reactionary policies of the right-wing British government. (Aston and Reinelt, 2000: 3) But if this represents a retreat on the part of women playwrights from radicalism in their presentation of gender politics, it is a retreat from or consolidation of the disorder that resulted from having achieved a huge cultural shift over a comparatively short time. That this should be so owes much to a generally more sophisticated view of the politics of gender among women playwrights than prevailed among their male counterparts, underpinned by the recognition that gender identity is crucial to the identity of the subject. At the same time, gender itself is a construct, and hence capable of deconstruction, a particularly fruitful practice for anybody trying to have an impact on the cultural disposition of British society. Women’s writing for the theatre mounted a challenge to the patriarchal tradition in five significant areas – an assertiveness of the existence of women’s rights, which overarches the following themes: the celebration of motherhood as a powerful and exclusive aspect of womanhood; the challenge mounted in women’s writing to the role of psychiatry as a tool of patriarchal oppression; the exploration of the potential for women to become the dominant occupants of spaces both public and private; and the liberation of sexuality, especially women’s sexuality. These five facets are frequently co-dependent, of course, but can be explored as distinct factors in the formation and evolution of the female canon. Tracing the impact of this body of women’s writing for the theatre necessarily involves a consideration of the dialectic between theatre and social attitudes over time. For example, by the 1970s, feminist polemical theatre was finding a numerous, if fairly homogeneous, audience. Michelene Wandor records the role played by socialist theatre groups in enabling women’s theatrical voices to be heard at this time (Wandor, 1986: 43–6), and how a dedicated feminist theatre emerged from this – the product of certain socialist theatres’ exploration on stage of feminist issues. A number of overtly politicized women’s theatre groups came into being during this period, including The Women’s Company, which briefly served as a vehicle for the work of Pam Gems, and Gay Sweatshop (discussed in Chapter 4). Wandor also describes the ‘slow diffusion of gay and feminist consciousness’, which led to the formation of Monstrous Regiment, the company that first produced Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom (Wandor, 1986: 57). Similarly,

The Emergence of the Female Canon |   23

The Women’s Theatre Group, founded in 1974, was in 1981 the first company to produce Timberlake Wertenbaker’s New Anatomies. Thus, in the case of three women playwrights who operated at the core of the women’s theatrical canon, especially of the 1980s, fringe polemical feminist companies were more or less instrumental in staging their plays and enabling later work to be mounted in the mainstream theatre. Katharine Worth observes of this phenomenon:  Fringe groups and theater collectives…have offered women actors more scope, and women playwrights such as Caryl Churchill have profited from the energy and initiative released in this new kind of performance situation…Women, because they find it more difficult to get into the theater at commanding levels, have drawn the greatest benefit from the antihierarchical arrangements of the new companies. (Brater, 1989: 3–4) For their part, Aston and Reinelt note that ‘The explosion of feminist companies in the 1970s was important to women playwrights because these companies commissioned plays by women which might otherwise have been rejected by “malestream” managements.’(Aston and Reinelt, 2000: 12) Hence, the development of a canon of plays written by women required, in the first place, the formation of a women’s space for the development of writing and performing – a wholly different environment from that offered by conventional theatre. And it was mainly from the launch pad of that alternative space that many women playwrights found it possible to establish themselves in the mainstream, when more direct access was denied even to the most innovative and significant of them – Churchill, Gems and Wertenbaker. Lizbeth Goodman observed in 1994 that: in recent years, due in large part to the influence of feminist critics who have challenged the assumptions inherent to the choice of [canonical] texts, the canon has been revised and expanded, and now includes a few plays by women…Because the canon traditionally has been male, and because men have been in positions of power to determine what was accepted as canonical, women’s work has remained on the margins. (Berney, 1994b: xiii) At first glance, this assertion of the hegemonization of the canon by men appears to be straightforward commonsense. In an analysis of ‘productions housed at some fifty London theatres over the period 1922 to 1958’, Maggie B Gale calculates an average ratio of 83: 17 male: female authorship of plays, with a marked decline towards the end of the period in the proportion of plays written by women.1 By 1994, a survey of building-based and touring companies conducted by Jennie Long found that the average proportion of produced plays written by women had only increased to 20 per cent,2 and, among building-based companies, only 15 per cent. The negligible increase surveyed by Gale between the end of the period and 1994 is astonishing, and suggests an extremely successful repulsion of female boarders by male impresarios and artistic directors. Alternatively, the fact that many people respond with surprise to the small size of the increase may be symptomatic of the disappearance from collective memory of those women playwrights who had enjoyed successful productions of their plays in the 1950s and earlier. Susan Bennett notes that ‘forty-two plays by women appear[ed] on

24   | sex on stage

the London stage between 1955 and 1958,’ and goes on, ‘it is precisely the kind of popular success that plays such as Roar Like a Dove [by Lesley Storm, 1957] achieved that caused (male) theatre reviewers to champion the cause of the ‘angry young men’.’ (Aston and Reinelt, 2000: 43) By this argument, the ‘angry young men’ had a largely reactionary impact, being both misogynistic and, as Dan Rebellato points out, homophobic.3 The continuing low representation of women writers among plays produced may not, however, be symptomatic of any reluctance on the part of male-dominated theatre managements to produce their work. In 1997 the Royal Court’s literary manager was reported as saying, ‘that out of a sample batch of scripts he looked at recently, only 189 out of 1000 were by women’. (Stephenson and Langridge, 1997: xv) Extrapolating from these figures, the proportion of produced plays written by women is not significantly out of line with the number of scripts submitted by women in the first place; the interesting question then becomes why the submission rate by women should be so low. That the rate should have been as low as 19 per cent by 1997 seems remarkable by any standards. It may be that the low figures for the 1990s stem from an actual lessening in the quantity of new writing for the theatre by women, perhaps a reflection of the decline in the number of fringe and touring companies being supported by subsidy. Janelle Reinelt suggests that more recent figures might be even lower: ‘In 2001-2, of 2000 off-Broadway and regional theatre productions in the United States, 16 per cent were written by women…I suspect that these figures would be the same or lower in the United Kingdom.’4 Another perspective comes from Aston and Reinelt:  For a young generation of writers like Kane and Prichard,5 who joined the British theatre scene in the late 1990s, it means working in a context in which feminism retains an academic centrality…but has no movement [equivalent to that] which…was formerly able to support women’s writing…Despite the absence of visible feminist support…women’s playwriting…has not disappeared. (Aston and Reinelt, 2000: 17) Yet it is also the case that Michelene Wandor cites figures culled from a number of sources in the 1970s and 1980s, which suggest that the proportion of the plays produced in Britain in that period by women was running at similarly low levels.6 Finally, the possible impact of sheer prejudice cannot be ruled out, and may account for the non-revival of plays such as Olwen Wymark’s Lunchtime Concert (1966) and Sandra Freeman’s Supporting Roles (1988), notwithstanding their innovative qualities as discussed below. Alternatively, the obscurity to which these plays have been consigned may be just a matter of chance, which the work of the feminist critics referred to by Lizbeth Goodman could redress in due course. Goodman also notes that, ‘it is generally agreed that the political and social unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s was instrumental in the development of both the women’s movement and alternative theatres’ (Berney, 1994b: xi). While there is obvious truth in this remark, it ignores the other aspect of a dynamic in which alternative or radical theatre may have helped create the conditions that enabled social change to occur. Indeed, the dialectics of theatre and political development were operating in a peculiarly vibrant way in this context, with post-

The Emergence of the Female Canon |   25

performance discussions a regular feature, enabling performances to evolve in response to the beliefs and feelings expressed by audiences. For example, Michelene Wandor’s review of Work to Role by the Women’s Theatre Group:  The group follows each performance with small group discussions, and comments and criticisms from their audiences provide a sounding board against which they can test the correctness and usefulness of both their message and the theatrical medium they use. This means that small things in the play are continually changed…its detailed validity is always being tested in practice.7 In a similar vein, Michèle Roberts reviews Jill Posener’s Any Woman Can: ‘In the course of discussions with different audiences, the play has been slightly changed to emphasize ideas which are central to feminism…’8 Many of the Afterwords to plays published in the first nine volumes of Methuen’s Plays By Women series note similar post-production discussions, resulting in both alterations to playtexts and vital intellectual and emotional responses from women whose outlooks were changed by the experience of seeing the plays. A lively cross-fertilization was taking place, it seems, between writers, directors, actors and audiences in the feminist (and, from memory, gay) theatre of the 1970s and onwards. It is hard to imagine such an interchange occurring in any medium other than the theatre, and the resulting dialectic may have enabled the plays to have a profound influence on the development and dissemination of gender politics among women in Britain. One consequence was that the nature of what it was possible to stage in repertory changed. Two examples of feminist drama staged towards the end of the 1970s that made the transition into the mainstream are Pam Gems’s Queen Christina (1977) and Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (1979). Women did not have the monopoly of presenting gender politics on the stage, of course, as the works of men such as Alan Ayckbourn, Arnold Wesker or Howard Barker attest. But there were few if any women playwrights operating during this period for whom gender politics was not a driving force in their work. This became more questionable in the mid-to-late 1990s, when issues of gender and sexuality increasingly occupied mainstream theatre – even one still largely dominated by men – a phenomenon that may well have operated at the expense of produced plays by women. In the later 1990s, however, a number of prominent women playwrights continued to have their plays produced on the mainstream stage: Caryl Churchill, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Phyllis Nagy, and (even after her suicide in 1999) Sarah Kane are all examples. The intertwined themes previously noted appear in strength in 1958, and go on to develop from there. The first such theme is, straightforwardly, the development of an early women’s-liberation consciousness and the threat to masculine hegemony which it embodied. The immediate masculine response to feminism was a burying of heads in the sand, in the sense that the need for change in the nature of masculinity was largely ignored until the 1970s – and continues to be so in some quarters. The natural consequence of this masculine purblindness was that men felt that their virility was under threat and there was nothing they could do about it – an approach whose futility was most memorably embodied in John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter. Space is perhaps the key to this threat, with the newly raised female consciousness not only challenging

26   | sex on stage

masculine dominance within the confines of the home, but also beginning to move outdoors. Hanna Scolnicov goes so far as to say that ‘woman is so closely associated with space that almost any articulation of space on stage or in the play is directly expressive of her position, her lifestyle, her personality.’(Scolnicov, 1994: xiii) Whatever the merits of Scolnicov’s broad claim, the increasing feminine occupation of public space is noted by Michelene Wandor, especially as a phenomenon of the post-1968 theatre, which she observes to be ‘a celebratory freeing of some parts of the theatrical imagination from the confines of the private home’ (Wandor, 1987: 152). Wandor’s insistence on 1968 as a starting point rules out of her consideration Ann Jellicoe’s The Sport of My Mad Mother, which had emphatically freed her characters from the private home as early as 1958, thus anticipating the preoccupations of most women’s drama by at least ten years. However, Wandor’s emphasis on theatre after 1968 is shared by many commentators. Lizbeth Goodman observes that ‘it is the post-1968 period which is studied and taught in courses on modern women’s drama’, and she subheads the relevant category, ‘Contemporary Women Dramatists: 1968 to the present’ (Berney, 1994b: xi). Such disregard for the late 1950s and most of the 1960s ignores some significant produced plays by women, which may have helped pave the way for the birth of the modern women’s movement. Indeed, it is the assertion of the existence of women’s political being that marks 1958 most strongly as a starting point. That assertion manifests itself through the associated themes of motherhood, sexuality, space, and (later) psychiatry. Motherhood The first subordinate theme to emerge from 1958 onwards is a celebration of motherhood. Both in Jo’s pregnancy in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, and in the ritualized birth with which The Sport of My Mad Mother ends, there is a clear theatrical move into territory in which female dominance becomes unchallengeable. Whether this territory represents a force for liberation or constraint remains arguable, especially in the light of anxieties about the drive towards motherhood, which continued to manifest themselves much later, as, for example, in Pam Gems’s Queen Christina (1977) and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Break of Day (1995). However, the fact is that the theatre was compelled to recognize that there was at least one pre-eminently female space, called motherhood, worthy of exploration. This exploration took place alongside the gradual occupation of the more literal public space, the gradual intrusion of women into the hitherto masculine preserves of work and politics. Shelagh Delaney’s motive for writing A Taste of Honey (1958) was reputedly to provide on stage a more positive image of a gay man than Terence Rattigan had done in Variation on a Theme (1958).9 This motive is not adequate, however, not only because Delaney’s treatment of her character Geoffrey and that of Rattigan’s Max are very similar, but also because of the extent to which critics have associated Delaney with Osborne and the ‘angry young men’. That said, Delaney is clearly perceived by some to have escaped the patriarchal axioms evident in the work of Osborne and his cohort. Enoch Brater, for example, notes that ‘The conventions which emerged from “kitchen-sink” drama were – with such notable deviations as…A Taste of Honey…essentially developed through masculine eyes.’(Brater, 1989: xii) What does emerge

The Emergence of the Female Canon |   27

from A Taste of Honey, though, is the subversive presence of working-class women and their sexuality. The fact that the father of Jo’s baby is black seems almost a gratuitous addition of social controversy, whereas Geoffrey’s homosexuality has a function that extends beyond shock value for its own sake. In the absence of Jo’s mother, Geoffrey’s unthreatening presence and supportiveness establish him as an effective maternal surrogate. It is perhaps a pity that Delaney’s construction of what would later come to be recognizable as the new man was based on both desexing and desexualizing Geoffrey, without providing anything in the way of compensation – a distinct threat to masculine identity, both heterosexual and homosexual. Another perspective on Geoffrey’s role is provided by Michelene Wandor when she says, ‘It is interesting that both Osborne and Delaney use a eunuch-like figure to act as an emotional catalyst for heterosexual dilemmas’, and ‘The male “eunuch”…[is] another oblique symbol of the crisis of virility.’(Wandor, 1986: 144) Also, in her presentation of Geoffrey’s neutered saintliness, Delaney highlights by contrast both the gross sexuality and materialism of the unreconstructed man embodied in Peter, Jo’s mother’s lover, and also the positive productiveness of motherhood. A crude critique of traditional masculinism, then, precedes the fugue of mother and daughter into a private, female, interior space of wary mutual supportiveness. This reinforcement of the private nature of feminine space may be seen as bolstering a stereotype. However, the characterization of public space as dominated by men like Peter represents the beginnings of an important critique, which developed from here until later feminist theatre created radical alternative types of space and radical alternative types of body to put into them. The preoccupation with motherhood emerges symbolically in Ann Jellicoe’s The Sport of My Mad Mother (1958). This time, however, women are liberated into an outside space, mounting a challenge to patriarchal dominance of public space, the out-of-doors, rather reminiscent of Euripides’ The Bacchae. The elemental aspect of Jellicoe’s work extends to the women’s performance as she thrusts her characters into the energizing ritual of a Dionysiac dance, translated into the London backstreets of the late 1950s. Jellicoe herself says of the play: ‘It is an anti-intellect play…[aiming to] reach the audience directly through rhythm…’ Also, ‘Myth is the bodying forth in images and stories of our deepest fears and conflicts.’ (Jellicoe, 1964: 5) Such an anti-intellectual approach gives rise to an unusual ‘orchestration of a primitive, syllabic language’ (in A. F. Kennedy’s words) (Kennedy, 1975: xiii). Indeed, the play’s underlying theme is the interplay between female forces of visceral disorder and male forces of cerebral order. The physicality of the play embraces a latent sexuality, as when in Act II, Greta ‘beats Cone up in an easy, lazy, rather splendid manner. He gives himself up in a sort of ecstasy.’ (Jellicoe, 1964: 59) But it is Greta’s pregnancy and eventual delivery of a child that gives her supremacy over both the infantile violence of Cone and the rational and humane outlook of Dean, both of whom are offstage by the end of the play. As Michelene Wandor sees it, ‘both Osborne’s fearful look at threatened masculinity and the celebratory potential of motherhood reappear’ (Wandor, 1986: 144). Masculinity, in this instance, has good reason to feel threatened. At least until the delivery of her child at the end of the play, Greta is a thoroughly frightening, unkind and violent character, more an updated Fury than an embodiment of positive womanhood. If the only possible roles for women are the Fury or the Mother, then this exhibits a profoundly reactionary view of female potential, unless, of course, Greta is to be viewed as a caricature

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of the fearful male’s fearful image of powerful woman – juxtaposed in the play with Dodo, the embodiment of fearful womanhood, completely paralysed by her fear. Perhaps Jellicoe would have her audience find a third way. Justina Komporaly recognizes the ambivalent aspect of this when she observes, ‘Greta’s maternity…stands for the possibilities inherent in the marginal female subject to move center-stage, while it equally marks a route towards female essentialism’ (Komporaly, 2006: 12).The empowerment of the centre-stage, on that basis, is bought at the expense of entrapment within the biological function of motherhood. Pam Gems’s Queen Christina (in Queen Christina, 1977) is a remarkable figure, literally a masculine construct, defying gender essentialism (and prefiguring by a decade much of the debate which made such terms widely familiar), but ultimately vitiated by her own biological drive towards childbirth. The extent to which she is the product of male power games is illustrated by the following exchange between her father and Axel, the Chancellor:  King: Make a man of her then. Axel: How? King: Training. Axel: I’d need legislation for that. King: Draft it. I want her fit, educated, able to lead an army if necessary. (Gems, 1982: 2) So not only is the decision taken by two men, but ‘training’ is clearly the essence of becoming a man, subject to the dispensation of a masculine-administered legal system. The outcome, naturally, is not a happy one for Christina, though she and Gems take the opportunity to enjoy a great deal of fun at the expense of men along the way, not least in Act I, scene ii, when she uses the confusion over her identity to outrage the crass German suitor for her hand. Less playful is Christina’s statement to the French Ambassador, a sympathetic, perhaps gay man: ‘We live on sufferance. To your desires. I find you a cruel sex.’ (Gems, 1982: 28) Christina’s ‘I find you…’ is a reasoned dispassionate statement, borne of her own observation, and significantly the stronger for it. When it comes to the provision of an heir, her role as a quasi-man, and as monarch, places her in an impossible position, as in her observation to Axel: ‘And how? By making a man of me. A man, despising women – just like you. You’ve had your joke, you and nature between you.’ (Gems, 1982: 33) It becomes apparent that Christina’s upbringing has engendered in her a species of homosociality among men, with its underlying sexual homophobic counterpart familiar amongst men’s men in a great many social milieux. Christina: You’ve done your job too well. I love men! Their company, their talk…the smell of a man’s sweat in the saddle! I love them in the bone…in the flesh…The truth that is in a man takes him where his flesh decides. The flesh chooses! Do you

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think I’m going to pollute that, the only truth I know? I will not rape a man. Nor will I be the woman for you to despise. Between the two you have put me off. I’ve dreamed of murdering you for it. (Gems, 1982: 35) Christina is an altogether formidable person, highly intelligent, forceful, dispassionate and, at the same time, mixed up in a way familiar to many, making her very endearing. But she is dangerous: underlying her humane ‘I will not rape a man’ is a recognition that she is empowered to do just that, should she so choose. Her hybridity gives her extraordinary strengths. For example, she is largely successful in her determination to extricate Sweden from war. She is, then, a more complete human being than those around her, having the advantage over Axel of a degree of warmth and flexibility, and the advantage over her mother of being able to think. This hybridity is unsustainable, however, and Christina’s need for personal freedom leads her to abdicate, from which point her individuality seems to decline. For example, in her encounter with two French proto-lesbian feminist separatists, Christina’s antipathy towards women is exposed, together with the fact that she has failed to think through the roots of that antipathy. Then, with her embrace of the Roman Catholic Church and her discovery of the pleasures of heterosexuality she begins to reject her masculine attributes:  I was bred as a man, despising the weakness of women. I begin to question the favour. To be invited to join the killing, why, where’s the advantage? Half the world rapes and destroys – must women, the other half, join in?…I begin to perceive that I am a woman. What that is, heaven knows…the philosophy is yet to be written, there is a world to be explored. (Gems, 1982: 74–5) Christina’s difficulty is that, in order to offer the above critique of men, she has to abandon the masculine attributes that make up a considerable part of her personality. Meanwhile, there is clearly no satisfactory female role model available for her, so she necessarily becomes less than the person she has been. Her over-simplified characterization of men as rapists and destroyers is an indication of how her quandary has led to a loss subtlety. And being forced to give way to her own apparently irresistible biological drive to have children leads to a less than satisfactory conclusion to the play. Gems’s Queen Christina is by no means the only woman on stage to have – according to one’s point of view – her potential for action curtailed, or her essential womanhood affirmed by the prospect of, or desire for, motherhood. In Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Break of Day (1995), Nina and Tess, two of her three intelligent, interesting, successful middle-class women, are tormented by an unfulfilled biological drive to have children. Counterpoised against them is her heroically undriven character April, and the all-too-fecund Marisa. That the drive towards procreation is capable of unbalancing people is made clear by the obsessive efforts of Tess and Nina, respectively, to get pregnant by artificial means and to adopt an Eastern European child. Nina and Tess’s loss of balance is mapped by that of the play, as April and Marisa are marginalized, leaving centre-stage and most of the second half of the play to Tess and Nina’s unhappy or desperate strivings. Arguably, the balance is restored in two sets of a few lines each in the final scene: 

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Tess:  She hasn’t answered: I’ve asked if she would donate her eggs. I know I was horrible to her, but that was a year ago, I’m sure she’ll understand. Robert:  Tess– Tess:  I’ll try it once more, no, three times. Then I’ll stop. Pause (Wertenbaker, 1995: 90) The embarrassed silence which greets Tess’s revelation of her own unreasonable expectations stands in marked contrast to the supportive noises that April’s quiet assertiveness brings forth a little later:  April:  I think so, but no one talks about women like me. Particularly not in your magazines, Tess. Tess:  I’d change that, but – April:  We may not consume much, but we contribute a lot. We work. I think I live with dignity and some grace. I try to behave with decency. I feel lonely sometimes – Nick:  I do too, but for different reasons… April:  But I keep going. My life is full. I want you to write a song about that, Nina, I want you to write a song about me. (Wertenbaker, 1995: 93) Notwithstanding the potential for an ironic reading of April’s cool self-sufficiency, her opting out of the biological crisis that has ambushed Nina and Tess is largely presented as a sympathetic and worthwhile alternative. She is indeed ‘clear-sighted’, having not been blinded in the way that Nina and Tess’s obsessions have blinded them. Tess’s manoeuvres, in particular, echo the more polemical handling of the issue of artificial insemination by donor, dealt with in some of the lesbian plays of the 1970s. In all these cases, the underlying issue seems to be the capacity of a woman to generate an exclusively feminine space called motherhood, but by 1995 that space had become awkward and hard to attain. The success of Michelene Wandor’s lesbian heroines in Aid Thy Neighbour (1978) is a source of laughter and delight. Tess’s failure in The Break of Day verges on the tragic. Another angle on motherhood and women’s space is provided by Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1982). The fact that this play, unusually for Churchill, is populated entirely by women makes for a particularly searching note of enquiry into the morality and integrity of these female characters. The moral ambiguity of Marlene, the central character, is the aspect of the play I want to consider. At first glance, Marlene’s career success as director of her company appears to be celebrated

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by Churchill as a shining example of what the campaign for women’s equality with men had achieved by the early 1980s, encouraged, no doubt, by the presence of Britain’s first female prime minister. And the heady atmosphere of the Top Girls agency is conveyed by the sheer joie de vivre of the interview scenes, written with tremendous verve and edgy humour, which (mis) leads the audience into sympathy towards a situation whose human cost the play then goes on to critique. The intervention by Mrs Kidd on behalf of her husband is not merely pathetic but almost psychopathic in its self-oppressive malice, and contrasts with the occupation of the workspace by women, which is both good, and good fun. Yet this sportive atmosphere is redolent of masculine competitiveness: there is a clear recognition of rules which need to be bent or broken in order for a woman to make progress, and acceptance of an ageism that neither men nor women are able readily to overcome. Similarly, the public space of the restaurant in Act I could not be more appropriate as a place in which to celebrate the achievements of Marlene and her array of female guests. It is a space representative of Marlene’s success in the masculine world – a success bought at the cost of abandoning sisterhood. Marlene thrives in an environment where she is giving orders to other women, such as the waitress in the restaurant. But it is in the private space of Joyce and Angie’s home that disquiet at Marlene’s behaviour is particularly keenly felt. Through Joyce and Angie, we find that Marlene’s career success has only been achieved at considerable cost in the areas of motherhood and the home. Above all, Angie’s closing ‘frightening’, ambiguously directed to or at Marlene, raises the spectre of the inhumanly successful, frighteningly unmaternal woman; for Marlene has become a sort of ersatz man at the expense of her own womanhood. If the price of success for a woman in a man’s world is as great as this, Churchill suggests, is it worth it? Is the greater task to attempt to create a new world altogether, rather than to cut away huge parts of the self in order to make progress in the patriarchal world, on patriarchy’s terms? Marlene prefigures many of the characteristics of Alan Ayckbourn’s Thatcherite woman, Jill, in Man of the Moment (1988). Ayckbourn’s Jill is the mature product of Thatcherism, whereas Churchill had created a worrying chimera in Marlene, at a time when the downside of Thatcherism had not yet become universally apparent.10 In Churchill’s prophetic exercise the audience is disconcertingly invited first to revel in Marlene’s success and then to wonder quite how high a price is being asked for it. Marlene’s utter rejection of the space of the home and motherhood is an act of betrayal of her status as a woman. This would no doubt be forgivable if she had made the sacrifice in the interests of exploring a new kind of role for women. But to abandon the possibility of celebrating her womanhood and motherhood merely to go through a reprise of tired old masculine values is an act that Churchill puts seriously into question. As Michael Billington says of Top Girls, the play suggested ‘that a feminism that did not embrace compassion and generosity was not worthy of the name’. (Berney, 1994a: 52) Psychiatry If motherhood was one major preoccupation of women’s writing for the theatre during this period, the oppressive nature of psychiatry, especially as a regulator of sexuality, was another. This reflects a perception that, by the 1950s, the job of maintaining patriarchy’s cultural hegemony had been handed over, at least in part, to the psychiatric profession. Perhaps inevitably, given the legacy of Freud and Lacan, women playwrights both critiqued the role of

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psychiatry and explored the possibility of recuperating psychotherapy as a beneficial, rather than oppressive, practice. Psychiatry and alternative therapies, especially in the form of therapeutic role play, are a feature of Olwen Wymark’s plays of this period. Wymark writes her characters into shifting role plays, with a strong undercurrent of sexuality; her plays of the late 1960s show a powerful concern for psychological well-being and the potential of role play as benign therapy, throwing a new light on gender roles. In Lunchtime Concert (1966), a woman aged 77 and a man aged 17 enter, prepared to have a picnic. Their performance towards each other veers from conventional hatred to a strange affection. However, Wymark undermines realism with melodramatic language to deliver her particular truths. There is a parodic note to the characters’ exchanges, in which the words are undermined by contradictory timbre and action:  He:  I’ll squeeze your skinny old neck till you’re dead. She:  Help! Help! Help! (But her voice is a deliberate whisper.) (Wymark, 1967: 15) – She:  I have no patience left for you. I’ve run out. And as for affection…none! None! I feel nothing for you, do you hear? Nothing at all. I am free. I am absolutely free and I can do what I like with my life. (Wymark, 1967: 16) – He:  You bloody black widow spider. (He sinks to his knees and buries his face in her skirts.) You disgust me. You sicken me. She:  (Twisting her head about, wringing her hands.) Let me go. I want to go. Let me go. He:  (Holding her tighter.) Go then! Go! For God’s sake, leave me! (Wymark, 1967: 18) – She:  (Pinching his cheek…) He:  (Giving her a smacking kiss on the cheek…) (Wymark, 1967: 42) They encounter a birdwatcher, who gradually gets embroiled in their play-acting, purportedly and perhaps actually as the would-be seducer of the boy. But the role played by the birdwatcher is that of Mrs Grundy, disapproving of the affection between the other two in case it is not quite normal, and embodying the voice of convention and the law. At one point it becomes apparent

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that there is a violently disruptive and destructive creature underneath the birdwatcher’s façade. By way of contrast, the camp role play between the young man and the woman, with its undertones of sexual desire and power-play, is portrayed as healthy and benign, which serves to expose and question the inhibitions that ageism imposes on interactions between people of greatly differing ages. It also perhaps places role play in a generally healthful psychological context, pointing to its largely neglected therapeutic value. By operating in a playful, nonprofessional arena, the play mounts an implicit challenge to the mystique and power-play of the psychiatric profession. Wymark returns to her questioning of conventional views of sexuality and the psychotherapeutic benefits of role play with The Inhabitants (1967), in which a trio of characters equivalent to the dramatis personae of Lunchtime Concert constantly step into and out of character and role play different power-games. This time, the woman, aged 56, is presented ambiguously as either the mother or lover of a much younger man, who in turn is the lover of a man of about the same age as the woman. Their interplay is broken up by a disembodied voice demanding and getting repeat performances of their role plays, with the locus of greatest power or (a)morality being distributed differently among the characters during each repetition. While in Lunchtime Concert and The Inhabitants Wymark uses role play to allow alternative sexual roles to be suggested, however ambiguously, in her plays of the later 1960s and early 1970s she presents role play in a manner altogether less threatening, subversive and subtle. For example, she (apparently) ascribes to the fantasy engaged in by Tony and Len in The Gymnasium (1971) a cathartic power to counteract ‘the deep insecurity of an older man married to a much younger wife’.11 Wymark’s take on age difference and sexuality is more conventional here, but there is still an interesting commentary on how role play performs a therapeutic function all the more necessary because of the inhibitions which prevent disclosure between people in their real existence; or at least to exorcise the demons created in the insecure imagination as to what might be said if such inhibitions did not exist. The play ends with Tony saying, ‘She never never says anything unkind or cruel to me. But you can see…I know she’s thinking them. If only she’d say them. Oh God, if only she’d say them.’(Wymark, 1971: 19) Tony’s need to have his worst fears realized is evidence of a species of masochism which leads him to seek release through his weekly encounter with Len in the boxing ring. Again, there are ambiguous sexual overtones both in the setting, the tussling between the two men and the fact that they move in and out of the roles assigned to them by the script written (as it turns out) by Tony himself. Such a script within a script is reminiscent of the ritualized and pre-scripted encounters demanded of prostitutes by some of their clients. However, what seems to have been lost from Wymark’s plays by this time is the fresh, unprejudiced line taken on ageism and sexuality discernible in the earlier work. Wymark takes a different line on the value of role play in Stay Where You Are (1969), in which feminist politics forms an important underlying (though unstated) issue. Here, one of the characters is not party to the role play but is instead the victim of it. The other three know what is

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going on as they constantly enmesh the innocent party in a string of fantasies, eventually forcing her into a more or less subservient role in an uneasy and menacing scene, again with sadomasochistic undertones. The end of the play, however, is more polemical than psychologically menacing, as the innocent woman tears the place apart. She has learnt the value of anger from a role play whose menace has been directed helpfully towards therapeutic purposes after all. This metaphor for a proper feminist response to gender-role entrapment provides a realworld solution, in which desperation can be converted into constructive anger and provides liberation through political action. It is perhaps no accident that these feminist undertones are discernible in a play produced in 1969, at a moment when the women’s movement in Britain was beginning to articulate a new politics in the lead-up to the first national conference of the Women’s Liberation Movement, held in 1970. Over all, Wymark exhibits an ambivalent set of attitudes towards psychiatry. On the one hand, her earlier plays explore the benefits of using role play in an environment that allows therapy as a means of personal liberation, but without the therapist. In Find Me (1977), on the other hand, she gives a harrowing, more or less documentary account of the damage inflicted by a mentally disturbed girl on her family and those around her. The girl dies in Broadmoor at the age of twenty, to the guilty relief of all concerned, including the audience. As Prabhu Guptara puts it:  Those expecting the play to concentrate sympathy on the little girl must have been disappointed: it is far easier to sympathize with the restaurant owners, friends, and family who have their peace and prosperity destroyed by the girl’s predilection for starting fires. Indeed, though she died in the hospital, viewers find themselves sympathizing with the desperate hospital authorities rather than with Verity. (Kirkpatrick, 1988: 584) In the case of this acutely disturbed girl, it is not the presence of the psychiatric profession that is being critiqued; what the play points up is the sheer hopelessness of trying to cater properly for the needs of somebody so damaged that assessment and containment is beyond the bounds of the possible. While Wymark offers no overt critique of the psychiatric profession as such, a far more critical stance is taken by the early radio plays of Caryl Churchill from this same period. In Lovesick (1967) Churchill uses some of the characteristics of farce: the lack of emotional engagement of the characters leads to a ruthless humour, and the internal moral vacuum which is produced in the play is used to point out the dangers of the therapist as god. Hodge, the psychiatrist, has no compunction about trying to use psychotherapeutic procedures – mainly consisting of crude aversion therapy – in order to manipulate the emotions and sexualities of those around him. It all goes wrong from Hodge’s point of view, as his efforts are sabotaged by the brilliant and self-interestedly amoral Robert. At the end of the play, Ellen, whom Hodge had sought to enamour of himself, has become a lesbian, while Kevin, whom Hodge had sought to ‘cure’ of homosexuality, has developed acute self-hatred, fallen in love with Hodge and committed suicide. Meanwhile, Robert and his mother are uninterruptedly developing their incestuous

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love for one another, while Hodge himself embarks on a course of aversion therapy in order to destroy his love for Ellen and thus to allow him to get on with his work. The view taken of the effectiveness of the therapy seems dichotomous: Kevin asserts ‘Cure me? What do you mean? I’ve always loved you’, while Ellen says, ‘What do you mean, I’m not really a lesbian? I love her, I’ve never been so happy. Listen, I’ve had dreams about women for years.’ (Churchill, 1990: 18–19) In each case the love which has been brought to the surface by therapy appears to have been brought up from no very great depth. So there is some irony in the suggestion that what is regarded by all concerned, and particularly by Hodge, as an invasive procedure in need of moral justification may actually be just a healthy brushing away of the cobwebs imposed by societal norms. On the other hand, Kevin’s self-hatred, induced by the therapy, offers a clear indictment of the procedures involved in this form of psychotherapy. Hodge’s attitude towards his profession casts him in an extremely dubious moral light, in that he uses his role as psychiatrist to place himself in a position of power over his patients. He is quite prepared to play god in order to serve his own ends, and his callousness towards Kevin’s death is almost startling: ‘Kevin’s self-disgust was pitiful, but no one could blame me for not loving him. I’ve homosexual tendencies like anyone else, but well suppressed, and it was most inconvenient to have them stirred.’ (Churchill, 1990: 18) There is thus little doubt that Hodge is an extremely unsympathetic portrait of a psychiatrist. Indeed, on one fairly obvious reading, he provides a metaphor for patriarchy’s use of the notion of mental illness, and hence of psychiatry, to enforce conformity. The parallels between the form and content of Lovesick and those of Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw are notable, and suggest that by 1967 the psychiatrist in Britain was an authority figure ripe for undermining by comic theatrical treatment.12 If Lovesick presents a radical view of the damaging role of psychiatry in the field of sexuality, Churchill goes into altogether more controversial territory with her exploration of psychiatry and gender issues in her reworking of the case of Daniel Paul Schreber. In Schreber’s Nervous Illness (1972) Churchill is arguably less critical of the role of the psychiatrist than she is in Lovesick. Schreber, by most standards, is genuinely ill, and his antipathy towards his previous psychiatrist, Professor Flechsig, appears to be the product of that illness. The occasional interposed commentaries on Schreber’s mental health given by Weber, his current psychiatrist within the real time of the play, are measured and humane in tone. Of course, Flechsig and Weber, unlike Hodge, are not comic caricatures but portraits of real historical figures, and the play consists of extracts selected almost verbatim from Ida MacAlpine and Richard Hunter’s translation of Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (Schreber, 1955). Indeed, the structure of the play is governed by having been selected and intercut from a psychological textbook. Long speeches from Schreber himself are interrupted by taunts and comments from the rays that torment him and from God. At intervals, sections of formal reports from his psychiatrist and from the judge responsible for deciding whether Schreber is to be released from hospital are intercut, and there are remarkable similarities and differences in the language deployed. But considering that Freud wrote up the case, Schreber is an almost irresistibly anti-Freudian character in a number of respects: he is a man; he refuses to be pathologized to the end; he is undergoing a species of womb envy. When, towards the

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end of the play, he returns to the care of his wife, he is utterly endearing as he rationally defends his remaining symptoms of occasional ‘bellowing’ and transvestism. He can thus be seen as the antithesis of the image of the woman pathologized by Freudian or some varieties of post-Freudian psychiatry, whose reactions to child sexual abuse, for example, would be dismissed in the form of a new pathology of penis envy. Amelia Howe Kritzer makes the observation that the play ‘initiates an exploration by Churchill of the interplay between gender division and power relations. It is the first of many works in which Churchill would address questions of gender.’(Kritzer, 1991: 32) Indeed, this play can be regarded a crucial milestone in the development of Churchill’s corpus of work because of its radical engagement with the politics of gender. For in Schreber’s case, it is not an emergent femininity per se which constitutes the nervous illness, but rather the desire to achieve the best of both worlds, in which a man seeks to become a more complete human being by a process of adopting feminine characteristics and losing the more polarized of their masculine counterparts. But, for Schreber, the polarities are simply too extreme to be borne, as evidenced by his remarkable words:  One morning while still in bed I had the highly peculiar feeling that it really must be rather pleasant to be a woman submitting to intercourse. This idea was so foreign to my whole nature that if I had been fully awake I would have rejected it with indignation. (Churchill, 1990: 62) These two sentences demonstrate the conflict within Schreber. His ‘it really must be rather pleasant’ is relaxed, perhaps feminine in tone, contrasting acutely with the almost forensic ‘a woman submitting to intercourse’. The ‘submitting’13 alone carries a great burden by implication of patriarchal attitudes towards female sexuality. Then there is a marked retreat into the conventional and masculine in his ‘foreign to my whole nature’. However, it is not merely the choice of words which is revealing at this point, but also the underlying irrationality. Clearly, the idea cannot be foreign to Schreber’s nature, or it would not have occurred to him at all. In short, he is denying the existence of those parts of his nature capable of conceiving the idea of the attractiveness to him of adopting a passive sexual role. Had he ‘been fully awake [he] would have rejected [the idea] with indignation’. But as he was not fully awake, he did not reject it. His sleeping self, his subconscious perhaps, does not reject the idea of being penetrated at all, and certainly does not reject it ‘with indignation’. One view of what is going on here might be that Schreber is fantasizing about passive homosexual sex; this certainly seems to be the view of Schreber’s case taken by Freud. In the introduction to their translation of Schreber’s Memoirs, MacAlpine and Hunter report that: Freud interpreted Schreber’s illness as the outcome of conflict over unconscious homosexuality: an upsurge of unconscious homosexuality was unacceptable to Schreber’s personality because of its implied castration threat, and the ensuing struggle led to his mental illness and withdrawal from reality. (Schreber, 1955: 10)

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However, while this may be a compelling view of Schreber in purely psychoanalytical terms, it risks setting at nought the very important gender conflict he is experiencing. That it is a gender conflict rather than suppressed homosexuality seeking to come to the surface is demonstrated elsewhere in the play, when Schreber’s ‘male genitals have withdrawn into my body’ (Churchill, 1990a: 65). Also, ‘I am preoccupied with changing into a woman’, and ‘I must imagine myself as man and woman in one person having intercourse with myself’. On one reading of the play Schreber is the archetype of the successful male, but one for whom such conventional success is not of itself enough to provide fulfilment. What Schreber needs is to embody attributes that have conventionally been ascribed exclusively to the female sex. The idea of the male finding completeness and fulfilment by the hegemonic adoption of female characteristics is familiar enough from at least as far back as The Oresteia. What is different with Schreber, however, is his preparedness to engage in two-way traffic, whereby he not merely adopts female characteristics to add to his pre-existing male persona, but is prepared to lose male characteristics in exchange – metaphorically his ‘unmanning’, in the word used by the translators, or the withdrawal of his male genitals into his body. The attempt, however, is fraught with danger. The rise of feminist thinking, coupled with the pioneering gender-fucking of some of the gay activists of the 1970s, has made it possible to avoid, without undue discomfort, some of the limitations imposed by polarized gender stereotypes. However, to essay a similar avoidance in haut-bourgeois Germany in the 1890s was an altogether more difficult matter: hence the acute distress experienced by Schreber in making the attempt. There is also the external regulatory function of psychiatry, a role familiar from the description, for example, of the ‘hysterization of women’s bodies’ and the ‘psychiatrization of perverse pleasures’ in Foucault’s History of Sexuality (Foucault, 1981: 104–5). Even in the context of the present day, moves by women to achieve equality of power with men are widely viewed with far more sympathy and acceptance than the more radical moves by some men to shed power in order to participate in the creation of a new set of concepts of what gender is or should be. Schreber’s reversal is not merely concomitant with the rejection of his position near the pinnacle of the patriarchal hierarchy, but perhaps an intrinsic part of the process of self-feminization he is undergoing. While the erotic aspect of Schreber’s physical fantasy of getting fucked by God is unambiguous, there are unstated erotics associated simply with the loss of power. To be done to rather than to be doing, even in arenas far removed from the bedroom, is a common-enough male erotic fantasy, and one with a long literary history. To take this a stage further, can Schreber’s perceived relations both with his psychiatrists and with God be seen as the acting out of a masochistic fantasy? Indeed, the adoption of a conventional female role of ‘submitting to intercourse’ may be not so much the cause of Schreber’s subsequent troubles, as the first stage of an exercise in masochism of which submission to God and to psychiatry are the necessary next stages. Be that as it may, in Schreber’s Nervous Illness Churchill provides an impressive portrayal of the power of patriarchy to inflict pain on transgressors in the area of gender, and of how psychiatry can be complicit in this process.

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Thus, a complex set of concerns about psychiatry was emerging through the 1970s among feminist playwrights in particular, and in the feminist movement in general. For example, in Spare Rib in 1976 Frances Seton describes both the beneficial effect upon her of undergoing psychotherapy, and her own suspicions and those of others of psychotherapeutic techniques. ‘Feminists have exposed the power structure in the patient-doctor relationship of psychoanalytic (Freudian) theory which is the basis of all other theories’, and ‘in feminist and other radical critiques, psychology is seen to propound an idea of women that is false, oppressive and closely related to the maintenance of patriarchal society.’ But noting the fact that she had very nearly been deterred altogether from seeking therapy, and that the therapy with which she ultimately engaged had, in fact, proved extremely helpful, Seton takes the stance that the pervasive hostility to psychotherapy among feminists was ultimately disabling. She clearly recognizes the need for a feminist critique of the psychotherapeutic tradition, particularly insofar as it is thoroughly rooted in Freudian theory. Seton’s response is to advocate a new approach to psychotherapy, whereby a feminist standpoint could be developed that would recognize the therapeutic benefits to the subject, given a sympathetic practitioner.14 Sexuality Alongside the celebration of motherhood and the critique of psychiatry, the exploration of the potential of women’s sexuality represents a third major characteristic of the emerging female canon, one which is often counterpoised against motherhood. Perhaps a crude trade-off of sexual pleasure against personal fulfilment through motherhood can be described as a continuing perplexity throughout the period in question. But even considered independently of motherhood, sexuality is a major theme. Sue-Ellen Case observes that ‘in the past thirty years of women’s playwriting sexual issues have taken the stage’, and discusses a number of plays which ‘have carefully, for the critique and therefore aid of women, precisely sketched the workings of oppressive uses of sexuality’ (Case, 1991: 238). A chronological development is visible among women playwrights: the depth and radical potential of the presentation of sexuality increases from the late 1950s through the 1970s and beyond. Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (1979) mounted a particularly searching and committed examination of sexuality, and initiated a different cultural critique from those of plays such as Gems’s Queen Christina, though still with gender politics to the fore. Apart from using a rather different set of parallels, Churchill also made strides in new areas of theatrical form, with her extraordinary use of timeshifts and cross-gender casting, offering, in effect, a new theatrical vocabulary for the presentation of gender political issues. Cloud Nine’s Act 2 manifesto statement of the power of sexuality to enable the establishment of a constructive self-identity remains persuasive over twenty years after the terms of gender political debate are perceived to have moved on. Out of the polemical theatre of the mid-1970s, Churchill developed a sophisticated form in which song, fast-moving comic stage action and naturalistic expressions of deep-seated emotion come together to considerable effect. Her range of characters provides her with the opportunity to create a complex mosaic of cultural critique, and the sophistication of her treatment makes for a compelling play. For example, the relationship between Edward and Gerry is shown to be based on a pantomime role play, which emulates conventional marriage and hence is doomed. This foreshadows, though in the area of sexuality, Churchill’s use of

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Marlene in Top Girls as a warning to women against seeking to accommodate themselves to the working patterns and behaviours established by patriarchy. And while the need for new forms of gay relationships had previously been demonstrated in plays such as Gay Sweatshop’s Mr X, the dazzling layering of dramatic action and dialogue in Cloud Nine took the presentation of the political debate to new heights. Cloud Nine’s significance for the development of the gender political debate is most firmly rooted in the character of Betty. The only character to transfer as an adult from the late nineteenth century of Act 1 to the 1970s setting of Act 2, Betty demonstrates that adults as well as children can grow and change their lives for the better. What is especially significant about Betty, though, is that her sexuality is the most important factor in stabilizing her when she finds it difficult to adjust to the new demands and freedoms she encounters. Unquestionably, Churchill makes a large claim for the power of sexuality when she gives the stage to Betty’s amalgamation in Act II with her Act I self at the close of the play, highlighting the significance of her discovery of masturbation. Women’s sexuality was (and is) an area crying out for reclamation from male colonization, and large claims in women’s writing for the theatre were certainly required. That said, Cloud Nine’s sustained political engagement enables it to transcend the dismissively insubstantial role ascribed to it by critics who regard it as presenting a simplistic manifesto for sexual liberation. It also serves to demonstrate, in my view, how much further men have to travel than women do in achieving self-discovery.15 Like Cloud Nine, Sharman MacDonald’s When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout (1984) explores the possibilities for women of achieving a measure of autonomy over their sexuality, and in this regard refers glancingly to the potential of masturbation. Here, female autonomy is directly counterpoised with having children. Near the beginning of the play, Morag is nagging her 32-year-old daughter about having a child: ‘A wee head to hold in my hand. A wee head, Fiona’, and, less positively, ‘A woman’s body is a clock that runs down very rapidly’ (MacDonald, 1985: 9). As the play goes on it transpires that Fiona has had a child at the age of 15, in a complex attempted transaction with God and her mother. That early experience of motherhood has largely failed Fiona, and now the question is whether she or her childhood friend Vari has achieved the greater degree of happiness. The similarities between the two as children are demonstrated in a series of scenes that convey their childhood sex games in a remarkably unembarrassing way on stage. At the age of 32, however, their paths have long since diverged: Vari is married, uneducated, has three children and feels that her body has been ruined by childbirth; Fiona has no children – after her first which had been adopted from the outset – has a degree, is unmarried and is proud of her body. Which of the two is the happier? MacDonald leaves her audience to reach its own conclusions. Where she is more willing to provide answers is in the area of sexuality. Morag’s threats of hellfire if pubescent Fiona continues to masturbate have evidently proved effective, with Fiona deprived of an important source of pleasure and exploration. Similarly, the transactional nature of the exchanges surrounding childbirth are revealing. If adolescent Fiona has a baby, her mother won’t go away. If adult Fiona has a baby, it will be the joy of Morag’s old age. If adult Fiona does not have a baby, her body will age and the opportunity will be lost. The older woman’s refrain is childbirth good, sexual activity bad: ‘I like men. Not sex, you understand. That’s dirty. Your father was like an elephant, if he got it once in ten years he could consider himself lucky.’ (MacDonald, 1985: 24) At least the younger women seem to have a choice in the matter of

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childbirth, a choice presumably unavailable to Morag, with her utterly repressed notion of sexual desire as an entirely masculine construct, in which a woman’s role is either to grant the man his sexual wishes or to deny them; there seems to be no question of Morag having a positive sexual desire of her own, unlike Fiona. Vari serves as a species of awful warning in that she may not so much have exercised a choice, but have simply reverted to being the conventional woman whose sexual identity is entirely determined by her role as a mother. Ultimately, Fiona is the sole ray of hope for a more liberated approach to female sexuality in the play, and a rather muted beacon at that. A more liberating approach to women’s sexuality occurs in Nell Dunn’s Steaming (1981). Perhaps improbably for a woman who complains of being a victim of her menfolk, one of the lead characters, Josie, gives a wonderfully earthy and enthusiastic account of her assertion of her sexual rights:  He made me wild last night, we was having it and I was really getting into it and enjoying it when he’s come. ‘Hold up!,’ I says, ‘What about me?’ Well, after that I made him plate me for an hour till I came, every time he lifts his head I push it back down – I wouldn’t even let him up to breathe…I can feel it from the bottom of my toes to the top of my skull. It’s as if something pealed right through my body…I hadn’t come like that for months. It did me the world of good. (Dunn, 1981: 26) Unlike the masturbatory autonomy enjoyed by Betty in Cloud Nine, Josie is here celebrating the achievement of sex on combative, but ultimately equal, terms with a man, to her physical satisfaction. An entirely positive polemic underlies Josie’s speech, one that brings a personal politics back into view. Sexuality as redemption is an important recurrent theme in some of Timberlake Wertenbaker’s plays. In Our Country’s Good (1988) she celebrates the power of both theatre and sexuality to regenerate doomed lives. Her principal dealings with sexuality in the play are refracted through the experiences of men, but there is also a revealing scene of sexual equality between Mary and Ralph:  She begins to undress, from the top. Ralph: I’ve never looked at the body of a woman before. Mary: Your wife? Ralph: It wasn’t right to look at her. Let me see you. Mary: Yes. Let me see you. Ralph: Yes. He begins to undress himself. (Wertenbaker, 1991: 78–9)

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Here, sexuality enables Ralph to escape from the constraints of respectability that have prevented him from achieving a fulfilling relationship with his wife. Mary is escaping the slur of transportation to Australia and the constraints of poverty. The two people meet in the middle in a new and potentially rich relationship, conducted on equal terms. An important exploration of sexuality is also conducted in Our Country’s Good in terms of the contrasting and converging development of Ralph, on the one hand, and Wisehammer, on the other. Wisehammer delivers a poetic but grossly physical description in Act 1, scene ii, of the need for the convicts on the voyage to seek solace in sex: ‘at night what is there to do but seek English cunt, warm, moist, soft, oh the comfort, the comfort of the lick, the thrust into the nooks, the crannies of the crooks of England’ (Wertenbaker, 1991: 1). Wisehammer’s development in the course of the play is, to some extent, signposted by the contrast between this initial description of sex as an escapist experience (so far removed from emotional involvement as to make the partner apparently irrelevant) through to his seeking to establish a partnership with Mary in Act II, scene vii. In parallel with this, Ralph is developing in the reverse direction: in Act I, scene iv, he writes to his fiancée that he, ‘On Sunday as usual, kissed your dear beloved image a thousand times.’ (Wertenbaker, 1991: 6) By the end of Act II, scene x, Ralph has escaped from this affected sentimentality, and is engaging in an honest, open and more or less equal sexual relationship with Mary. So far as the main thrust of the play is concerned, the involvement with rehearsals of the play within the play has enabled both Wisehammer and Ralph to develop from their very different starting points to such a degree that they end up being in competition with one another to embark on a relationship – apparently on reasonably equal terms – with the same woman. Sexuality thus serves as a microcosm of the growth that the characters experience. Wisehammer moves from the narrow confines of the physical experience of sex to a rational approach to partnership. Ralph moves from the role playing involved in late-eighteenth-century middle-class sentimental dalliance to an exploration of the body on apparently free and equal physical terms with Mary. This underlying theme of sexuality provides an important counterweight to the play’s more obvious concerns with theatre and the potency of language. Susan Carlson begins to make this point by first quoting Wertenbaker herself: ‘Our Country’s Good was a plea for the value of theatre and because the characters discovered this value for themselves, it ended up on an up note.’ But Carlson then sounds a warning note: ‘A more negative reading of the conclusion of Our Country’s Good finds that the ending underwrites the inequities of colonialism. In other words, the play ends by reproducing the dominant ideology at the expense of a social critique.’16 Considered solely in terms of language, then, the liberation of the characters of the play may just be a liberation into the more agreeable playpen of the bourgeoisie. Only when those subordinate aspects of the play concerning sexuality are taken into consideration does it become apparent that the ‘dominant ideology’ is indeed altered in the process of the characters’ progression towards personal liberation. That is to say, Ralph’s naked body is to become the object of Mary’s gaze just as much as hers is of his. This physical symbol of a white male changing sufficiently to be complicit in his own shift out of a hierarchy in which he has held a comparatively dominant position is vital in order to gain an appreciation of the triumphant – perhaps utopian – achievement of the play.

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Sexuality is very much to the fore in Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale (1988). In scene ii part of Philomele’s enjoyment of life – the happiness which causes tragedy to be visited upon her – lies in her celebration of ‘Tigers, rivers, serpents, here, in my stomach, a little below.’ And ‘I want to run my hands down bronzed skin.’ (Wertenbaker, 1989: 2–3) Philomele’s transgressive activism in asserting a female sexuality brings on to herself the retributive force of patriarchy. And it is the nature of male sexuality which Philomele is questioning in scene xv: ‘I was the cause, wasn’t I…My body bleeding, my spirit ripped open, and I am the cause…It was your act. It was you. I caused nothing.’ Then, having firmly established where the responsibility for the rape lies, Philomele goes on to describe Tereus’s sexual being: ‘a man who could screech such quick and ugly pleasure, a man of jelly beneath his hard skin.’ (Wertenbaker, 1989: 34–5) The disillusionment that Philomele experiences over the nature of sexuality is devastating for her. Whereas her own sexuality is pleasurable and fulfilling as long as it is entirely within her control (by implication, masturbatory), the interaction between male and female sexualities in this case is both disastrous and disgusting. Indeed, it is the act of Tereus attempting to colonize Philomele’s sexuality which is so destructive: the loss of female autonomy is enforced by the male to appalling effect. Wertenbaker’s The Grace of Mary Traverse (1985) also foregrounds sexuality as one of the elements involved in self-discovery. Mary’s odyssey is an exploration of essentially masculine exploitativeness. Certainly, that is the theme of the sexual encounter between Mary and Mr Hardlong in Act II, scene iii, which is entirely a commercial transaction. Part of the difficulty for Mary, however, is that by masculinizing herself she has excised female vulnerability from her persona, and so no longer appeals to the more predatory instincts of men. The more obviously vulnerable Sophie is constantly being preferred by men to Mary. In Act II, scene iv, Mary seeks to counter the role playing of those around her with a candid description of her sex:  Why don’t you look and see what it’s like? When you talk of sulphurous pits, deadly darkness, it’s your own imagination you see. Look. It’s solid, rich, gently shaped, fully coloured. The blood flows there on the way to the heart. It answers tenderness with tenderness, there is no gaping void here, only soft bumps, corners, cool convexities. (Wertenbaker, 1989: 89) But this physical reality is no match for the image that the men around Mary want to perpetuate. As Giles Traverse says in Act III, scene i, ‘I want a woman, not a personality.’ (Wertenbaker, 1989: 96) This attitude among men limits Mary’s sexual experience – arguably to her advantage – to the commercial sphere. She rules herself out of playing the weak and exploited woman, and instead becomes the exploiter. It is a grim summation of the options open to men and women, and one which uses sexuality as a symbol of the constraints imposed by conventional gender roles. It is notable that Wertenbaker is consistently more physical – genital, even – in those of her plays that are set in the past than she is in those set in the present. Wisehammer’s initial speech in Our

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Country’s Good, Procne’s initial ‘sponge’ speech in The Love of the Nightingale, and, above all, Mary’s description in The Grace of Mary Traverse of her own genitalia are all physical in a way that is completely unmatched in those of Wertenbaker’s plays which have a modern setting. Does Wertenbaker need to adopt pastiche Greek tragedy or restoration comedy as a format before she is able to confront issues of sexuality? To the extent that issues of sexuality require physical description or depiction, the answer seems to be, yes. Indeed, it may be helpful for the audience/ reader to be distanced by the shift into the past so that grossly physical descriptions do not distract unduly from the main themes of the plays. It may also be that a contemporary character, in order to carry conviction, must share with the audience/reader certain cultural conventions, including a degree of reluctance to discuss physical or sexual matters openly. Certainly, the distancing effect of the time-shift enables Wertenbaker to put into the mouths of her characters what might be unsayable in a strictly modern setting. In the case of Mary Traverse, though, it is more a matter of staging business that would be difficult to present in a contemporary setting than of speaking. The use of speech to depict sexual acts had already become acceptable on stage in a contemporary setting, as, for example, in Steaming. In any case, the time-shift may be part of a more significant avoidance by Wertenbaker of realism. Ruby Cohn notes Wertenbaker’s antipathy to naturalism, and quotes her thus: ‘My plays are an attempt to get away from the smallness of naturalism, from enclosed rooms to open spaces, and also to get ideas away from the restraints of closed spaces to something wider.’(Cohn, 1991: 191) Sexuality and space, then, emerge as important issues in Wertenbaker’s plays, as they are in women’s plays of the period more generally. Time is an issue as well, however, as further observed by Cohn:  Wertenbaker claims that she ‘found the eighteenth century a valid metaphor’, but she does not reveal for what, as she leaves questions unanswered. Any period of history may be a ‘valid metaphor’ for our time, when we are perhaps more acutely conscious than ever before of unanswered questions, too often shrugged away as unanswerable. (Cohn, 1991: 194) However far-ranging that perception of the time-shift as metaphor may be in its potential, it is its impact on the more limited areas of physical space, and the presentation of women’s sexuality, that is particularly striking in Wertenbaker’s plays. Space Physical space is an essential ingredient of almost any staged play, of course, but there are some aspects of the deployment of space by women writers that are worth looking at in isolation. Hanna Scolnicov makes the point:  Analysis of the theatrical space reveals not only the general ideology of the play, but, more specifically, its attitude to the place of women in society…woman is so closely associated with space that almost any articulation of space on stage or in the play is directly expressive of her position, her life style, her personality. Also, ‘The changing spatial conventions of the theatre are faithful expressions of the growing awareness of the specificity of gender differences and the changing attitudes to woman and

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her sexuality.’ (Scolnicov, 1994: xiii) A productive example of space expressively articulated on stage is the boxing ring, used in Olwen Wymark’s The Gymnasium (1971), and again as a setting in Claire Luckham’s Trafford Tanzi (1981). But whereas Wymark used the ring as a physical arena for the release of male inhibitions, Luckham introduces a visual account of the feminist struggle by staging the battle of the sexes around the ring, a shift in theatrical practice which reflects the political changes that had occurred in Britain during the 1970s. Here is a woman not merely daring to enter the almost exclusively masculine space of the ring, but taking men on in that space and defeating them. Interiority sometimes gives rise to a much more defensive negotiation of space. Consider, for example, Maureen Duffy’s Rites (1969) and Nell Dunn’s Steaming (1981). Rites is explicitly a reworking of The Bacchae, in which the action is set in the confining female privacy of a public lavatory – enclosed, windowless, perhaps even underground, ‘the last wholly female space in our culture’, as Hanna Scolnicov points out (Scolnicov, 1994: 155). But this is a space morally polluted by the atmosphere of prevailing distrust. Duffy herself says of the supervisor, Ada, that, like Agave, she: has also denied life by translating sex and love into money and revenge…In a world of stereotypes and attitudes (men do this, women are like that; feminine reaction, masculine response) she is society’s product if not victim…In the very moment when the women have got their own back on men for their typecasting in an orgy of violence, they find they have destroyed themselves. (Duffy, 1969: 6–7) And Ada’s attitude towards men and sexuality is apparent from the start: ‘you’ve got to tart it up a bit to sell it high. After all, the goods are all the same when they get the wrapping off. You’ve got to make them pay for the wrapping off.’ (Duffy, 1969: 11) The increasingly ritualistic exchanges among the women in the lavatory have an oppressive taint from the start, as when the three office girls chorus ‘Only men, only men, only men do that’, in response to graffiti in one of the cubicles. The attitudes of the women have been formed in a patriarchal society, as evidenced by the two women in their sixties speaking about the things they do for their husbands, such as picking out all the bones from a piece of fish. The thrust of the play, then, is that oppression has begotten oppression, and that women should distrust their more antagonistic reactions to patriarchal oppression if they are to avoid disaster. In the enclosed physical universe of the lavatory Duffy increases the sense of menace, when first the little boy and then the old woman become the centre of the women’s attention. The way is thus prepared for the bloody denouement:  Ada: Look a bloody man. In here. Spying on us. (They stop and all turn panting towards the figure, which tries to back away.) He’s trying to run for it. Don’t let him out. You think you can get away with murder, that we’ve no place we can call our own. Coming down here to see what we get up to when we’re alone. Bastard Men!

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Chorus (Whispering menacingly): Bastard Men! (…frenzied activity…a tattered and broken figure wrapped in bloody clothing…) (Duffy, 1969: 33–4) The women of Rites get it terribly wrong as they act in defence of their enclosed lavatorial space. It is no Pentheus who is killed but a woman wearing masculine clothes. The murder is directed not against a real threat from outside but against a woman who happens not to conform to the expectations of those on the inside. Thus, defence of women’s space gives rise to desecration, as non-conformity is punished, in a colourable analogy with bigotry against transvestism or other forms of gender bending. The constraining nature of the space serves as a metaphor for a more general narrowness in the women’s attitudes towards men, as oppressive attitudes towards women have, in their turn, bred a narrow and oppressive outlook. In Steaming the retreat of the women into the baths is far from being a cause for celebration. This interior space can only serve as a temporary sanctuary because it is threatened with closure; it constitutes perhaps more of a prison than a sanctuary, with the looming shadow of Bill appearing menacingly through the glass door. The solidarity achieved by the women accompanies a realization that all their problems are caused by men, as an improbable alliance is formed between able, sensible, middle-class Nancy, and able, feckless, working-class Josie. However, their defiance of the outside world appears to be more a cause for concern than celebration, in the sense that the women are compelled to retreat into a private space. This paradox or subversion of the play’s no doubt excellent intentions was reinforced in production. ‘It must…be one of the few feminist plays to have brought large numbers of male chauvinists in, attracted by the fact that the cast members are nude for much of the time.’ (Berney, 1994b: 77) In both cases the enclosed space is oppressive and unliberating in effect, whatever other intentions Nell Dunn, in particular, may have had. In addition to physical space on stage, virtual space has also been used effectively by women playwrights of the period. A challenging symbolic deployment of space occurs in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Three Birds Alighting on a Field (1991), in which the blank canvas of the painting being sold at the beginning of the play simultaneously represents the space within which new approaches to living may be undertaken, as well as the futility of artistic endeavours. The canvas is both a positive and negative space at the same time. Act I, scene i is entitled ‘Portrait of Biddy in profile’. Biddy describes herself, quite unemotionally, as ‘like the final touches of a well-decorated house. It gives pleasure, but you don’t notice it.’ (Wertenbaker, 1992: 3) She is, then, the same kind of tabula rasa as the painting in the prelude to the play, a space in which the imagination – in this case Biddy’s own – can operate creatively. Another view of Biddy might be as a space in which malicious play can subvert, undermine and degenerate, and the play implies that this is what generations of men have done to generations of women. Biddy is also typical of a cohort of women who have allowed

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themselves to be persuaded by men that a blank canvas, filled by men at will, is preferable to autonomy for women, with its attendant risk of repeating Eve’s betrayal. The primeval lie holds sway in the Biddy of Act I, her symbolic interior space a mere void. She is a disembodied voice representing undemanding comfort:  England still had women who went to good schools and looked after large houses in the country, horses, dogs, children, that sort of thing, that was my voice. Tony – that’s my first husband – said he found my conversation comforting background noise when he read the papers. (Wertenbaker, 1992: 3) While this perhaps says more about the nature of Tony than it does about Biddy herself, Biddy goes on to talk about her perception of her own boringness to other people, and that the one interesting thing about her is her parvenu second husband’s enormous wealth. And so the play goes on, a funny, generally emotionally detached drama about finding an identity through conforming to an image, or allowing oneself to be shaped. Central to the play is the development of Biddy, through her involvement with the art market as she struggles to avoid becoming embroiled in another divorce. Susan Carlson quotes Wertenbaker herself:  Three Birds was a plea for the value of Art, but showed how Art is also corrupted by the price put on it by a cynical society. The ending was more tentative, although Biddy was definitely transformed and deepened by her encounter with painting. (Aston and Reinelt, 2000: 138) Moving in the art world, Biddy eventually develops a new confidence – sufficient to enable her to hold her own in the face of Stephen’s onslaught in scene xi, through to her ability to reject Yo-Yo towards the end of the play, and to reflect back on her life in terms of art-criticism in the final scene, having found some measure of identity and contentment as Stephen’s model. If nothing more, Biddy has at least been instrumental in determining the nature of the man who will shape her future relations with canvases, as she ousts the three birds from the painting of the play’s title. While a space may have been found for Biddy to occupy, the woman in the play who manages to create a space for herself whose shape is not dictated by men is Julia. Abandoning the useless if amiable Jeremy to his fate, Julia sets out on her own to establish a gallery to be run on her terms. She is a Wertenbaker hero, reprised in The Break of Day in the person of April. Quiet, competent, and self-sufficient, Wertenbaker’s best women operate in the unemotional backwaters of her plays, from which they manage to hold together both themselves and the world around them. This is a strangely traditional women’s space, in the sense that these women are empowered not to take the initiative, but to provide sanity and stability – ideal mother figures occupying the virtual space that stands behind the centre and holds it in place. Caryl Churchill’s use of space is also partly symbolic. In Cloud Nine she draws a parallel between British colonial adventures in Africa and men’s hegemonization of the entire arena of gender and sexuality. Ownership of physical space becomes identified with possession

The Emergence of the Female Canon |   47

of sexual freedom, and Churchill ultimately celebrates the possibilities represented by sexual freedom, as indicated above. But Churchill also used colonialism as a motif in her earlier play, The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution (apparently unperformed but written in about 1972). Curiously, the use of space here is translated not into sexuality but into psychiatry. Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist, mediates the breakdown of the relationship between his patient, Françoise, and her parents, arguably representatives of Algeria and colonial France respectively. This seems to be a guardedly optimistic account of the potential of psychotherapy to generate a productive mediation for victims of gender conflict. Space, and its appropriation, continued to be a dramatic issue, as demonstrated in Phyllis Nagy’s Never Land (1998). In contrast to Nell Dunn’s Steaming, in which the private women’s bath space is threatened and encroached upon by the male-dominated outside world, Nagy opens Never Land with the woman’s bath space encroaching on and threatening public living space. From the outset, Elisabeth’s nakedness on stage is asserted as her right, her decision, her threat, to an extent that made it hard to imagine much in the way of erotic voyeurism among members of the audience. (Yet old habits die hard in some cases, with Robert Gore Langton reviewing the play thus: ‘We kick off with Elisabeth in her bath – the lovely Michelle Fairley performing stark naked.’)17 The conventional dominance of man over woman and the clothed over the naked is reversed from the start:  Henri: 

I’ve told you not to fill that tub in here.

Elisabeth: And I’ve told you I don’t bathe in the out-of-doors. It’s humiliating, not having proper plumbing. Henri: 

This is not. This is – it’s not decent.

Elisabeth:  There’s nothing indecent about naked women… – Henri does not move, but he does divert his gaze from Elisabeth’s nudity. – Elisabeth:  Hand me my robe. Henri does so without looking at her…Henri, out of a deep embarrassment…(Nagy, 1988: 10–11) By going on the offensive with her matter-of-fact nudity in the public living-room in the public theatre, Elisabeth then reappropriates, as it were, Laura Mulvey’s male gaze,18 to considerable effect. Elisabeth does a similar thing with her lover Michael, goading him into the use of verbal

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abuse and the threat of physical violence. The juxtaposition of routine social pleasantries with the rawest of emotions rawly expressed exposes both the serviceability of social hypocrisy and its perilous concealment of truth. This takes Nagy’s critique of hypocrisy a stage beyond that of Orton thirty years before, and brings her and her audience into difficult linguistic territory. Aleks Sierz describes Never Land as: a world where ordinary conversations are suddenly interrupted by cries from the heart, where mundane scenes quickly turn quirky – and where deep gulps of emotion drown out reason and rationality…What Nagy does is to duck and dive between the crevices of the said and the unsaid in normal dialogue, frequently interrupting social chit-chat or familial bickering with great blasts of emotion or fragments of dreams.19 This experimentation with new linguistic forms is a trait that Nagy shares with some of Caryl Churchill’s work in the 1990s, especially Blue Heart (1997), and may come to represent a territory characteristic of plays by women as gender and sexuality per se lose their centrality. As well as dealing with space and linguistic form, Never Land also delineates sexuality as the subject of a continuing dispute that is complex and shattering. In its treatment of female sexuality, Never Land has gone to a place beyond politics and polemic. Instead, the dangerous sadomasochistic nature of Jane’s dream fantasies enters a psychological territory that it shares to a degree with Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996), and Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (1998). Finally, though, it is the difference between sexuality and love that is central to Never Land, presented in a complex, unresolved way. All the drama in the lives of Henri, Jane, and Elisabeth is wiped out with their suicide/murder pact at the end of the play. The simple honesty of the love of which they finally and unambiguously speak provides the justification for their having existed, while necessitating their deaths because of that love’s incompatibility with the reality of life in the world. Again paralleling Cleansed, love and loyalty are depicted as the principal victims of a modern world of self-gratification and exploitation. Spatial relations are particularly important in Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995), in that there is a complete reversal of empowerment over the course of the play, according to who is doing what in the space. For as long as Ian and Cate are performing a conventional role play in the hotel room, it is Ian who is dominant, verbally and physically abusing Cate. Cate’s only escape from Ian’s abuse is to enter a fugue state of unconsciousness brought about by her epileptic illness. Her verbal directness about this disconcerts Ian and undermines his clichéd attempts at romantic speech, to considerable comic effect:  Ian:  When I’m with you I can’t think about anything else. You take me to another place. Cate:  It’s like that when I have a fit. (Kane, 2001: 22) Cate’s move into the bathroom appears at first to be a step into a kind of ultra-feminine interior space within an interior, which makes her wholly vulnerable. In fact, she has climbed out of the

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window and taken a degree of control over her situation. Meanwhile, Ian’s ludicrous attempt to use a series of supposedly encoded knocks to ensure the security of the bedroom serves to place him in the power of the soldier. Ian’s role as guardian of the space is demolished as the sham nature of his assumed masculine fantasy is exposed. In the end Cate becomes the provider for both, as a result of her moving into the outside world. The costs of her doing so are evidently considerable, as attested by the ‘blood seeping from between her legs’ on her return (Kane, 2001: 60), and her loss of innocence is underlined by her eating the sausage and ‘wash[ing] it down with gin’ (Kane, 2001: 61). Ultimately, though, Cate’s ability to overcome the limitations of feminized space permits an arguably redemptive ending to the play. Ian’s spectacular degradation towards the end apparently ends as he ‘dies with relief’ (p.60), and yet he is still alive, or has been reborn. The old abusive Ian has, at any rate, been replaced by someone capable of thanking Cate for providing him with food and drink. His attempts at masculine heroics and bravado are no longer a possibility, while Cate’s role as provider is a necessary move away from her earlier dependency. Perhaps both now have the possibility of moving forward, following the enforced abandonment of their previously polarized and constraining gender roles. Conclusion Sarah Kane’s plays exemplify a change of emphasis that took place in the mid-to- late 1990s from themes that had been prominent in plays by women from the 1950s onwards. Beyond Sarah Kane’s work, the assertion of women’s rights is taken – probably incorrectly – to be a thing of the past, the battles for equality having been largely achieved. Motherhood has been presented as the desperate preoccupation of some of the women characters in Wertenbaker’s The Break of Day, paralleling the more and more prominently reported and considered issues surrounding fertility treatments. Space has been asserted as women’s property as much as men’s in Nagy’s Never Land, a battle won in progressive circles but still being fought in the mainstream. A partial resolution of some of these themes had taken place by the mid-1990s, with a tendency for some women’s writing to enter the radical portion of the mainstream. Indeed, there may be an argument that there is no longer a sensible distinction to be drawn between women’s writing for the stage and that of men. So far as the spatial motif is concerned, Hanna Scolnicov had this to say: ‘Women’s special links with space, based on her privileged position in the home, have come to an end. Space is no longer a woman.’20 Psychiatry was also no longer regarded as the symbolic preserve of patriarchy, and no longer featured among plays by women to any discernibly greater extent than in plays by men. Meanwhile, sexuality remained the site of perhaps the greatest unease, in the painful explorations of Nagy and Kane. That said, perhaps it is linguistic experimentation that was destined to be seen as the site of greatest innovation among women playwrights writing in the later 1990s and beyond. Ann Jellicoe’s ‘orchestration of…language’ of the late 1950s, and Olwen Wymark’s strange, alienated dislocation of action and language in the later 1960s may have undergone a cyclical reprise in Nagy and Churchill. Notes   1. Gale, Maggie B. (1998), ‘A Need for Reappraisal: Women Playwrights on the London Stage, 1918–58’, in Goodman and de Gay, pp. 83.   2. Long, Jennie (1998) ‘What Share of the Cake Now? The Employment of Women in the English Theatre (1994)’, in Goodman and de Gay, pp. 104–6.

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  3. At least by association: see Chapter 4, pp. 90.   4. Reinelt, Janelle (2006), ‘Navigating Post-feminism: Writing Out of the Box’, in Aston and Harris pp. 21.   5. Rebecca Prichard, e.g. Yard Gal (1998).   6. The specific figures need to be treated with some caution, as different surveys have generated apparently incompatible data on the proportion of women authors of produced plays at various times. For example, ‘In the survey…it was found that only about 7 per cent of all produced plays in the theatres covered were by women, and of these, productions of Agatha Christie plays accounted for half.’ (Wandor, 1986: 124) The survey she cites must be that published in January 1984 by the Conference of Women Theatre Directors. But the average figure from a study conducted in April 1987 was 22 per cent.   7. Michelene Wandor reviewing Work to Role in Spare Rib, number 45, April 1976, pp. 30–31.   8. Michèle Roberts reviewing Any Woman Can in Spare Rib, number 53, December 1976, p. 38.   9. Christopher Innes, for example, says that ‘Shelagh Delaney wrote A Taste of Honey…to correct what she perceived as insensitivity in the way Rattigan portrayed homosexuality.’ (1992: 93). 10. Indeed Churchill records that the idea for the play had begun to form itself even prior to the 1979 election: ‘in 1979 I started thinking about a play that would have a lot of women characters doing various jobs and of course the same year Thatcher got in for the first time. It took ‘80 and ‘81 to work it out.’ introduction to Churchill (1990). 11. Anonymous foreword to Wymark (1971). 12. First broadcast on 8 April 1967, Lovesick could have influenced the final form of What the Butler Saw. 13. ‘Succumbing’ in the MacAlpine and Hunter text, ‘submitting’ in Sigmund Freud (1958). 14. Frances Seton, ‘Opening Myself to Change’, Spare Rib, number 44, March 1976, pp. 30–2. 15. See Wyllie, Andrew, ‘Caryl Churchill Cloud Nine’ in The Literary Encyclopaedia, http: //www. litencyc.com. 16. Carlson, Susan (2000), ‘Language and Identity in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Plays’ in Aston and Reinelt (2000: 138–9). 17. Langton, Robert Gore, Daily Express, 15 January 1998. 18. Mulvey was concerned with cinema when she identified the active male gaze and the ‘to-be-lookedat-ness’ of women, but similar considerations apply to the theatre. Mulvey, Laura (1990), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Erens, pp. 28–40. 19. Sierz, Aleks, Tribune, 23 January 1998. 20. Scolnicov (1994: 154). The reference is to William Blake’s The Vision of the Last Judgement: ‘Time and Space are real Beings, a Male and a Female. Time is a Man, Space is a Woman, and her Masculine Portion is Death.’

3 Masculine Anxieties

Introduction Three factors seem to have operated in combination to generate a radical insecurity about gender and sexuality among men in Britain in the 1950s. Firstly, some awareness of gender issues was beginning to make itself felt, especially following the publication in 1953 of the English translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Secondly, a longstanding and pervasive British neurosis about male homosexuality had taken a new turn with the formation in 1954 of the Wolfenden Committee. Thirdly, Britain’s role in the World War II, followed by undeniable proof of the ending of the British empire, had generated great confusion in Britain’s national sense of identity. As regards male playwrights, three parallel responses to this masculine anxiety can be identified, which I characterize as follows: hostile masculinity at bay; boy feminists; and menacing clearsightedness. The first two terms are self-explanatory; as to the third, Harold Pinter’s early plays are the most powerful examples. They present a coolly objective evocation of men’s and women’s fears and limitations in an atmosphere of theatrically heightened threat and menace. One section of what follows is devoted to each of the above categories. One of several parallel phenomena that manifested themselves in this cultural environment was that a new generation of men, too young to have acquired a sense of fulfilment, glamour or heroism by participating in the war, and too hidebound to see the emergence of the questioning of conventional gender roles as anything other than a threat, took refuge in raging against what they saw as the dying of patriarchy’s light. Another factor may have been the impact of men returning at the end of the war to employment and home. Lynne Segal describes a ‘political campaign in the late 1940s to return women to the home and increase the population of Britain’ (Segal,1988: 80), and goes on to depict a Britain in which a stifling domesticity was overtaking both women and men. Notoriously, 1956 saw the arrival on stage of Jimmy Porter and his anger, dismissing Rattigan’s genteel angst from centre-stage. Reappraisals of Look Back in Anger in the later 1990s have

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not only pointed out the play’s reactionary misogyny, but have also questioned whether the sweeping impact credited by popular wisdom to the play’s May 1956 production at the Royal Court was ever much more than homophobically inspired hype. While there is considerable polarity between estimates of the play’s significance in both political and theatre historical terms, an increasing degree of consensus is emerging that the theme of masculine embitterment and impotent rage it expresses captured an important aspect of the contemporary zeitgeist. David Hare observes ‘the role forged for the theatre by John Osborne, Joan Littlewood and others of offering a place where the recognizable thoughts and feelings of the time may seem to echo and illuminate its social history.’ (Hare, 1991: 41) Osborne has the status of a reference point for post-war drama in Britain, and that status is reflected in what follows. Jimmy Porter seems to represent a cohort of British men, for whom a unique cocktail of factors was coming together to fuel a sense of rage and frustration: while they had been too young to acquire cachet by fighting in World War II, yet they were expected to participate in the new domestication which was perceived as representing the just deserts of returning heroes. At the same time, a peculiarly masculinist culture was prevalent, a result of the combined effects of the extreme homosociality bred by National Service, a politically determined effort to devalue women in employment and an hysterical national homophobia, fostered by the fall-out from the Burgess and MacLean affair and the adoption in Britain of many of the attitudes of American MacCarthyism. Indeed, the subject of homosexuality was becoming a peculiarly difficult issue, as popular homophobia sat uneasily with the patrician liberalism that fostered the Wolfenden Committee. Also in this post-war era, Britain’s international role was plainly in decline with the end of the empire: the futile attempt to demonstrate national virility represented by the disastrous Suez adventure of 1956 was a symptom, at national level, of the same malaise that British men of a certain age were suffering on the personal level. In theatrical terms, Osborne has become the standard-bearer of this impotent reactionary movement, which raged against the disappearance of pre-war masculine certainties. However, he was by no means alone in literature: a similar misogyny is detectable in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), and Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1957). Given the strength of the factors which could have generated Osborne’s attitudes, as identified in Lynne Segal’s essay, it is perhaps surprising to find other male playwrights of the time adopting entirely different paths. Osborne’s late-1950s opposite number might be taken to be Arnold Wesker, whose Trilogy gave men and women roles as each other’s saviours, and saw hope in the ability to care, politically and personally. Symbolically, then, Osborne and Wesker can be taken to stand respectively for a reactionary and a progressive masculine response to the conditions of the 1950s. The period from the late 1950s to the early 2000s has been punctuated by the ascendancy of one or other of these polarities on the British stage, perhaps indicating a changing approach on the part of men towards the prospect of having to rethink conventional gender roles. If Osborne captured the state of mind of Britain in the 1950s at the individual level, Arnold Wesker achieved this on the political. Wesker displays an inclination to deny his own evident

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feminism: he is surely being disingenuous when he says, ‘As I look back over my work I notice a curious fact: the central characters in most of my plays and stories are women,’ and ‘I’m not aware of being an especial champion of women’s rights…Nor am I homosexual, which might have accounted for this preoccupation with women in my writing.’(Wesker, 1985: 150) Championship of women’s rights, or at least a considerable respect for women and their potential is evident in many of Wesker’s plays. Few other male playwrights have written so many plays in which women play the predominant roles, up to and including a collection of One Woman Plays. It is perhaps telling that these plays seem to have been received with more warmth by women reviewers than by men.1 There is, in any case, a consistent feminism running through much of Wesker’s work, from the Trilogy onwards. In the Trilogy this comes most significantly to the fore in the case of Sarah in Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), and Beatie in Roots (1959). With Osborne and Wesker representing two contrasting responses to the rise of the nonmasculine in the 1950s, Harold Pinter proposed a third way. Wesker acknowledges the influence that Look Back in Anger had on his own work, while Pinter denies that Osborne’s play had any particular influence on him, citing the first London production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as the pivotal theatrical event of the 1950s, as far as he was concerned.2 In gender political terms, then, can Vladimir and Estragon be credited with any very different set of theatrical offspring than Jimmy Porter and Alison? Pinter perhaps represents a more individually theatrical tradition than Wesker, influenced by Beckett rather than Osborne, and achieving an idiosyncratic view of gender politics. Foucaultian power transactions fall precisely within the power play which has come to be regarded as characteristic of Pinter’s work. The manoeuvring for advantage that occurs as part of the power play spares nobody, man or woman, a fact that has given rise to charges of misogyny against Pinter. And misogyny is evident in The Birthday Party (1958), in which Pinter’s treatment of Meg has been regarded as dehumanizing her, in much the same way as Kath is dehumanized in Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964). The 1950s, then, seem to have been regarded as a particularly oppressive era, which Osborne, Wesker and Pinter reacted to in different ways theatrically. Each had his successors, or paved the way for new developments in terms of the way in which male playwrights, in particular, brought to the stage a series of discussions on changing gender roles and their appropriate responses. What follows is a consideration of each of these three strands in turn. While the work of many of those successors clearly represented a move towards a more progressive and constructive outlook as regards the politics of gender, there remained flourishing reactionary forces as well. In British male mass culture from the early 1990s onwards the phenomenon of ‘lad-culture’ or ‘new laddism’ was prominent and much commented on. In essence, this new laddism seems to have been a retreat from the challenge of taking seriously the issues that arise from awareness of gender and sexuality. Tim Edwards sees the phenomenon as being rooted in a particular genre of style magazine: ‘the success of Loaded3 has led other

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titles to drift increasingly towards using New Laddism, as opposed to narcissistic New Mannism, as a means of selling magazines.’ Edwards notes that ‘the recent and reactionary drift of men’s style magazines is increasingly giving cause for concern,’ and goes on to say, ‘where the New Man was caring and sharing…the New Lad is selfish, loutish and inconsiderate to a point of infantile smelliness. He likes drinking, football and fucking in that order of preference… defensively working class which also means defensively masculine.’(Edwards, 1997: 81–2) Thus, the retreat upon which the new lads have engaged is largely into a species of infantilization, whereby men exhibit many of the characteristics of adolescent boys – homosociality, compulsive and compulsory heterosexuality, along with a culture of sporty and competitive hedonism. It is a phenomenon which was prophesied, oddly enough, in Howard Barker’s The Castle (1985), with Stucley’s regression: ‘Gang meets at sunset by the camp! The password is – Don’t tell! Gang meets at sunset and no girls!’ (Barker, 1990: 232) However, The Castle was written in advance of the efflorescence of lad culture in Britain. Lad culture’s literature is largely novelistic, but some of its influence is visible on stage, for example in the work of Patrick Marber. Marber is considered here as the most recent embodiment of a beleaguered masculinity, hostile to the rise of the non-masculine. The boy-feminist tradition, arguably initiated by Wesker, has no obvious counterpart to Marber, though two of this tradition’s leading exponents, Wesker himself and Howard Barker, are still active, if not at the forefront of twenty-first century British cultural consciousness. The third tradition – the ambivalent theatricality at the head of which I have placed Harold Pinter – continues. The work of playwrights like Mark Ravenhill, which openly take sexuality as their driving force, can be viewed as a development of the same tradition. Hostile Masculinity at Bay As documented by Geoffrey Wansell and Dan Rebellato, Osborne and George Devine may have had an obliterative homophobic agenda at the Royal Court in the mid-1950s.4 Certainly, an extraordinary degree of anxiety about homosexuality is evident in Osborne’s autobiography, with relentless references page after page to queers, queens and so on. Osborne’s anxieties about homosexuality may very well have stemmed from doubts about his own sexuality, especially since he describes himself variously as ‘about 20 per cent’ (Osborne, 1991: 271), or ‘about 30 per cent’ (Rebellato, 1999: 218) homosexual. This insecurity may therefore have influenced his theatrical output as well. As Michael Anderson points out, ‘only A Patriot For Me has homosexuality as its central subject, but one Osborne character after another betrays a fascination with the theme.’ (Anderson, 1976: 23) Another characteristic of Osborne’s work is an apparent misogyny. One difficulty here is to find a yardstick against which to measure it. Was British society in the 1950s generally so misogynistic that Osborne was, in fact, a relatively enlightened figure? – a conclusion that can reasonably be drawn from Lynne Segal’s analysis. However, comparing Look Back in Anger and Inadmissible Evidence with, for example, Wesker’s Trilogy or Rattigan’s Deep Blue Sea, the answer would have to be an emphatic, no. Osborne instead represents the overthrow of a set of middle-class attitudes that embraced both bigotry and liberalism, and its replacement with an assumed working-class

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misogynistic rage. The underlying ambiguity of Osborne’s position is again significant, though. For if Look Back In Anger overthrew Rattigan’s image of powerful and enlightened femininity in the person of Pat Cooper in Separate Tables, it also assaulted the hypocrisy and class consciousness that gave rise to the deception by ‘Major’ Pollock in the same play. That Osborne got away with the reactionary aspect of the kitchen-sink revolution for so long in so many quarters seems extraordinary. In Look Back in Anger, the initial stage directions describe Jimmy Porter’s character in great and rather self-contradictory detail, but overall so sympathetically that his character is held up for judgement only of the most approving kind. Yet, above all else, Jimmy is the most monstrous egotist, and his fugue into the world of bears and squirrels is his escape from the necessity of growing up into an adult world which cannot be moulded precisely to his whim. As a child, on the other hand, he can make demands, secure in the knowledge that his mother (-substitute, in this case) will meet them. As Alison says near the beginning of the play: ‘Really, Jimmy, you’re like a child.’(Osborne, 1960: 24) Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this child, however, is the extent to which apparently sane people like Alison and Cliff are prepared not merely to put up with its appalling behaviour, but even to humour it. Jimmy, though, is not simply a destructive child: that side of his character is amply demonstrated by the account of his campaign of pseudo-class-warfare against Alison’s family – futile, irritating and destructive, perhaps, but not unduly worrying. It is when Jimmy goes beyond routine attention-seeking that something psychopathic is revealed: ‘If you could have a child, and it would die,’ he prophetically wishes of Alison, before describing her body as ‘those distended, overfed tripes’. (Osborne, 1960: 37–8) Getting into the swing of things in Act II, Alison becomes ‘sweet and sticky on the outside…inside, all white, messy and disgusting’, ‘black-hearted, evil minded and vicious’, ‘sycophantic, phlegmatic and… pusillanimous’. (Osborne, 1960: 49) Jimmy makes clear that he wants total abjection from Alison, and at the end of the play she duly obliges: ‘I’m in the mud at last! I’m grovelling! I’m crawling!’ (Osborne, 1960: 95) Faced with the possibility of having to take responsibility for his child-like destructiveness of Alison, Jimmy retreats, taking Alison with him, into a ghastly infantilism: ‘Poor squirrels’, ‘Poor bears! Oh, poor, poor bears!’ That Osborne believed that he could get away with giving that final line to Alison, following Jimmy’s treatment of her, is remarkable. More remarkable, however, is that audiences in 1956 apparently empathized with this psychopathically misogynistic man. Jimmy’s invective against Alison is matched by his views expressed in cooler moments. ‘Why, why, why, why do we let these women bleed us to death?’ asks Jimmy in what is clearly a cool, calm and reflective discussion with Cliff, before going on to observe, ‘I suppose people of our generation aren’t able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us, in the thirties and the forties, when we were still kids. There aren’t any good, brave causes left…No, there’s nothing left for it, me boy, but to let yourself be butchered by the women.’ (Osborne, 1960: 84–5) That people of Osborne’s and Jimmy Porter’s generation should feel overshadowed by the older men who had fought in the International Brigade in Spain and against fascism in World

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War II is perhaps understandable. Quite why that feeling should translate itself into a sense that nothing was left to fight for – at a time when the fight against nuclear weapons, for example, was all too clearly an issue – is unclear. What is unfair, however, is that Jimmy should then seek to put the blame for male frustrations on to women. This is particularly unfair when he appears to spend his time being waited on hand and foot, first by Alison and then by Helena, and having every whim pandered to. The fact that Acts I and III should both open on a scene with a woman ironing while wearing one of Jimmy’s shirts would seem to provide convincing evidence that Jimmy’s place as an unreconstructed male chauvinist is being threatened by neither Alison nor Helena. Indeed, each is anxious to lose her personality in a simulacrum of that of Jimmy himself, a submission symbolized by wearing his shirts. Despite Look Back in Anger being used as a vehicle for the sympathetic depiction of the most grisly misogyny, it was clearly received favourably by a number of critics of the day5 (and not simply by Kenneth Tynan, as has been suggested in some quarters). The fact that Jimmy’s attitude towards women is barely remarked on in contemporary reviews suggests he is voicing a commonplace. It is perhaps easy to forget how radically views on gender roles have changed in Britain over the past fifty years or so. Osborne’s plays exhibit little sense of development from the misogyny of Look Back in Anger, in parallel with the evolution of more liberated and aware British social attitudes to gender and sexuality. Of the major plays, The Entertainer (1957) probably has the least to say directly on the subject. While the protagonist, Archie Rice, serves as the vehicle for any number of homophobic and misogynistic sentiments, he is portrayed as a man so out of his time, so ‘dead behind the eyes’, that his endorsement of such a view can hardly be interpreted as Osborne attempting to sway audience opinion. Nevertheless, Rice is something of a tragic figure, in that he has a degree of self-awareness and vulnerability, which occasionally surfaces: he knows, indeed proclaims, that he is dead behind the eyes. From a political point of view, it is more the pronouncements of Archie’s daughter, Jean, and his father, Billy, which perhaps invite sympathy from the audience. This ambivalence helped maintain Osborne’s standing as a crucial figure in the evolution of post-war drama. On the one hand, Billy is racist, sexist and homophobic, generally a mouthpiece for the kind of reactionary views that slumber just beneath the surface of the British right-wing press. Jean, for her part, who Osborne presents as a rather simple-minded but basically sympathetic character, has at least some hope that action can change society for the better. Archie Rice is slotted between these two: as Simon Trussler says, ‘Like Jimmy Porter, he is of a lost generation.’ (Trussler, 1969: 12) Archie is both too late for music hall and too early for politics. Osborne’s play, then, looks wistfully back to an Edwardian era, depicted as satisfactorily imperialist and masculine. At the same time, it looks forward to a time when the political activism of both men and women may provide future generations with a sense of purpose. Archie Rice can no longer belong to an age in which the fact of his masculine gender would, of itself, suffice to justify his existence. Neither can he have faith in the power of politics to redefine gender so as to redeem a persona whose reliance on a now-defunct view of gender has been undermined. He can still say ‘Thank God I’m normal’ (Osborne, 1998: 54) with as much (and as little) conviction as any of his utterances carry.

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In Déjàvu (1992) Osborne resurrects Jimmy Porter, grown older, posher and more rancorous over the years, in exact parallel with his creator, an equivalence matched by the move of both from urban flats to substantial houses in the West Midlands countryside. The play is a vehicle for a species of rancorous whimsy, railing against all those attitudes that the right-wing press had, by 1992, grouped together as politically correct, and is painfully racist, sexist and homophobic. Painful, too, is the powerful sense that Osborne is by now talking to nobody but himself.6 An interesting move forward from Look Back in Anger is that the new Alison – now Porter’s daughter – gets away with standing up for herself in a way that her predecessor never could. Osborne includes various portrayals of embittered, frustrated virility, but he also allows himself some almost endearing liberties, presenting characters composed of contradictory and ambivalent components. I argue in Chapter 4 that A Patriot for Me is essentially a homophobic play because of its portrayal of Redl’s treachery. The centrality of Redl, however, and Osborne’s portrayal of his relative sincerity, courage and highmindedness, means that it is also, at least in part, a sympathetic portrait of a gay man – a flawed hero in a flawed play. Michael Billington conveys a sense of this ambivalence:  [Redl] unhesitatingly sacrifices his country’s needs to his personal happiness. He becomes a patriot for me; and his priorities, Osborne suggests, are absolutely right…a blistering attack on certain aspects of homosexuality while suggesting no man-woman relationship ever captures its physical intimacy.7 In a small way, Osborne achieves a more sympathetic and worthwhile portraiture in plays where he diverges from vulnerable hurt virility. The opening scene of Under Plain Cover (1962) has the protagonists engagingly unembarrassed and amusing as they pursue their mildly sadomasochistic sexual games. Unfortunately, Osborne then spoils the effect with a bout of selfindulgence about women’s knickers, followed by a plot that introduces the crimes of the tabloid press. The play’s first theme is better achieved by Pinter in The Lover (1963), which concentrates solely on this aspect of sexual fantasy between stable partners. Among Osborne’s later plays, The End of Me Old Cigar (1975) has the protagonist talking in scene i about Der Rosenkavalier in the following terms: ‘The love of women, the love of woman for woman, the love of love itself and life continuing, and replenishing the earth.’ This celebratory note achieves something of the vigour that Jimmy Porter possessed, and the play’s whimsical theme of women taking over the effective governance of Britain through a process involving prostitution and blackmail has a certain straightforward joie de vivre, which is extremely appealing. The central character, Regine, is portrayed with great sympathy, and her prejudices are given considerable theatrical space. However, Osborne again destroys the effectiveness of his own play by indulging in a self-indulgent, anti-feminist rant as the drama progresses, and then contrives the finale as a victory for a conformist vision of common-sense, heterosexual love.

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Perhaps the most convincing of Osborne’s portraits of masculine angst is that of Bill Maitland in Inadmissible Evidence (1964). Here, the early-middle-aged hero is shown dissolving, as if seen in a bad dream. He is drinking his way out of his career, sleeping his way out of his marriage and non-committing his way out of his relationship with his mistress, while feeling guilty and vulnerable about the whole situation. Maitland’s least appealing facet is his exploitative philandering and the obvious desire, combined with contempt, which he feels for younger women. For example, when he discusses Joy with Hudson: ‘Look at that beautiful bottom. Don’t go much on her face. But the way her skirt stretched over that little bum. You could stick a bus ticket in there.’(Osborne, 1998: 198) It is perhaps this sexual honesty that makes the play both a ruthlessly accurate portrait, and a recognizable archetype of the hidden desires of many middle-aged, middle-class heterosexual men of the period. A fascinating aspect of the play is the way in which Maitland encounters his gay client, Maples. He becomes undream-like and competent for the duration of the interview. That is to say, he seems to achieve a degree of rationality by empathizing with somebody with whom his ego is not involved. While the play as a whole could hardly be taken as a plea for gay rights, the Maitland/Maples scene is, nevertheless, at least inoffensive in its treatment of the gay character, and Maitland is convincingly indignant about police use of agents provocateurs. Overall, though, it is the apparent authenticity of this portrait of a man of his time that gives the play its power. Maitland’s sexual persona gives him, and those who identify with him, no comfort whatsoever beyond that established by a sense of fellow feeling. However, the fact that Osborne avoids the hysterical self-indulgence of both Jimmy Porter, and of his later work in general, lends considerable conviction to what can perhaps best be regarded as a plea for understanding of heterosexual men of a certain age. And age, here, is of the first significance. Whereas Archie Rice looks wistfully backward to the Edwardian heyday of his father, Bill Maitland longs for the freedoms which he thinks his daughter experiences, and is jealous of her as a representative of the younger generation. They’re being allowed to roll about in it and have clothes and money and music and sex…No one before has been able to do such things with such charm, such ease…And you dance with each other, in such a way I would never have been able to master. (He gazes longingly across) (Osborne, 1998: 256) Osborne’s output as a playwright was in decline after the late 1960s. In the later years of his life, his most significant publications were the volumes of his autobiography. Osborne’s identification with the era of his greatest output – from Look Back in Anger (1956) to The Hotel in Amsterdam (1968) – was remarkable for the extent to which he succeeded in capturing the contemporary zeitgeist. After about 1968, he seems to have deliberately cultivated a reactionary persona, railing futilely against a world in which homosexuality was increasingly legal and talked about, and women had begun to assert themselves against the patriarchal assumptions that had prevailed thus far. Having spoken in the 1950s and 1960s with a voice that was generally vital and relevant, Osborne, in his later writings, can be seen to have beached himself on the further shores of the Daily Telegraph-reading classes.

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The most direct theatrical descendant of John Osborne seems to be David Hare, a case most easily to be made with reference to Hare’s Plenty (1978). Indeed, in his review of the play Ted Whitehead observed: ‘David Hare has had a bellyful, like Osborne.’8 Similarly, in her commentary on Plenty, Carol Homden describes Hare as ‘the belatedly Angry and somewhat self-indulgent Young Man’(Homden, 1995: 70). Perhaps an echo of Osborne’s approach to the politics of gender can be detected in Hare’s dismissive remark: ‘Frankly, I find most academic feminist criticism of my work completely inane.’(Zeifman, 1994: 9) In view of the fact that Plenty has a female protagonist, the comparison with Osborne needs fleshing out. Firstly, there is the temporal aspect: although the play moves backwards and forwards between 1943 and 1962, its moral and dramatic fulcrum is 1956 and the Suez crisis, placing it firmly in the same temporal field as Look Back in Anger. There is also the absence of any positive outlook. Susan Traherne’s anger in Plenty shares with that of Jimmy Porter, a futility borne of self-indulgence and false premises. Brock almost has the measure of Susan in scene iv, when he says: ‘When you talk longingly about the war…some deception usually follows.’(Hare, 1978: 37) What he fails to realize at that point is that the deception incorporates the longing reference to the war itself. For it is clear that Susan’s personal mythology of her role in the war is partly false. In scene ii her encounter with a French resistance man almost ends in disaster, largely because ‘SUSAN handling the FRENCHMAN very badly begins to lose her temper’. (Hare, 1978: 17) Susan then breaches the rules of confidentiality in her conversation with Lazar, before bursting out: ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die like that’, and then ‘crying uncontrollably’. (Hare, 1978: 19) From all this, it appears that Susan’s later bathing of her wartime experience in a rosy glow of retrospective glamour and excitement reflects qualities which had been largely absent at the time. Finding herself dissatisfied with post-war civilian life, Susan has perhaps manufactured a glamorous wartime past in an effort to justify her self-indulgent bouts of anger and discontent. Hare himself recognizes the existence of a negative side to Susan, when he observes:  It is…important that a balance of sympathy is maintained throughout the evening, and that the actress playing Susan puts the case for her as strongly as she can. The case against her makes itself, or is made by the other characters. (Hare, 1978: 87–8) Similarly, ‘the part [of Susan] gets right up the male nose’,9 (though if the inference here is that women generally find Susan a positive character, that seems rather startling). Meanwhile, ‘Brock’s destruction…is…death by compromise and absorption into institutional life’ (Hare, 1984: 15). An alternative perspective on Brock’s ‘destruction’ might be that it had less to do with ‘compromise’, and a great deal to do with the machinations of Susan Traherne. Be that as it may, Hare’s ostensible perspective on Susan seems quaintly sympathetic. In one of the most moving speeches in the play, however, Brock presents us with what, for him, is the unvarnished truth about Susan:  Your life is selfish, self-interested gain. That’s the most charitable interpretation to hand. You claim to be protecting some personal ideal, always at a cost of almost infinite pain to

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everyone around you. You are selfish, brutish, unkind. Jealous of other people’s happiness as well, determined to destroy other ways of happiness they find. (Hare, 1978: 78) The spirit here is one of cool urbanity, rational and objective. Also, this speech occurs in the same scene and only a couple of minutes/pages after Brock’s wryly self-aware, honest and humorous account of his working life:  Something in the Foreign Office suited my style. Whatever horrible things people say. At least they were hypocrites, I do value that now. Hypocrisy does keep things pleasant for at least part of the time. Whereas down in the City they don’t even try. (Hare, 1978: 75) The disarming frankness of this defence of hypocrisy sets Brock up – to a greater extent than anything he has previously said in the play – as a sort of honest broker, whose objectivity and honesty are to be trusted. His subsequent onslaught on Susan is thus given a force which otherwise might be lost, or perhaps treated as the product of irrational anger. What, then, has Plenty achieved? Hare, notoriously, is a writer of good parts for women, and there can be no doubt that Susan Traherne offers an actress the opportunity to be at the centre of the proceedings more or less throughout. But she also comes across as an immensely unsympathetic character, whatever attempts are made to excuse her behaviour on the grounds of madness, uncomfortable honesty or just swimming against the cultural tide. On a straightforward reading, Susan embodies the disturbing, destructive female presence, released into an ill-prepared post-war British society to wreak havoc – the embodiment, in fact, of the source of the male anxieties to which Jimmy Porter gave such bilious voice. This anxiety is vividly conjured at the very beginning of the play, when Alice, standing over the naked and unconscious Brock, handles his penis and comments to Susan, ‘turkey neck and turkey gristle’ (Hare, 1978: 11). Brock’s powerlessness in this scene, the fact of his being the subject of comment from one woman to another, and the coolly contemptuous but outwardly objective phraseology and tone adopted by Alice when commenting on the physical centre of Brock’s masculinity, all seem designed to evoke an essentially masculine anxiety. While Look Back in Anger focuses on male rage, frustration and anxiety at increasing loss of power by men, Plenty focuses on the source of that frustration. Jimmy Porter’s angst and rage are self-indulgent: had he been treated by Alison as Brock is treated by Susan, they might almost have been justified. It may be possible to strain a more positive view of Susan’s character and situation from the play. She is, after all, a woman whose only fulfilment occurred during World War II, and who subsequently could not – and should not have attempted to – turn down her engagement with life to a level commensurate with the expected role of a bourgeois housewife in post-war Britain. Hare, presumably, wants to see this interesting character treated fairly and even-handedly, as suggested by his note on performance quoted above. He also says, ‘I intend to show the struggle of a heroine against a deceitful and emotionally stultified class, yet some sections of the London audience miss this, for they see what Susan is up against as life itself.’ (Hare, 1984: 15)

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But what would constitute fair and even-handed treatment for someone so self-indulgent, destructive and inexorably self-willed? When David Mamet presented a similar character some years later in Oleanna (1992), many critics detected misogyny as his motivation. With the benefit of political hindsight, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that misogyny also lay behind Hare’s centre-stage presentation of this deeply flawed woman. Hare’s Slag (1970), with its pantomimic send-up of feminist attitudes and general slur on the competence and probity of women, certainly reinforces the impression that the David Hare of the 1970s was presenting on stage a wilfully negative portrayal of women. Hare’s earlier plays, then, seem to display a latter-day Osbornian misogyny, which is absent from the later work. At any rate, his portrait of Thatcherism embodied in the character Marion in The Secret Rapture (1988) was both satisfyingly complex and legitimately based in political reality. Thereafter, Hare directed his aim at more male-centred targets. Certainly, the established church, the legal profession and the Labour Party of the late 1980s and early 1990s were all so male-dominated that it would require a much more perverse sensibility than Hare’s to seek female targets within them. Instead, Hare uses women to a variety of effects in each of the trilogy of plays: Irina as the naive corruptee in Murmuring Judges (1991), Vera Klein as the abandoned and irrelevant sea-green incorruptible in The Absence of War (1993) and sundry more or less marginal characters in Racing Demon (1990). In Skylight (1995) the central characters, Kyra and Tom, may be irritatingly caricatured, but they at least have the virtue of being more or less equal in caricature. Again, in Hare’s extremely powerful (and surprisingly neglected) study of addiction, My Zinc Bed (2000), the sole female character, Elsa, is presented both powerfully and sympathetically. The play can be read as making the case for love as a form of addiction as attractive and dangerous as alcohol, and it is hard to say whose love for whom is the strongest between the two male and one female characters. While both Victor and Paul feel sexual attraction towards Elsa, and corresponding sexual jealousy, the relationship between each pair of characters is equally powerful and rivalled in strength only by Paul and Eva’s relationships with alcohol. Hence, neither gender nor sexuality as such is the main focus of the play. By the time of Stuff Happens (2004), Hare is primarily concerned with documenting the reality of Blair and Bush’s male fantasies. Mixed messages about gender politics in Hare’s plays after Plenty may be taken as a reassuring sign of a positive change in the prevailing culture. Much less reassuring is the emergence of the phenomenon of New Laddism and its literature, embodied on stage in the work of Patrick Marber. In Dealer’s Choice (1995) Marber paints a generally sympathetic portrait of a group of men interacting with one another. Their exchanges consist of needling, advantage-seeking and laugh-seeking crosstalk. Almost all the dialogue is one-liners, many of them very funny but with an exceptionally low communicative content. Along with their card-playing, this provides a means of co-existing, but their relationships are generally dysfunctional since their modus vivendi operates to keep one another at a distance. Michael Billington has it that Marber ‘subtly implies that these are all men who find it difficult to relate to women and who use poker as a sexual substitute’(Marber, 1995), though this seems to underestimate the degree to which poker acts as a substitute in these men’s lives. Heterosexual sex appears to be ruled out as

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an option for all, or perhaps all but one, of these men. Their laddish sexual braggadocio is self-contradictory, and evidently forms part of a group ritual rather than representing any kind of truth. Homosexual sex is presumably out of the question, not least because of being kept at bay by the exchange of heterosexist banter. However, even the father/son relationship in the play becomes subsumed in macho by-play. The father-son relationship is undermined by the fact that the son, Carl, has extensive gambling debts, and is trying to get the money to cover these out of his father by underhand means, being too afraid to ask him for the money outright. Ash, to whom Carl owes the money, straightens out Carl’s order of priorities:  Your father, the rich businessman with his swank restaurant. You said he’d give you the money if it came to it. This is it. Go get the money, go crying, go begging, go suck his fucking cock, I don’t care, just get the fucking money. (Marber, 1995: 56) In due course, Stephen realizes that Carl is trying to get money out of him to pay a gambling debt, and duly pays it for him. A curious showdown then occurs between father and son at the end of the play:  Stephen:  You’ve been coming in here every Sunday night, ‘Hi Dad’, ‘Bye Dad’, and then you go straight off to a casino to gamble thousands of pounds with another man. – Carl:  Look at you with your pissy little poker game…which gives you the illusion of power. I’ve played with real men for real money. (Marber, 1995: 118) Stephen’s ‘with another man’ in this exchange has more of the flavour of a betrayed lover than that of a swindled father. Carl, for his part, is apparently incapable of viewing his relationship with his father in anything other than competitive gambling terms, in which masculinity is measured by the amounts of money gambled. Each point of view is limiting, constrained and inappropriate. Perhaps years of masculine ritual banter has distorted, or destroyed, their ability to engage in any authentic emotional discourse. Finally, it is the prospect of another poker night, and the recording of statistics from the game that has occupied Act III that bring the play to a close, with an apparent rescission of hostilities between Stephen and Carl. Dealer’s Choice, then, lends itself to being read as either a celebration or critique of a certain kind of masculine culture. The play has faint shadowings of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, which might suggest that it tends more towards critique than celebration. In fact, Dealer’s Choice seems to engage in a certain satirizing of Streetcar, a move into doublebluff, which serves to assert all the more strongly its celebration of lad-culture. The most direct reference to the earlier play comes with the line, ‘and the game is Mugsy’s Nightmare’,

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surely a comic send-up of Streetcar’s ‘This game is seven-card stud’. Then again, the relentless comedy of the repartee between the men, and the occasionally quite funny knockabout stage business give the play a sympathetic or even celebratory quality. These men may be tedious and inadequate, lost and vulnerable, but those characteristics are presented as an inevitable and perhaps loveable package of what makes men what they are. In particular, the character of the bumptious and stupid Mugsy is celebrated by Stephen: ‘God, don’t you just love Mugsy? I mean he’s straight. For all his bull-headed stupidity, for all his relentless inability to recognize his own inadequacy, that man is psychotically alive.’ (Marber, 1995: 118) Quite apart from the tremendous verve with which it is expressed, this description of Mugsy simply confirms the impression of him conveyed throughout: he is loveable, a sort of latter-day British Forrest Gump, or even Bottom the weaver. The celebration of such a character suggests an identification with lad-culture, in which intelligence, articulacy and emotional sophistication are always suspect. ‘Playing the game’ is the game, leaving analysis and emotionalism to the non-masculine, in a confirmation that straight men have been right all along to be anxious and suspicious of it. The refuseniks of lad-culture, and those ineligible to participate in it, seem to be armed with the weapons necessary to undermine or place at a disadvantage the self-consciously or unimaginatively role-playing masculine performers. Alternatively, by being non-combatants in lad-culture’s eternal jokey competitiveness, perhaps the representatives of non-masculinity are simply regarded as too tedious to worry about. Either way, laddism seems to be a defensive construct, aimed at defending straight men against the need to expose their own vulnerability. Laddism’s engagement with sexuality is exposed by Marber in Closer (1997). One of the principal characters in the play, Dan, pretends to be a woman in the course of an email exchange with Larry, the other male principal. Dan’s reasons for doing this are unclear, but the device provides Marber with the opportunity to present, in pornographic, terms a male sexual fantasy. This fantasy is clearly degrading to women, and, because Dan’s email masquerade is visually highlighted on stage, it is presented as light comedy:  They form a queue and I attend to them like a cum hungry bitch, 1 in each hole and both hands. – They cum in my mouth arse tits cunt hair. – i lik it off like the dirty slut I am. Wait have to type with 1 hand…I’m cuming right now…(Marber, 1997: 26) A slightly more engaging note is struck when it is revealed to Larry that he has been communicating with a man pretending to be a woman:  Larry:  No, I was talking to a woman. Anna:  How do you know? Larry:  Because…believe me, it was a woman, I got a huge…she was a woman. (Marber, 1997: 31)

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However, Marber later uses another device, this time of a woman talking about sex under duress, to introduce another bit of pornographic male fantasy into the dialogue. The play is a vehicle for the sexual exploitation of women, either in its own right or as an ironic commentary on the behaviour and attitudes of men. However, any credentials that might establish it as a critique of male attitudes rapidly wear thin:  Larry:  You’re fucking cold. You’re all fucking cold at heart. WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO DO TO GET A BIT OF INTIMACY ROUND HERE? Alice:  Well, maybe next time I’ll have worked on my intimacy. Larry:  No, I’ll tell you what’s going to work. What’s going to work is that you’re going to take your clothes off right now and you’re going to turn round very slowly and bend over and touch the fucking floor for my visual pleasure. (Marber, 1997: 67–8) In the above episode sexual exploitation of a woman is presented as an understandable male response to an absence of affectionate reaction when Larry encounters Alice working in a strip club. This is perhaps an instance of what Aleks Sierz sees as the role of ‘the sex act [as]…a desperate attempt to communicate’. (Sierz, 2001: 179) And the play may indeed be regarded as revealing men’s pain and desperation, in the crisis of masculinity that seems to have recurred in the 1990s. In his generally favourable account of Closer, however, Sierz ignores the extent to which the play seeks to justify objectively bad behaviour on the part of its male protagonists. The process by which a man puts himself in the right, and the woman in the wrong, is treated approvingly in a drama where isolation, violence and sex are dominant, and whose dialogue consists largely of repartee, of line-by-line stichomythic gags. The play is symptomatic in this respect of lad-culture, and represents a retrogressive masculinism in sexual matters. If that masculinism suggests an Osbornian influence – mediated, no doubt, by the passage of time and events – there is also a link with Osborne in the extent to which Marber seems to empathize with some of his characters and their environment. A string of largely positive reviews refer to the authenticity of the war between the sexes as depicted in Closer. David Benedict attributes this authenticity to the presence of Marber’s own experience, when he says: ‘[his] latest play has the dangerous feel of autobiography’, and ‘Closer strips men’s behaviour bare and you sense that Marber is refreshingly ready to implicate himself in the process.’10 Indeed, Marber confirms the centrality of the scene in the strip-club cited above to the writing of the play: The very first scene I wrote was the one set in the lap-dancing club between Alice and Larry, which now opens Act 2. It came out of taking Dealer’s Choice on tour to Atlanta the previous year. While we were there, the cast said they were going to a lap-dancing club and did I want to come? It’s a very knowing, new-lad thing to be interested in porn, but I’m not. But I was persuaded to go, and the experience was akin to the very first time that I walked into a casino. A disturbing strangeness.

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Also, ‘The ambiance of the play is my own life.’11 The problem, as with Osborne, is that Marber’s introduction of this empathy brings the play dangerously close to the self-indulgent and partisan. Boy Feminists Turning now to the quite different strand of playwriting represented by Arnold Wesker and his successors, one of the iconic works of the era is Wesker’s Trilogy (1958–60). Sarah Kahn is the lifeblood of the first of the trilogy, Chicken Soup with Barley (1958): she is a woman of great vitality, high principles and a perhaps rather simple-minded determination to stick to her communist guns. Wesker’s portrait of Sarah’s husband Harry, on the other hand, traces him from the timidity, laziness and untruthfulness of his young manhood to the physical decay of his premature senility. Harry seems to be unwilling to engage with the world on adult terms. Even his senile incontinence can be seen as a return to an infancy out of which he wishes he had never grown in the first place, a desire for childhood that strangely parallels Jimmy Porter’s regressive fantasies. There is no justification, however, for burdening Sarah with the guilt for Harry’s condition, as some critics have done. A comparison with Hazel’s infantilization in Ayckbourn’s Wildest Dreams (1991, discussed in Chapter 5) makes for an instructive contrast. The men in Hazel’s life have successively taken active steps to reduce Hazel’s self-esteem to a minimum, thus driving her towards the infant condition to which she is reduced by the end of the play. Sarah, on the other hand, has done no more than provide a level of active support for Harry, which he has exploited as a means of doing as little as possible for himself, thus encouraging the self-infantilization represented by his serial strokes and incontinence. Sarah clearly has her limitations, as noted by her old friend and comrade Monty, who mildly satirizes her view of the world. Sarah’s role throughout the play is to maintain political optimism and to supply food and drink. Her determination to oppose the corrosive cynicism in 1950s Britain of many who had been on the left is made clear at the end with a heartfelt credo that gives to the play a clear and firm belief in the value of political action as a necessary means of avoiding spiritual defeat. Sarah is the female antithesis of Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, and the contrast between the two casts an intriguing sidelight on Wesker’s statement that the writing of Chicken Soup with Barley was spurred by seeing Look Back in Anger. Wesker has distanced himself from his hero in a way that Osborne seems unable to do, not only in Look Back in Anger, but, repeatedly, in his major plays. Because of his distance from Sarah, Wesker is able to portray her as a heroic character possessed of human flaws, but who feels no need to rail against the rest of the world in the way that Jimmy Porter does. She combines nurture and optimism where Jimmy combines neediness and pessimism. Sarah provides both men and women with a new role model, which unites a traditionally masculine political activism with a traditionally feminine culinary and caring activism. Wesker’s other great female hero in the Trilogy is Beatie in Roots. Beatie’s achievement is twofold: first, to escape the extremely restricted and restrictive intellectual regimen in the family home, and find herself somebody able and willing to teach her how to live; secondly, to

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escape from the influence of that teaching and acquire her own voice. She is the embodiment of the expansion of horizons that took place in the 1950s for some women. Unfortunately, no such expanding horizon is granted to other members of her family, male or female. There is an urban/rural dynamic here. Rural culture, in a particularly positive form, is embodied in the person of Stan Mann. His death in the course of the play represents an end to a potentially fulfilling inter-war rural life. It is notable that Beatie’s liberation, having perhaps been inspired originally by Stan, needs the catalytic influence of the city boy, Ronnie, to achieve fulfillment. Moving on to the third of the plays, in I’m Talking about Jerusalem (1960) there is no evidence of any particular gender political development. But Ronnie’s final shout is defiant. The defiance may be futile, but it indicates a more positive outcome than straightforward defeat. Ronnie’s pain is a direct echo of Sarah’s at the end of Chicken Soup with Barley. Thus, Ronnie has avoided spiritual death, and has done so by learning from his mother. Taking the Trilogy overall, Chicken Soup with Barley sees the continuation of a set of female virtues surrounding political pertinacity and physical nurture, Roots sees a woman learning from a man how to live and then finding her independence, while I’m Talking about Jerusalem sees a man learning from a woman how to live, and perhaps achieving his independence of her, thereby allowing Ronnie’s future self to avoid his father’s fate. Along the way in I’m Talking about Jerusalem, we have seen Wesker’s answer to Jimmy Porter, in the shape of Libby Dobson. His attitude towards women has a familiar misogynistic ring to it that echoes Porter. The difference, of course, is that this is the voice of a corrosive minor character, in sharp contrast to Jimmy Porter’s role in Osborne’s play. As a whole, then, the Trilogy displays a sense of optimism, deriving largely from its female characters, but perhaps offers a glimmer of hope in Ronnie’s eventual ability to learn his mother’s lesson. Pessimism, though, stalks the optimism. Those who will not confront life, like Harry, those who are brutalized by life, like all the characters of Roots except Beatie and Stan Mann, and those who are predisposed to be poisoned by experience, like Libby Dobson, are all doomed. There is no straightforward gender political lesson here, for among the doomed – especially in Roots – are both men and women. However, it is notable that the young among the saved – Beatie and Ronnie – both experience salvation as a result of lessons learnt across the gender divide. There is a parallel between the John Osborne/David Hare axis, on the one hand, and the relationship between Arnold Wesker and Howard Barker on the other. Barker and Wesker can usefully be bracketed together because of the similarities in their positive approaches towards the prospect of men and women learning from each other, in a move which might have as its outcome a reduction in the polarization between the sexes. That said, the similarities between Barker’s work and Wesker’s extend little further than a shared, generally (not unambiguously) positive, approach to the politics of gender. Unlike Wesker’s plays, it is sexuality that repeatedly features in Barker’s work as the crucible in which masculine anxieties are smelted. In Claw (1975) the utter corruption of Noel Biledew expresses itself largely through his pimping activities. And his attempts to exploit the prostitute Angie – more successfully corrupt than he is – bring about his downfall. What is happening here, however, is not a gender political conflict, but a comic

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demonstration that, no matter how corrupt and violent individuals may be, the violence and corruption of capital and government will always exceed them. The more resources available, the greater the capacity for corruption. In Claw sexuality is linked to corruption only insofar as money is involved. As with Mark Ravenhill’s later Shopping and Fucking (1996), it is the commercialization of sexuality that is destructive, not sexuality per se. Barker takes this theme further in The Love of a Good Man (1978), in which sexuality is presented as the saving grace for a number of the characters. In David Ian Rabey’s words, it is ‘a play in which sexuality bursts feverishly through symmetry. (Rabey, 1989: 108) Here, Barker describes hopeless corruption, in which the rottenness of the flesh of dead men in Flanders in the immediate aftermath of World War I is matched by the financial and moral corruption involved in the process of sanitizing and sanctifying those same dead bodies. Hacker, one of the central characters of the play, is deeply limited by his vision of corrupt money making as the route to social betterment. His lust for Mrs Toynbee, a middle-aged, middle-class woman of apparently impeccable conventional morals, leads Hacker to deliver some wonderfully, shockingly, funny lines, which add a new dimension to his character:  I could use ’er shit for toothpaste…I could crawl across three fields of broken glass just for a piss in ’er bathwater. And, after Mrs Toynbee has agreed to become the lover of the Prince of Wales:  I would ’ave given two arms for a sniff of your knicker…I could still treasure one of your muff ’airs in a tin. (Barker, 1993: 21, 71) Hacker’s desire for Mrs Toynbee remains unfulfilled at the end of the play, but is used by Barker as a humane and comic force. Hacker’s words on sexual attraction are both funny and also suggest – visible through the coarse hyperbole – a serious intention of relative selflessness. Meanwhile, Mrs Toynbee remains in charge of her own sexuality and its exploitation. Thus, sexuality itself is presented as a liberating force, enabling both Hacker and Mrs Toynbee to transcend the limitations of their social positions. A very different take on both gender and sexuality is presented, however, in the following exchange between Mrs Toynbee’s daughter, Lalage, and a soldier, Riddle:  Lalage:  I’m sorry, but that is a lie…The lie of submissive, dark-skinned women…It makes me pity you. Riddle:  Well, that ends it, then. I will not lie with a woman who scorns the man. Lalage:  You see, you will keep on using these phrases like ‘to lie with’ and ‘Woman’ and ‘Man’. It is meant to put mystery into it but all it does is fuddle things. I would

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have expected the war to make men desperate for truth, but it’s made you bow down. Riddle:  Nothing will ever move your womb. You should be sodomized. It’s all you’re fit for, jellies, creams and second rate hotels…(He waits to see if he has provoked her, then turns to leave.) Lalage:  Marry me. I will help you. Marry me. (Barker, 1993: 46) Riddle’s fantasy about submissive women may be a case of his attempting to find comfort in the reassuring familiarity of cliché, while his outrageous reference to sodomization is clearly intended to provoke a reaction from Lalage, to discompose her; he seems to be role playing the heterosexist man. It is disconcerting to note Lalage’s reaction: Riddle’s brutal address to her brings this independent-minded, honest and candid woman to adopt the desperate measure of offering herself to Riddle in marriage. Perhaps this abjection was what Riddle was after, as suggested by the stage direction, ‘He looks at her, blankly, then goes out’, without any suggestion of there being games of bears and squirrels in the offing. Indeed, on one reading, abjection on the part of the woman may be the prime objective of the performance of conventional marriage. Thus, if such abjection is obtained without marriage having taken place, the need for the marriage evaporates. But Barker is using conventional marriage, and the gender role play associated with it, as the image of a hell of dishonesty and game-playing, which would seem to be the only situation in which Riddle and Lalage could have forged a relationship together. Lalage’s imaginative candour, when she portrays the war as having presented an opportunity to rethink gender relations, is altogether too unvarnished for Riddle. Riddle’s brutal role play, however, brings a restoration of conventional gender performance to their exchange. Barker, then, is exposing as shallow and dishonest the kind of gender relations that allow conventional marriage to thrive. This, though, is by no means an unambiguously feminist position, since the scene ends with Lalage exchanging honesty for coercive role playing, while Riddle exchanges role play for honest, if brutal, dismissal. Lalage’s retrogression is the product of a combination of her own physical desire for Riddle and the normalizing power of conventional gender roles. Barker is here recognizing that the coercive power of bourgeois marriage is quite sufficient to destroy a woman, even one as powerful as Lalage. For a man, however, marriage represents a tool with which to reinforce dominance. When Riddle makes to leave at the end of the scene, he produces despair in Lalage by the negative use of his bridegroom power, a power that generates Lalage’s abjection. Perhaps Barker’s most complex and profound treatment of gender relations occurs in The Castle (1985). At first sight, the play appears to be a straightforward feminist tract. With men away at the crusades, women establish an idyllic, non-exploitative society in which peace and

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happiness reign; the return of the men from the crusade immediately brings violence and horror into this Eden. The positive female and negative male stereotypes are vividly and impressively established. However, the play ultimately goes much further, much more subtly. For the vision of the rural idyll that prevailed while the men were away is unverified, and may be an entirely self-serving fantasy on the part of the proto-lesbian feminist Skinner. In any case, there has to be an element of subjectivity – apart from any tendency towards bias based on gender-identity – in making a judgement as to whether tended land is preferable to untended, or vice versa. The economic shift that has occurred in the men’s absence seems to have been from settled agriculture towards a hunter-gatherer set-up – a move towards the kind of prehistoric societies in which matriarchies are often supposed to have flourished. Many would regard this as an entirely retrogressive movement, and one that would necessarily entail either extreme poverty and hunger, or radical depopulation. Barker, then, invokes a gender-based polarization between a brutal masculine progressiveness, and a gentle feminine retrogressiveness. He does not impose simple-minded value judgements on his audience, however; it is not clear that the pre-lapsarian idyll had ever actually come into being, and, as described by Skinner, it might, in any case, have been something of a mixed blessing:  First there was the bailiff, and we broke the bailiff. And then there was God, and we broke God. And lastly there was cock, and we broke that, too. Freed the ground, freed religion, freed the body. And went up this hill, standing together naked like the old female pack, growing to eat and not to market. (Barker, 1990: 203) This represents a state of affairs only partially endorsed by some of the inhabitants. For instance, there is the transparent insincerity of Cant’s apology to Skinner for her own sexuality: ‘I gaze at their trousers, honestly I do, whilst thinking, enemy, enemy! I do gaze so, though hating myself, obviously.’ (Barker, 1990: 217) Whatever divisions might exist among the women, however, it is the polarization between the sexes that is symbolic and powerful in the play. Skinner’s vision of an idyllic pre-lapsarian female utopia represents a state which Stucley, the Lord of the Manor returned from the crusades, envisages thus: ‘I do believe…that human beings left without severity would roll back the ages and be hopping, croaking frogs, clustering thick on the female with the coming of the Spring, and sunk in mud for the winter.’ (Barker, 1990: 212) Where Skinner sees the potential for women to rediscover themselves through recuperation of the vagina from male domination, Stucley sees a subhuman state of amphibian polyandry. Furthermore, Stucley sees such retrogression as inevitable without the presence of ‘severity’, thus providing himself with the justification for imposing an authoritarian regime – which duly comes into being. As Rabey puts it, ‘Stucley believes he is saving those around him from themselves, the innate temptation of regression to primeval animal form.’ (Rabey, 1989: 159) The most striking power of the play, however, lies in its use of architecture as a metaphor for gender relations. Stucley has been encouraged to build an ever larger and more ambitious castle, featuring designs whose use of towers and verticality owes an obvious debt to male physicality.

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Stucley’s architect is Krak, a sort of elevated prisoner-of-war, brought back from his Middle Eastern adventures. Krak is highly intelligent and utterly alienated, having seen his mother, wife and daughter subjected to varying degrees of horrific violence by the crusaders. Indeed, a tenable reading of the relationship between Krak and Stucley is that Krak is exacting a sort of revenge on Stucley by encouraging him to take his defensive paranoia to its logical limit, and to embody this paranoia in an impossibly huge, elaborate and essentially phallic castle. A remarkable moment of truth occurs when Krak explains to Stucley – and possibly to himself – the flaw inherent in phallic architecture. Surrounded by drawings of female genitalia, Krak tells Stucley:  Krak:  Its vertical profile, which I took further than any other architect, renders it utterly vulnerable… Stucley:  What– Krak:  It goes up instead of down. Is high, not wide. Is circular and not oblique. Is useless, in effect, and an invitation to– (Barker, 1990: 242–3) There is considerable irony in the reflection that the unnamed thing to which this masculine architecture is ‘an invitation’ is presumably invasion, or, figuratively, rape. Meanwhile Krak apparently has a vision of an architecture that could achieve effective defensive qualities by exploiting the shape of female genitalia. Stucley finds himself bewildered by having to confront the revelation both of the futility of his castle building, and the familiarity of Krak with the shape of Ann’s (Stucley’s wife’s) genitalia. His response takes two forms: first, a call for more male violence, to which Ann, who is pregnant by Krak, reacts by committing suicide – an example followed, in a scene of grisly comedy, by all the pregnant women in the castle; second, Stucley becomes infantilized as the play proceeds, a fate relatively sympathetically portrayed. In parallel with the recognition of the need for architecture to embrace female principles, a similar awareness is demonstrated by the church. First, in Act I, scene iv, Stucley fulminates about the futility of his crusade: ‘Christ’s cock – Is nowhere mentioned – He was a man and I have lost five years trying to recover his dominions, five years for someone with no cock!’, and ‘What agonized me…was not the absence of a face but His castration, this Christ who never suffered for the woman, who never felt the feeling which makes no sense’. (Barker, 1990: 221–3) But Stucley’s rage and anxiety over the non-masculine attributes of Christ are then transformed, by Act II, scene vi, into a hegemonization by male-dominated religion of female characteristics: ‘The Holy Congregation of the Wise Womb – Christ, abhorring the phallus, foreswore his maleness, chose womanly ways.’ (Barker, 1990: 247) This absorption of feminine characteristics is then transferred into the governance of the state overall, when Skinner is asked to signal approval of the new religion. She attempts to withhold her approval, but is overwhelmed by Krak’s argument. The play then ends with Skinner nostalgically recalling the time before the men returned from the crusades: ‘There was no government…does anyone remember…there was none…there was none…there was none…!’ (Barker, 1990: 249)

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Among the questions raised by the play is the extent to which Barker is negatively anxious about women. Is Skinner, for example, demonized as the ultimate sexual traitor, a woman whose sexuality drives her to betray other women because she is jealous of their fecundity? And is there a degree of sexual prurience evident on Barker’s part derived from the reference to male female sodomy in both The Castle and The Love of a Good Man? But overall, the treatment of gender relations and sexuality in The Castle is positive, if not particularly optimistic. There is an Aeschylean recognition that a male-dominated society must embrace a degree of femininity if it is not to implode under the weight of its own violence and general preposterousness. Moreover, Barker’s apparent certainty that the adoption of feminine characteristics by such a state will take place by violent, hegemonistic and deceitful means may be no more than a recognition of the truth. As to the idyll of the feminized state, there is no evidence that it ever existed – or, if it did, that it was in reality so idyllic. Even granted the existence of the idyll, it is clearly Barker’s view that the exclusion of men from civil society will turn those men into terrifyingly violent usurpers. Better, surely, to find an accommodation that will enable male characteristics to be ameliorated by female ones, than to head for lesbian separatist utopia, if the latter is always and ineluctably to be menaced by unreconstructed male figures roaming around its perimeter. In the end, it is not clear that anything stands much chance of achieving a positive outcome, given the view presented by The Castle. But at least making the attempt to achieve a state with a balance of gendered characteristics may stave off the havoc inevitably generated by unbridled masculinity. Rabey quotes Penny Downie, who played Ann in the Royal Shakespeare company’s 1986 production of The Castle: ‘I think Howard [Barker] believes deeply in the effect of women on men, and women on society, but that in no way is it whole or complete if unbalanced.’ (Rabey, 1989: 254) Downie also remarks on the power of female sexuality: ‘The passion takes over [Ann], and it’s like a descent into hell from which she can never return.’ (Rabey, 1989: 255) On that reading, Ann’s suicide is the result of her discovery of sexuality, in much the same way as Lalage’s abjection in The Love of a Good Man. The destructive power of sexuality is a concern that recurs in Barker’s work. Perhaps the most obvious instance of this occurs in his Ursula: Fear of the Estuary (1998), in which the protagonist, Ursula, reflects on her vagina thus: ‘I saw it once / Ugly/ But ugly for the reason only for the reason that the thing is rarely seen/ Or not/ Perhaps it is authentically ugly/ Ugly because it’s loathed by God’.12 Ursula torments herself with a negative view of woman because her religion forces her into the position of self-oppression. Meanwhile, the prince bishop, Lucas, is the embodiment of desirable, treacherous and violent masculinity in the play. He, in effect, abducts Ursula and her fellow nuns, in a scene reminiscent of the abduction of Philomele by Tereus in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 1988 The Love of the Nightingale. Among a number of images of male sexual violence in the play, one of the most striking is Janet’s description of Ursula’s rape (if rape it was) by Lucas:  Is it not suffering to be taken into bed against your will?/ Is such a hideous violation not Ursula’s ordeal? Her private space made ruin by this man’s appetite? Her body nailed to his desires as cruelly as Christ was hammered to the tree?/ THE BED’S THE TREE.13

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Barker thus makes a fairly close association here, and in The Castle, between sexual oppression of women and male attitudes to God and religion, especially by evoking the woman nailed to the bed by the phallus. Barker has made a significant contribution to the development of theatre and its critique of social attitudes since the 1970s. Sexual politics have formed a particularly fruitful area for his writing over that time, with his curiously fertile ambiguity providing evidence for another type of masculine anxiety over sexuality and gender politics. Barker is by no means an optimist, but it does appear, especially from The Castle, that he places such hope as he has in the prospect of a society in which both female and male characteristics come together in a constructive fashion. At the very least, this appears a significant advance on the despairing, angry and confused sexual politics of Osborne and Hare. Menacing Clearsightedness While Osborne and Wesker are demonstrably exploring masculine anxieties of their own time, Harold Pinter is dealing with a more universal masculine angst. The terrible pain of reconciling masculine alienation with feminine reassurance is the current that runs through both The Birthday Party (1958) and The Homecoming (1965), a fact that may account for their position at the summit of critical opinion. Pinter’s treatment of Meg in The Birthday Party is particularly intriguing. Goldberg and McCann plainly have an overwhelmingly negative impact on Stanley, and they ultimately provoke Petey to minor defiance followed by subdued silence. Their impact on Meg, however, is minimal. Indeed, she is the one person who manages to disconcert Goldberg:  Meg: 

I hope I look nice in my dress.

Goldberg:  Madam, you’ll look like a tulip. Meg: 

What colour?

Goldberg:  Er – well, I’ll have to see the dress first. (Pinter, 1991: 33) Goldberg’s hesitation at this point is the sole occasion in the play when he is wrongfooted. Meg’s may be a negative capability, but her lack of a rational response to Goldberg’s conversation provides her with a large measure of protection from the threat he represents. Whether the women in the play represent, in their turn, a threat to the men, however, is another matter. Certainly, the more Freudian interpretations of the play establish Meg and Lulu as maternal and sexual threats to be eluded, attacked and otherwise dealt with. Indeed, the Oedipal motif is unavoidable, given the visual significance of Stanley’s blinding when McCann breaks his glasses, and his club-footedness when he has stepped in the drum. However, the anxiety that Pinter is deploying in The Birthday Party is less about the impact of women on men than about the destructive reaction of men to that impact. It is the masculine anxieties themselves that form the subject of The Birthday Party, in other words, rather than the sex differences that have given rise to those anxieties. Stanley is pathologized not as the victim of women but as the victim of the expectations imposed upon him by 1950s society.

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Some interpretations of The Birthday Party have treated Stanley’s relationship with Meg and Lulu, on the one hand, and Goldberg and McCann, on the other, as though their juxtaposition had occurred entirely accidentally. That view seems to miss an opportunity to come at the neurosis that lies at the heart of the play. If Goldberg and McCann’s presence in the house is treated as a direct consequence of the peculiar nature of Stanley’s relationships with Meg and Lulu, then the retributive nature of society’s dealings with emergent male adolescent sexuality becomes the focus of the play. Stanley’s fugue from the world into the feminine interior space that is Meg’s domain can compellingly be read as an escape from sexual maturity. His avoidance of suggestions from both Meg and Lulu that he should go outside the house reinforces his retreat into this inappropriate interior space. Here, the conflict of his quasi-Oedipal relationship with Meg becomes more and more difficult to deal with, until its resolution is heralded by the arrival of Goldberg and McCann. On this reading, whereby a causal link is established between Stanley’s initial presence and situation in the house, and the arrival of the two strangers, it is Stanley’s sexuality which is at stake. His failure to measure up to the expectations of a ferociously normative heterosexist society brings nemesis upon his head. It is not retribution for action or inaction in his past that is being visited on Stanley, but retribution for his sexually inactive present. His failure to play the role of the dominant and active heterosexual male in his dealings with Lulu is probably the final reason for the arrival of Goldberg and McCann. His semi-catatonic exit from the house, then, is perhaps indicative of the trauma imposed on young men by societal expectations in the realm of sexuality and gender role play. Stanley, of course, is no longer a particularly young man – ‘a man in his late thirties’, as described by Pinter in his list of characters, and so his failure to conform even by that age makes the violence of the retribution meted out to him all the stronger and more drastic in effect. Alternatively, Stanley is a man who, having achieved the sexual role expected of him in his adolescence, has then retreated from it. Pinter has described the situation as one in which ‘the hierarchy, the Establishment, the arbiters, the socio-religious monsters arrive to effect alteration and censure upon a member of the club who has discarded responsibility’.14 Part of the responsibility Stanley has discarded is presumably sexual, hence his fugue into Meg’s strange establishment, and Goldberg and McCann’s effort to bring him back to the fold. Moving on to The Homecoming, the men’s attitudes towards women are decidedly ambivalent, as, for example, represented by the father, Max, describing his late wife: ‘Mind you, she wasn’t such a bad woman. Even though it made me sick just to look at her rotten stinking face, she wasn’t such a bad bitch.’ Max presents his wife in an even more ambivalent light later on, when he says ‘I’ve never had a whore under this roof before. Ever since your mother died.’ (Pinter, 1991: 17, 50) So, the mother is represented as having been both a mother-figure and a prostitute. Among the men of the house a continuing, back-biting struggle for power rumbles along, characterized by ageism and mutual attempts at feminization, in which power accrues to the man most successfully portraying himself as macho and heterosexually active. Teddy stands aside from combat with the other men, though not before suffering an apparent defeat on his own ground – that of the detached intellect – at the hands of his brother Lenny. Gradually, attempts by the men to dominate Ruth are turned by her to her advantage, and

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she emerges as probably the most powerful figure in the play. There is room for debate on this last, especially given the final stage direction: ‘Lenny stands, watching’, but at the very least Ruth emerges in an unexpectedly strong position. After Teddy has left the house, the final tableau on stage has Ruth seated at its centre, apparently willing to become a prostitute while role playing the maternal figure at the middle of the house. Around her, the men, apart from Lenny, lie or kneel, beseeching her favour. Ruth’s centrality, of course, is not unambiguous, in that the position she occupies is both the resolution and idealization of the madonna/whore icons, conventional constructs of womanhood by men. For Michael Billington, The Homecoming represents ‘a feminist challenge to male despotism and to the classification of women as either mothers or whores’. Moreover, the play embodies ‘less…Oedipal wish-fulfilment than…female triumph over a male power-structure’ (Billington, 1996: 168–9). As to the first of these points, Billington suggests that Pinter is asking, ‘what…if these categories co-exist in the same woman? Does it not explode all the traditional male assumptions and at the same time give women a new power and authority?’ (Billington, 1996: 170–1) However, while the conjoining in one woman of two kinds of male icon might give her new power and authority, it might equally serve to enmesh her all the more thoroughly in an essentially masculine view of appropriate female role play. It could reinforce the Mediterranean tradition which pretends that women have dominance over domestic interior space, while conveniently forgetting the power that remains with men: the power of defining which spaces are domestic and which interior, and of controlling who crosses the boundary between interior and exterior and in what circumstances. On the other hand, if the presence of an element of whoredom in the Madonna role serves to undermine that role’s constraining power, and vice versa, then the process of combining the two may well be a thoroughly liberating one. In Ruth’s case, however, there is a sense that it does not really matter whether her position at the centre of the final tableau represents entrapment or liberation. What is fairly clear is that, for her, this new role is preferable to her previous one as wife and mother in America. To that extent, much of the play’s power lies in its ability to explode the dream of bourgeois marriage: if life in this grim North London household is, for Ruth, a pleasanter prospect than her previous married life, then how hellish the latter must have been. Pinter’s serio-comic assault on the institution of marriage prefigures Ayckbourn’s slightly later farcical guerrilla-raids. In terms of masculine anxiety, a number of significant developments are noticeable between The Birthday Party and The Homecoming. In particular, the character of Goldberg seems to have transmogrified into the character of Max. Both conjure sententious visions of a partially fictional past. Both use a fractured and borrowed language for these evocations, and the rhythms of their speech are practically identical at such times. The difference is that Goldberg evokes menace in the play’s time-present, while Max’s attempts to do the same thing only succeed in producing images of an unpleasant and threatening past. When Goldberg talks nonsense about his mother serving cold food hot, it is transparent that it is nonsense, and it need not be otherwise, for nobody will have the courage to challenge him. Max, on the other hand, has a sinister past relationship with his sons, evoked for him when Lenny says: ‘You used to tuck me up in bed every night. He tucked you up, too, didn’t he, Joey?’ Pause ‘He used to like tucking up

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his sons.’ (Pinter, 1991c: 25). If ever Pinter used a pause to powerful effect, this is it. It heightens the suggestiveness of Lenny’s last line, with its possible overtones of past sexual abuse. But it is the son, not the father, who evokes this ambiguous past, and in doing so Lenny’s menacing posture and timbre hint at the possibility of retribution being visited on Max. The balance of (probably abusive) power has shifted from father to son. Goldberg therefore has unquestioned power in his hands, while Max’s power is both questionable and in the past. Goldberg, as the figure of corrective power, represents a social paterfamilias, but Max has only the memory of a paterfamilias’s power. One of the great sources of masculine anxiety – the stern and retributive father – has shrunk in the way he is depicted between the two plays. Instead of transferring to a male heir, it appears likely that a substantial amount of this power is transferred to a woman. That transfer cannot take place without pain and trauma, of course, but the nature of the masculine anxiety it engenders has changed. It is possible to look forward from the finale of The Homecoming to a set of new possibilities, in which men and women find new and more constructive ways of living together. This is a significant advance on what it was possible to envisage from the finale of The Birthday Party. There, Petey’s courageous defiance – ‘Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do’ – fades back immediately into placid inanities, lies and silence. These, in turn, render Petey complicit in hiding Meg from any kind of confrontation with reality. As Elizabeth Sakellaridou puts it: ‘it has often been the case in Pinter’s plays that the male ideology about women was either unconsciously internalized by women themselves (Meg…) or only silently rejected.’ (Sakellaridou, 1988: 100) Thus, Meg’s self-oppressive withdrawal from the real world will continue to shield her from any need to realize herself as a complete human being. Meg’s caricature of a carefully constructed shell of a woman – fuss, giggles and self-delusion – is set to continue for an indefinite period. Arguably, aspects of Ruth in The Homecoming were foreshadowed in the character of Sarah in The Lover (1963). The setting of The Lover contrasts markedly with that of The Homecoming. Richard and Sarah live in ‘a detached house near Windsor’, and engage in a largely unfractured role play of the well-to-do suburban that the setting demands. Indeed, when their exchange slips out of kilter with its setting, it is generally to comic effect, rather than the more familiarly sinister overtones of other Pinter plays. Richard’s return home from the office cues a domestic conversation of comic banality, until: Richard:  Your lover came, did he? Sarah:  Mmnn. Oh yes. Richard:  Did you show him the hollyhocks? Slight pause Sarah:  The hollyhocks? (Pinter, 1966: 51)

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Richard’s wrong-footing of Sarah at this point could, in a different play, be freighted with menace. The word ‘Hollyhocks’, however, ensures that any dark undertones are leavened with comedy. That said, the play engages with men’s attitudes towards women, and with sexuality of both men and women, in a serious and thought-provoking way. Richard and Sarah, it transpires, role play each other’s lover, as a means of maintaining a robust sex-life in their marriage. In the event, a series of more or less erotic tableaux within the play are undermined by what turns out to be a persistent doubt on Richard’s part. Having made it clear that he regards his mistress – Sarah in her afternoon role play – as nothing more than a whore, Richard subsequently calls on Sarah to bring their afternoon relationship to an end, on the grounds that he dislikes deceiving his wife. Then, with Richard in his afternoon lover role, as Max:  Sarah:  But your wife…knows. Doesn’t she? You’ve told her…all about us. She’s known all the time. Max:  No, she doesn’t know. She thinks I know a whore, that’s all. Some spare-time whore, that’s all. That’s what she thinks. She’d mind if she knew that, in fact…I’ve got a full-time mistress, two or three times a week, a woman of grace, elegance, wit, imagination. He then asks how Sarah’s husband can stand knowing about her adultery. Max:  Perhaps I should meet him and have a word with him…– After all, he’s a man, like me. We’re both men. You’re just a bloody woman. (Pinter, 1966: 69–71) The play then ends with Richard’s line, ‘You lovely whore’, as they sink into a sexual embrace. Rather than Madonna/whore, Sarah embodies both the suburban housewife and the whore. This anticipates Ruth’s later epiphany, while also exposing a view of the sexually constraining nature of bourgeois marriage. The play succeeds in conveying an empathetic view of both male and female sexuality, and the gambits necessary to maintain both a respectable front and a fulfilling sex-life. In doing so, however, Pinter also gives full weight to the misogyny inherent in Richard’s use of the word ‘whore’. Thus, in both The Lover and The Homecoming there is a complex and worthwhile ambivalence, which both celebrates women’s sexuality and points up the fearful masculine response to it. Pinter’s later plays are often regarded as having abandoned the classically Pinteresque style and to have moved their focus from a psychological terrain to a more overtly political arena. This view has some justification where One for the Road (1984) and Mountain Language (1988) are concerned. There is, however, a powerful sense of Pinter’s continuing concern with the psychodrama of sexual relations in Ashes to Ashes (1996), in which male-female relations are equated with inquisition, sexual violence and, ultimately, the violence of the holocaust. If one were to look for a persistent theme in Pinter’s output, the impact of Oedipalism would be a strong claimant. The Oedipal nature of Meg and Stanley’s relationship in The Birthday Party seems clear enough, as discussed above, and the combination of the roles of mother and whore

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in The Homecoming must also have substantial Oedipal implications. In Celebration (2000) this Oedipalism is comically, world-wearily reflected on by two of the women characters:  Julie:  All mothers-in-law are like that. They love their sons. They love their boys. They don’t want their sons to be fucked by other girls. Isn’t that right? Prue:  Absolutely. All mothers want their sons to be fucked by themselves. Julie:  By their mothers. Prue:  All mothers. (Pinter, 2000: 16) This is a fairly bleak universalizing view of the human condition, and one that serves to epitomize the exhaustion of twentieth century struggles. The idiosyncratic nature of Pinter’s writing makes for something of a difficulty in identifying his obvious successors, though, as previously indicated, Mark Ravenhill’s work has a threatening sexuality, which might be seen as continuing a Pinterian tradition. That said, Pinter’s style of writing seems to be echoed most strongly in the plays of Olwen Wymark, considered in Chapter 2, while his influence is also evident in the work of various male playwrights, from Henry Livings to Philip Ridley. The extent to which echoes of Pinter are discernible in Ridley’s plays varies considerably, but is probably strongest in The Pitchfork Disney (1991) and Piranha Heights (2008). The physical settings of Ridley’s plays are the first indicator of a Pinterian influence. The Pitchfork Disney is set in ‘a dimly lit room in the East End of London…Everything old and colourless’ (Ridley, 1997: 5), while The Fastest Clock in the Universe (1992) is in ‘a dilapidated room above an abandoned factory in the East End of London. Many large cracks in the walls.’ (Ridley, 1997: 93) Similarly, Ghost from a Perfect Place (1994) is in ‘a dimly lit room in Bethnal Green…There has been a fire sometime in the past: the walls, floor and woodwork are all badly scorched.’ (Ridley, 1997: 181) Apart from the strong mutual echoes among these initial stage directions, the prevailing gloom is reminiscent of productions of Pinter’s The Room, The Dumb Waiter or The Caretaker. Another bond is the confinement of the action to a single interior space, a space threatened with invasion from the outside. This is especially true of The Pitchfork Disney, which can be read as a study in repressed desire. A strange, sensuous encounter takes place between a practically housebound agoraphobic couple and a beautiful, menacing young man from outside. Fear dominates and destroys the lives of the couple, and it may be that the encounter is between them and the object of their fear, between private security and public danger, between repressed sexuality and the object of sexual desire. The struggle for power in this case is one-sided, but it explores the potential for sexuality in the 1990s to generate a new comedy of menace. Another echo of Pinter occurs in the speech patterns. The similarity seems especially intense in the following exchange: 

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Cosmo:  That’s your fault, that is. Forcing me in here. I knew I was going to be sick. Always am. Presley:  Why? Cosmo:  Have to get it out of my system. (Stares at Presley suspiciously.) You ill? Presley:  No. Cosmo:  You look ill. Presley:  Well, I’m not. (Ridley, 1997: 25) The dialogue vividly conjures The Caretaker again. And, without hammering the point ad nauseam, there are shades of The Birthday Party in both The Fastest Clock in the Universe and Ghost from a Perfect Place. In the first case this arises directly from the spurious birthday party, while in the second the transparently false imagery of a golden past evokes Goldberg’s sentimental imagery. Where Ridley moves beyond Pinter is in his harsh vision of sexuality. Cosmo’s exploitation of Presley’s clear, though unadmitted, physical desire for him, sits alongside his violently homophobic remarks. This juxtaposition creates an effect that is not only menacing, but almost erotic, in a sadomasochistic way. However, it is the refusal of sexuality that is central to the play. Haley has a long early speech in which she describes a dream, which seems to be loaded with terrifying animalistic sexual imagery: ‘Dogs appeared. Seven of them. Big filthy dogs. With maggots in their fur. Foam on their lips. Eyes like clots of blood. One dog started to sniff me. Its nose was like an ice cube between my legs.’(Ridley, 1997: 10) After this recitation, Haley retreats into drug-induced catatonia, and becomes a source of fascination for the invading Cosmo. Cosmo coats his finger with a narcotic syrup, and introduces it into the mouth of Haley, drawing it back and forth. Presley discovers him thus engaged, and fights him, breaking Cosmo’s finger in a moment of excruciating, if slight, violence, reminiscent of McCann’s breaking of Stanley’s glasses in The Birthday Party, and perhaps anticipating the retributive violence of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed. The phallic imagery, and the rejection/breaking of the phallus seem inescapable here. What follows is the terrifying arrival of Cosmo’s sidekick, the Pitchfork Cavalier. He does no physical harm to Presley or Haley, but Pitchfork’s presence petrifies them. He is masked, allegedly deformed, and carrying with him a weight of the unnatural, as well as a strong suggestion of sexual fetishism. The play ends with Presley and Haley repeating softly to one another, ‘I’m scared.’ The whole incursion of Cosmo and Pitchfork has perhaps been a reminder of Presley and Haley’s own sexuality. Despite Presley’s endless evocations of childhood in his exchanges with Cosmo, he cannot, in fact, retreat into the past. Beautiful, untouchable Cosmo is the embodiment of his desires, and Presley rejects both his own and Cosmo’s sexuality by breaking Cosmo’s

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finger. Again, Pitchfork’s arrival may be an evocation of sexual practice. Rejecting both these embodiments of sexuality, however, Presley condemns himself to an endless recurrence of his futile imagery of his boyhood, and to the frightening sexual dreams he describes in the course of his conversation with Cosmo. Perhaps more troublingly, the fact of Haley having been unconscious for most of the performance means that all the decisions about rejecting sexual practice have, in effect, been taken by Presley on her behalf, as well as on his own. The net effect of this rejection of sexuality is that Presley and Haley are condemned to an indefinite future of terror, shut away from the world and indulging in drugs, chocolate bars and infinite regressive fantasies. Curiously, this nightmare vision of the effect of failing to come to terms with one’s own sexuality has a great deal in common with the ending of Look Back in Anger. Presley’s rejection of the phallus has its counterpart in Jimmy Porter’s rejection of Alison’s fertility, and both end up with the prospect of retreating into a fruitless infantilism. A crucial ambiguity surrounds the ending of The Fastest Clock in the Universe, which can be read as a retreat from sexuality into a vision of a sterile romantic love, or, alternatively, as the recuperation of one of the central characters from an unproductive obsession. The dangerous, vain, 30-year-old Cougar is terrified of growing old, and is staging his own nineteenth birthday party in an effort to seduce the 16-year-old (male) Foxtrot. He is thwarted in his attempted seduction by the combined efforts of Sherbet, Foxtrot’s girlfriend, and Captain, an older man enamoured of Cougar.15 It is Sherbet, however, who sets herself up as Cougar’s main opponent. She embarks on a litany of heterosexual, aspirant petit-bourgeois values, using tabloid or women’s magazine language as she does so, somewhat reminiscent of Orton. But she also begins to talk about Cougar’s age, and she and Cougar then make as if to kill one another. In the fight Cougar punches Sherbet in the stomach, and she proceeds to abort her pregnancy. Subsequently, the Captain aims a gun at Cougar, but is disarmed before he pulls the trigger. After this violent denial of and punishment for sexuality, the play bizarrely ends, thus:  Captain: …The Fastest Clock in the Universe is… Cougar: Love. Captain: Hallelujah! (Ridley, 1997: 175) Perhaps love makes life pass as quickly as possible, which may or may not be a good thing. But in the context this love would seem to be devoid of sexual content, and, indeed, it is highly questionable as to whether any love is possible where Cougar is concerned. In Ghost from a Perfect Place (1994) Ridley uses the character of the ageing gangster, Travis, to expose the sordid reality of a particular kind of East End criminality that had tended to be romanticized by the tabloid press. Ridley’s writing of the play was presumably informed by his experience of having written the screenplay for the 1990 film, The Krays. Travis’s attempt to glamorize his past is undermined, first by the elderly woman Torchie, as she uses an apparent complicity in this glamorization to expose the reality of violence and suffering when she

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recounts her history. In the second half of the play it is Torchie’s granddaughter, Rio, and her comrades, Miss Sulphur and Miss Kerosene, who take on the job of recuperating a history. They dominate Travis and use both the threat and reality of violence to force him to confront the fact that his life has been a shabby failure. A masculine mythology of the gentleman criminal is destroyed, first by Torchie’s exposure of female suffering and then by Travis’s own admission of his poverty and inadequacy. Travis provides an echo of Max’s story in The Homecoming of his and MacGregor’s status as men who were hated and feared. Travis also embodies a particularly unpleasant version of sexual exploitation of women by men. Like Pinter, then, Ridley seems to have a clear vision of the ways in which sexuality can be both a positive driver and an agent of fear and despair. As with The Birthday Party, the pitfalls of sexuality are given considerable emphasis in both The Pitchfork Disney and The Fastest Clock in the Universe. Unlike Pinter’s play, however, Ridley presents us with physical violence on stage in the form of breaking the finger/phallus and Sherbet’s violent miscarriage. In most of Ridley’s later plays the Pinteresque style is less apparent, though still discernible, as, for example, in Vincent’s narrative in Vincent River (2000), and in the comedy of menace apparent in Mercury Fur (2005). Although it falls outside the temporal compass of this book, it is perhaps worth noting here that in Piranha Heights (2008) there are strong echoes of The Homecoming, in that a young woman character ends the play by appearing to take on the role of mother to two middle-aged men. But Ridley is, of course, part of a later generation than Pinter, and his treatment of gender politics that of somebody embroiled in the in-yer-face movement. Aleks Sierz sees Ridley as a pioneer: ‘At the start of the decade Ridley was almost alone in exploring ideas no one else dared to touch, but some of his trademarks – violent stage images, blatant language, pop culture references – became staples of the new drama.’(Sierz, 2001: 47) Beyond that, Ridley made a significant contribution to the arrival of gender and sexuality on the mainstream stage of the 1990s. There is a gloomy psychosis here, which has transformed earlier anxieties into a balanced, nuanced, and extremely troubling statement of mainstream concerns. Notes   1. Wesker’s Caritas (1981), for example, was very positively reviewed in Time Out by Michelene Wandor, against a background of generally quite grudging comment from male reviewers.   2. In the course of an interview at a conference, ‘British Theatre in the 1950s’, held at the British Library, December 1997.   3. Launched in spring 1994.   4. See Chapter 4, pp. 90.   5. John Russell Taylor (1968: 35–6) quotes, for example, from Derek Granger’s review in the Financial Times: ‘a play of extraordinary importance’, from T. C. Worsley in the New Statesman: ‘a most exciting [play], abounding with life and vitality’, and from Anthony Hartley in the Spectator: ‘a powerful and sombre play’, as well as from critics who disliked the play, but perceived in it Osborne’s potential. Harold Hobson’s Sunday Times review described Osborne as ‘a writer of outstanding promise’, while Harold Conway in the Daily Sketch called him ‘a new dramatist of importance’.   6. In the introduction to Volume 1 of the Collected Plays (1993), Osborne compares the reception of Déjàvu to that provoked by the opening of The World of Paul Slickey (1959): ‘the same degree of

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concerted animosity attended it and the campaigning conspiracy of its suppression was just as malign’.   7. Michael Billington, The Guardian, 5 December 1973.   8.  The Spectator, 22 April 1978.   9. Nicholas Wroe, ‘David Hare: Profile’, The Guardian, 13 November 1999. 10. David Benedict, reviewing Closer in The Independent, 31 May 1997. 11. Patrick Marber interviewed by Lyn Gardner in the Guardian, 3 January 1998. 12. Barker, Howard (1998), Ursula: Fear of the Estuary, typescript held in the British Library. Playscript number 8212, pp. 15–16. The play is now published in Barker (2007). 13. Barker, Howard (1998: 81). 14. Harold Pinter, ‘A Letter to Peter Wood’, dated 30 March 1958, quoted in Michael Scott (1986: 82). 15. Completely thwarted in the original version of the play, but only partially in the version published in the 2002 edition of Ridley Plays: 1.

4 Gay and Lesbian Plays

Introduction The period 1950 to 2000 saw the development of gay and lesbian plays from virtual nonexistence to a cautious emergence into the twilight, then into a polemical and far-reaching position, followed by emergence into the mainstream and, finally – and arguably – substantial absorption into the mainstream. There has been a dynamic between the gay and lesbian plays produced and the state of public opinion about lesbian and gay issues. What has been permissible or possible to stage has changed as a more liberal attitude has prevailed, especially since the abolition of the theatre censorship function of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office in 1968, and the coming into effect of the Sexual Offences Act 1967. That said, there has been a kind of oscillation in the visibility of homosexuality on stage in the post-war decades. The 1950s saw the birth of the sympathetic homosexual subject on stage, while homosexuality was to some extent decentred as a topic in the 1960s. Then in the 1970s there was an energetic surge of issue-based lesbian and gay plays, which fell back in the 1980s, probably because of the impact of AIDS. Again, the early to mid-1990s saw a renaissance of gay plays, but this tide retreated in the later 1990s and 2000s. When Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables was first performed, on 22 September 1954, the true nature of the scandal at the centre of the second of the two playlets could not even be stated. By the time Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking had its first performance on 26 September 1996, sexual acts between men were being quite explicitly depicted on stage, as unremarkable events in a remarkable play. The progress of lesbian plays has in some ways paralleled this development through the latter part of the same period. However, the corpus of lesbian plays is far smaller than that of male gay plays, and my focus in this chapter is proportionately more on the latter than the former. Michael Billington, reflecting on the theatre of 1995, expressed it thus: ‘the homosexualities represented in the mainstream have been overwhelmingly male. In this respect the proliferation of gay plays is symptomatic of another distinctive feature of new British drama: the prevalence of plays by and about men.’1

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There are various possible explanations for the relatively small number of lesbian plays. One is that it simply reflects the balance between produced plays written by men and those written by women. It may be that the comparatively small number of female playwrights in Britain and elsewhere is a result of the long-standing perception of women’s space as private/domestic, and of public space as masculine. The theatre stage is among the most public of spaces, perhaps with a corresponding male dominance and hegemony, which has insisted that the role of women in the theatre is firmly confined to what Elaine Aston, among others, describes as ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’. Under male sanction, then, women’s role in the theatre, since the latter part of the eighteenth century, has been as the actress, the object of the male gaze in an environment, both physical and textual, that is controlled by men. A straightforward survey of the proportions of twentieth-century plays written by women would suggest that there is value in this view, and that no large-scale assault on masculine hegemony was possible until after the rise of the feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A further subtlety enters the dynamic, with the question of whether feminists sought to make an impact in theatre other than by challenging traditional male supremacy in the role of text author. Elaine Aston considers ‘the female performer as potential creator of an “alternative” text to the male-authored stage picture in which she is “framed”’ (Aston, 1995: 32). Aston then goes on to cite evidence of the rise in the US of a feminist leaning towards writing on the body, in the shape of performance art, at the expense of conventional playwriting. Similarly, Jill Dolan writes about a shift in the emphasis of American feminist theatre to solo performance: ‘Language in feminist performance…is only part of the story. The body writes the largest part of the text.’ She goes on to discuss ‘the problems and pleasures of representing the female body’,2 the area where the difference between the sexes is most distinct. Thus, what would, in any case, have been a relatively small number of plays by women to feature the lesbian subject may have been reduced still further by less reliance on text per se among women theatre practitioners than men. The lesbian subject is notable by her absence from the British stage until Frank Marcus’s The Killing of Sister George (1965). Anything approaching a sympathetic treatment of the lesbian theme, or, better still, a lesbian play actually written by a lesbian, had to wait even longer. In many eyes Marcus’s depiction of bizarre stereotypes probably disqualifies The Killing of Sister George from being considered a lesbian play at all. Jill Davis, for example, is clearly not prepared to countenance it as one when she places ‘the beginning of lesbian theatre in the mid 1970s’. (Davis, 1989: viii) An initial point here is what actually qualifies as a ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ play. Some commentators have taken the identity of the playwright as the defining factor. This is problematic, as it fails to address the content or political outlook of the plays themselves. Alan Sinfield makes the point: ‘there is no correlation between the (reported) sexuality of the writer…and the way he or she represents homosexuality’ (Sinfield, 1999: 4). Thus, for present purposes, the gay play is taken to be one that foregrounds gay experience in a way that provides a positive image, or at least a sympathetic one, of the gay subject; a similar definition can be applied to the lesbian play.

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The Run-up to Legality for Gay Men Which play should be taken as the first post-war British gay play? A case can be made for Benedick Scott’s Lambs of God (1948), but the play is only positive towards the central gay character to the extent that he is portrayed as less manipulative and destructive than his heterosexual female rival. There is, in fact, a generally self-oppressive tone to the play, as clearly indicated by the following stage direction: ‘Dick watches him go, his whole body sags dejectedly, as if all the bitter self-disgust and torment, all the tragic unhappiness and inherent loneliness of his inversion had of a sudden been thrust upwards by his overburdened conscience.’ (Scott, 1948) Meanwhile, Michael Billington argues persuasively for Emlyn Williams’s Accolade (1950) to be regarded as a coded gay play (Billington, 2007: 41). However, while there are clear indications of a possible gay subtext, they are sufficiently encoded to have been visible only to a minority 1950 audience, or so I would have thought. A better starting point might be Rattigan’s Deep Blue Sea (1952), on the basis that, as Geoffrey Wansell suggests, it may have been originally written with Hector, rather than Hester, as the central character.3 However, pace Wansell, at best the amount of inference required for a gay reading of The Deep Blue Sea is considerable; at worst such a reading may be nonsense. In fact, the rumour of a homosexual version of the play may be based on the character of Miller rather than Hester. The quietly heroic Miller has been struck off the medical register and sent to prison for some offence or other, though the nature of the offence has become more obscure through successive drafts of the play. By the time of the published version of the play, the landlady, Mrs Elton, is fairly cryptic: ‘what he did wasn’t – well – the sort of thing people forgive very easily. Ordinary normal people, I mean…I see far too much of life in this place to get upset by that sort of thing.’ (Rattigan, 1985: 59) By this stage, the offence in question could as easily be abortion as homosexuality, though it is hard to think of much else in this context that would invite opprobrium from society at large, but be treated as socially acceptable by an easy-going and sympathetic London landlady. That said, homosexuality is not readily readable as a central issue in The Deep Blue Sea. Following this process of elimination, the first significant post-war British gay play becomes Rattigan’s Separate Tables (1954), or at least Table Number Seven, the second of the two playlets. It seems that the Major’s offence in Table Number Seven – described in the text as nudging ladies in the cinema – had always been intended by Rattigan as a metaphor for homosexuality. Indeed, as Michael Billington has also pointed out (Billington, 2007: 71), it is hard to read it any other way in light of some of the exchanges in the play. One example comes from Charles Stratton’s defence of the Major: ‘My lack of understanding it is probably a shortcoming in me. The Major presumably understands my form of lovemaking. I should therefore understand his.’ (Rattigan, 1985: 147) Another example, this time from the exchange in which the Major tells Sibyl about his reluctance to go and stay with a friend in London, and Sibyl reacts to the prospect almost with fear. Charles Stratton’s reference to the Major’s ‘form of lovemaking’ is much more easily understood as directed towards a broadly recognized orientation than to an individual peccadillo. Similarly, it is hard to see that the Major and Sibyl

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would be so fearful if the prospect were he and his London acquaintance merely egging one another on to further outrages towards ladies in cinemas. That the homosexual subtext was indeed there is confirmed by Rattigan’s attempt to make homosexuality overt in the play’s 1956 Broadway production.4 Geoffrey Wansell quotes Rattigan’s correspondence with his American producer: ‘If the Major’s peccadilloes are not more than what the Lord Chamberlain had forced me to pretend they are then everybody’s reactions in the play are exaggerated.’ Rattigan goes on to cite a number of instances of this exaggeration, describing them as comments ‘that such characters would normally make about a man pleading guilty to a homosexual offence’ (Wansell, 1996: 277–8). Wansell also reports Rattigan’s claim that ‘he believed that “an English audience knew my problem and accepted the fact that I had to skirt around it. They got the full impact of the play”’(Wansell, 1996: 273). So even though the homosexual theme is present only in disguised form, it seems legitimate to claim this as a gay play. Indeed, it may even possess some distinctly radical elements, combining to rather peculiar effect with the Major’s self-oppressed protestations. Rattigan’s sympathetic stance towards Pat Cooper, the embodiment of humane intelligence and tolerance, and his almost brutal treatment of Mrs Railton-Bell, with her vindictive power-hunger, are straightforward enough. The context within which these polarities are displayed, however, adds a much more radical element to the sexual politics of the play. The Major’s survival at the end is the direct consequence of his being forced to ‘come out’, and of his fellow residents being compelled to take a stance between conventional moral values, aloof from human reality, and fellow feeling towards a man whom circumstances have backed into a corner, and who, once cornered, has managed to face the situation with considerable courage and dignity. That the majority of the hotel residents ultimately deal with this situation with reasonable generosity and humanity is all very well, but, of course, it is not just Mrs Railton-Bell who has reacted so vindictively. Jean Stratton, portrayed as an unhealthily stereotypical young mother, is plainly the next incarnation of Mrs Railton-Bell’s inquisitive intolerance. The play then appears to express mixed feelings as regards the prospect of a more liberal and tolerant climate of opinion towards homosexuality existing in Britain in future. While the majority of the hotel’s residents – and by extension Britain’s inhabitants – eventually emerge blinking into a reasonably friendly climate, Jean Stratton very clearly does not. Rattigan thus suggests that homophobia will continue to exert a considerable force in British culture for some time to come, and that this may be all the longer given that the young mother is responsible for this branch of neurosis, which she is quite likely to pass on to her child. Indeed, Jean Stratton, becomes the vehicle for a small but satisfyingly wicked irony, when the fact that nudging ladies in the cinema has become a cover for homosexuality gives rise to the following exchange:  Jean:  I don’t agree at all. I feel disgusted at what he’s done too, but I think I’m quite right to feel disgusted. I don’t consider myself prejudiced at all, and I think that people who behave like that are a public menace and deserve anything they get.

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Charles: Your vehemence is highly suspect. I must have you psycho-analysed. Jean:  It’s absolutely logical, Charles. Supposing next time it’s a daughter– Charles:  I know. I know. And supposing in twenty or thirty years’ time she sits next to a Major Pollock in a cinema– (Rattigan, 1985: 147–8) ‘Supposing next time it’s a daughter’ neatly reverses the more usual concern about sons falling prey to homosexual seduction. Rattigan here exposes to view the way in which apparent concern for children’s welfare has been used to justify the lazy bigotry that allowed homophobia to be a pervasive cultural blight in Britain for so much of the twentieth century. A parallel reversal occurs with Charles’s semi-jocular threat to have Jean subjected to psychiatric analysis, which, especially during the 1950s, was seen, alongside aversion therapy, as appropriate ‘treatment’ for homosexuality perceived as a pathological condition. Rattigan is said to have taken his inspiration for Table Number Seven from the experience endured by John Gielgud earlier that year, who had been arrested on indecency charges. His misdemeanour had been reported in the Daily Express with some vindictiveness, and he had then had to face a Liverpool audience at the opening of a new play. According to which source one consults, his appearance on stage was greeted either with a ‘standing ovation’ (Wansell, 1996: 252), or ‘a sort of sigh’ (Darlow and Hodson, 1979: 227). Either way,5 what it was not greeted with was the kind of homophobic demonstration that the Liverpool theatre management had feared. Gielgud’s homosexuality, then, was out in the open, and the heavens had not fallen. The Major’s homosexuality is both out in the open and hidden. The audience may choose to read the metaphor or not, but the hotel residents presumably have no such choice. Nonetheless, forcing the Major’s hand may well have led, by the end of the play, to a much less desperate future than he would otherwise have faced. Certainly, his own fortitude in facing the rest of the hotel residents over dinner that evening has made a huge difference, leaving him largely free to carry on his life in the hotel on a new and more honest basis. And had Mrs Railton-Bell not forced the issue, he would have carried on as the bogus Major, the falseness of his position a symbol of his unwillingness to commit himself to a homosexual identity. Honesty and openness versus self-deceit and hypocrisy form the moral crux of the play. Mrs Railton-Bell’s kangaroo court parodies British justice and respectable opinion, while the later exchange between the Major and Sibyl gives an opportunity for the human value of honesty to gain the audience’s attention and sympathy. There is a degree of manipulation at work here: the Major gains a good deal of sympathy from the mere fact that he is not Mrs RailtonBell. However, the central point remains – that the Major’s intimate and revealing description to Sibyl of his feelings and motivations is a moment of greater emotional value than the whole of the lives of the older residents. Given the Major’s own agreement with Sibyl’s statement that, ‘It’s horrible’, this is hardly the stuff of gay liberation, and it is certainly ironic that this plea for openness and honesty should be in a play unable to be open about the true nature of the issue.

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However, considered purely from the inside of the play, openness is presented as the road to personal salvation. Despite the vividness lent to the play by an explicitly homosexual reading, this may be seen as too parochial an approach. Responding to Rattigan’s proposal for revising the US opening, Whitehead wrote, ‘in being so specific about his “offence” I feel the play becomes smaller, it becomes “a play about homosexuality”, which it isn’t’ (Wansell, 1996: 275–6). Whitehead’s attitude is satirized bitterly by Sean O’Connor:  Of course Rattigan wasn’t capable of writing a play about the toleration of homosexuality which was also ‘about man’s inhumanity to man’. Of course a play which discussed such a narrow issue could not speak of universal isolation. And of course the box office had nothing to do with it. (O’Connor, 1998: 211) Quite how Whitehead came to see dealing overtly with homosexuality as more constraining to the scope of Table Number Seven than presenting it as nudging ladies in a cinema is hard to say. The assumption would have to be that the audience could deduce that nudging ladies in a cinema was a cipher for some larger issue, but then leap over homosexuality in their contemplation of what that might be to arrive at some huge and universal moral dilemma. That seems incredible, and leads to the conclusion that O’Connor’s mordant citing of the power of the box office correctly assesses the degree of cynicism in Whitehead’s response. In any case, the power of Table Number Seven is such that there seems little doubt it would transcend any parochialism that might be imposed by making the Major’s homosexuality overt. A problem arises, however, in the making of the Major overtly homosexual, in that the nature of the bond between him and Sibyl becomes unclear. What, after all, can a man convicted of homosexual importuning have in common with an overprotected younger woman with a neurotic fear of sex? O’Connor suggests an intriguing solution:  perhaps Sibyl is also an allegorical figure: the suffocated homosexual mother’s boy whose fear of his sexuality is so great that he cauterizes the very notion of sex from his being. As homosexual figures, Sibyl and the Major represent the options in a culture where sex between men is criminalized: Sibyl withdraws from sex altogether and the Major, who chooses an active sex life, must operate against the law and ‘in the dark’. (O’Connor, 1998: 212–13) Such an approach gains some support from Michael Darlow and Gillian Hodson: ‘casts have found it helpful at times in rehearsal to think of both characters as men, and have thus uncovered nuances in the dialogue which have enriched the texture of the whole.’ (Darlow and Hodson, 1979: 224) But changing Sibyl’s sex seems rather radical and, indeed, neither O’Connor nor Darlow and Hodson go so far as to suggest that such a change should be incorporated into an actual production; rather, that this alternative view could reasonably be held in the mind of the cast and audience. But if this is a reasonable demand to place on the audience, can the

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same not be said of homosexuality? Perhaps Rattigan’s original instinct was correct: to trust in his ability to communicate the issue of homosexuality to his audience without being explicit, and in the ability of his audience to be properly responsive to what he was saying. Regardless, Table Number Seven remains a powerful drama, fully capable of sustaining an important and liberating gay reading. In contrast with the foregoing, an effort to impose a gay reading on Table by the Window, the first of the two Separate Tables playlets, would involve a degree of contrivance that cannot be justified. John Malcolm is surely as red-blooded a heterosexual man as the post-war stage can offer, though enslaved to the extent that Anne could ‘make him grovel at the vague and distant promise of delights that were his anyway by right’ (Rattigan, 1985: 108). This sexual neediness, counterpoised with Anne’s coldness and her calculating cruelty in contriving to get what she wants, suggests a rather primitive view on Rattigan’s part of what heterosexual men and women are about, and certainly a less than enlightened view of gender politics. But perhaps his sympathies are reserved for when Anne allows her vulnerability to come to the fore:  John:  Our two needs for each other are like two chemicals that are harmless by themselves but when brought together in a test-tube can make an explosive as deadly as dynamite. Anne:  I could take the risk. After all, there are worse deaths, aren’t there? (She looks round the room at the empty tables.) Slower and more painful and more frightening. So frightening, John. So frightening. (Rattigan, 1985: 126–7) However ponderous John’s dialogue, Rattigan has generated a powerful feeling of solidarity with both these characters by the end of the playlet, thus giving the Major and Sibyl a quite extraordinary platform from which to begin their mutual crisis. John and Anne are too much, too dangerously, in love, while the Major and Sibyl are too scared of human contact on either the physical or emotional level. The two pairs of characters present precisely opposite emotional problems, a point made more emphatic by the parts being doubled by the actors. Sean O’Connor comments: ‘The performers who play Anne Shankland and John Malcolm in the first play take on the roles of Sibyl Railton-Bell and Major Pollock in the second, implying a close relationship between the apparently diverse dilemmas of the four protagonists.’ (O’Connor, 1998: 202) While Rattigan makes the case in Separate Tables for openness and tolerance towards homosexuality, he seems to back away from this approach in Variation on a Theme (1958). Here, Sam, the gay choreographer, responds to Rose’s unspoken assumption that he and Ron are lovers:  Sam:  Would you try to get this into your Wolfenden-conscious mind? Feelings can’t sometimes be helped, but the expression of them can. They can and they are.

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Rose:  That sounds very noble. Sam:  No. Not noble. Difficult and rather humiliating – and well – just generally pretty good hell. But not ignoble. (Rattigan, 1964: 268) Sam is perhaps the nearest to a sympathetic male character in the play, and is by implication not only critical of the lifestyle of Rose, the anti-heroine, and her laissez-faire attitude towards sexual matters, but also of moves towards legalizing homosexuality in the UK, as recommended by the Wolfenden Report.6 But a more offbeat depiction of homosexuality as an issue occurs in Rattigan’s Man and Boy (1963), in which the (heterosexual) financier Antonescu, on the brink of ruin and exposure as a swindler, manages to convince the (homosexual) tycoon Herries that Antonescu’s (heterosexual) son is actually his lover and will be available for Herries’s pleasure. Again, the weakness of the homosexual character is very far from a positive or remotely convincing gay image, although this weakness is a relatively insignificant flaw when compared to the manipulative callousness of his deceiver. In fact, the play overall is flawed in a number of respects, especially as regards its unconvincing plot and dialogue, so is far from being a milestone in the development of gay theatre. It is remarkable, however, in its unhysterical approach to the father’s putative attempt to prostitute his son. That said, the underlying attitude towards homosexuality evinced by Rattigan seems to have become increasingly negative since the shadowy but likeable Miller in The Deep Blue Sea, and the slightly absurd but nevertheless endearing Major in Separate Tables. Indeed, apart from a passing reference in Cause Célèbre (1977), homosexuality disappears from Rattigan’s plays after Man and Boy, perhaps indicating an unwillingness to deal with a theme that apparently deeply troubled him in his personal life. Wansell quotes David Rudkin to this effect: ‘I detect in his plays a deep personal, surely sexual pain’, and Wansell goes on to say, ‘Rattigan struggled with his own will, and his homosexuality, throughout his life,’ and ‘Rattigan never considered “outing” himself. The possibility would have appalled him.’ (Wansell, 1996: 404, 408–9) In light of all this, it is perhaps more remarkable that Rattigan went as far as he did in pleading for homosexual liberation in Separate Tables, than that the degree of his apparent conviction should have lessened in subsequent plays. Another possibility is that the tailing off of radicalism evident in Separate Tables may have been the result of a feeling on Rattigan’s part that he was the victim of a homophobic conspiracy. Geoffrey Wansell evidently thinks that Kenneth Tynan had Rattigan in his sights when he gave such favourable publicity to Look Back In Anger: ‘It was a distrust and dislike of homosexuality that [George] Devine shared with Tynan.’ (Wansell, 1996: 285) And Dan Rebellato places the ‘clear moment where the heterosexual agenda of the Court was established’ at the first meeting between Devine and Osborne. Rebellato quotes Osborne to the effect that Devine was evidently at pains to dismiss Rattigan’s plays because of their covert homosexual content. (Rebellato, 1999: 214–15) The attitude towards homosexuality in Variation on a Theme apparently gave rise to such outrage on the part of Shelagh Delaney that it prompted her to write A Taste of Honey (1958) (Innes, 1992: 93). Certainly, Delaney provides in Geoffrey a decidedly more positive gay character than that of Herries in Rattigan’s later Man and Boy. Indeed,

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the whole play has a radical flavour: the milieu is genuinely working-class, unlike the posturing of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger; Jo, the (white) heroine, is pregnant by a black man; her mother Helen is promiscuous. But for all this radical promise, Delaney fails to provide anything very positive in her homosexual character. Geoffrey is an almost exact counterpart of Sam in Variation on a Theme, a rather ironic outcome given Delaney’s supposed motivation for writing the play. And as with Sam, Geoffrey is sexually unprovided for throughout the play, and is eventually excluded from any kind of emotional involvement when Jo’s unsatisfactory mother returns to the scene and turfs Geoffrey out. Any claims to radicalism in the depiction of homosexuality seem to be based purely on Geoffrey’s saintliness, which has to be its own reward. Saintliness is also Sam’s principal attribute In Variation on a Theme and does him as little good. One of the most positive and influential images of homosexuality in the early 1960s appeared not in a stage play but a film, Victim (Green and McCormick, 1961). Positive may be going too far, given that this plea for relaxing the law is couched in terms of a thoroughly patronizing tolerance and understanding. The quiet heroism of Barrett, whose suicide is central to the motivation of the film, is set in a context where many of the homosexual characters are weak and unsatisfactory. Even Melville Farr, the central character, only acquires heroic status by suppressing his gay persona. ‘I may share your instincts. But I’ve always resisted them,’ he declares piously to one peculiarly obnoxious gay character, a declaration almost exactly the same in effect as that made by Sam in Rattigan’s Variation on a Theme. The film, then, makes a very muted plea for relaxation of the law, on the grounds that this would be the lesser of two evils. In a weird stilted exchange among three powerful gay men, the core message of the film is set out:  Calloway:  I’m a born odd man out, Carr.7 But I’ve never corrupted the normal. Why should I be forced to live outside the law because I find love in the only way I can. Farr:  You’re a star, Calloway. Men like you set the fashion. If the youngsters knew the way you live, wouldn’t they think that as an example to be followed? Lord Fullbrook:  Of course youth must be protected, we all agree that. But that doesn’t mean that ‘consenting males in private’ should be pilloried by an antiquated law and made meat for blackmail. If the gay characters exude self-oppression, this is more than matched in unattractiveness by the tolerance and understanding of the more sympathetic heterosexual figures. Frank, one of the most sympathetic characters in the film, observes to his viciously bigoted wife, ‘You don’t know how lonely his kind are. In their hearts, I mean…There’s no real substitute for what you and me have got.’ And Frank’s well-meaning smugness is matched by that of the kindly and humane policeman Harris: ‘If only these unfortunate devils would come to us in the first place.’

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But if the liberal heterosexuals sound extraordinary to modern ears, the less liberal ones give real pause for thought. Melville Farr’s brother-in-law, Scott, is described by Farr as ‘a perfect barometer of public morality’. Scott then provides a telling account of the anxieties society has about homosexuality: ‘I’ve got a son. And I’m not going to have Ronnie hero-worshipping Mel, knowing what I do…There’s a moment of choice for almost every adolescent boy. And I’m not going to risk Ronnie making the wrong choice.’ Scott’s anxieties about his son’s potential to be influenced by Melville Farr to become homosexual are clearly irrational in their severity. His role as a ‘barometer’, however, suggests an outlook representative of a widespread state of mind. Against this background of anxiety and oppression, the film presents collaborators in blackmail with a number of different motives. The Sandy Youth is almost certainly gay himself, and is in the business of blackmail solely in order to provide himself with a comfortable and easy living. Miss Benham, on the other hand, is engaged on a species of moral crusade designed to punish homosexuals for their sins. This combination of active bigotry and lazy amorality contains an uneasy reflection of the state of public opinion as it was created or reacted to by the popular press of the day – or, in modified form, by the popular press throughout the period considered by this chapter.8 Sandy Youth and Miss Benham are the creatures of an unthinking social anxiety about homosexuality, in which extermination is seen as preferable to accommodation. Limited as the liberationist moral compass of Victim may be, it is credited with having considerable impact on public attitudes, and with helping to pave the way for the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which legalized sex between men over the age of 21, in private, in England and Wales – but not in Scotland, which was perceived to occupy a more primitively intransigent position on sexual morality.9 If Victim’s relatively positive image of the gay man is altogether double-edged, and based largely on the more negative portraits of the other protagonists in the film, perhaps this can be seen as a prevailing image of the time. Another example is Redl in Osborne’s rather later A Patriot for Me (1965), who is very far from a figure of unalloyed saintliness, but a rather better person than most of the other characters in the play, gay or straight. Similarly, the gay hero of David Rudkin’s Afore Night Come (1962) is an ambiguous figure, prevented by his fear and mental incapacity from being more than marginally better than his fellows (and in that respect reminiscent of Dick in The Lambs of God). Nevertheless, he is also more than merely the best of a bad lot. As Christopher Innes puts it, ‘Positive values are embodied in a marginalized outcast, who has been condemned by society for sexual perversion.’ (Innes, 1992: 422) If the message of Victim is that the persecution of homosexuals is understandable but unjust, in Afore Night Comes there is a greater sense that society needs to look to its outcasts for salvation, since those who belong firmly in the mainstream are too deeply implicated in society’s ills to provide a route out of them. A Patriot for Me is an account of an army officer of the Austro-Hungarian Empire around 1890–1910. The hero, Colonel Redl, is extremely efficient, intelligent and hard-working. He also has some Jewish blood, and is gay. He comes from a petit-bourgeois family, and so lacks

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the means to sustain the lifestyle of an army officer of the era. In order to make money he spies for the Russians, but is eventually discovered and forced to commit suicide. All the time, he is operating in an environment prepared to turn a blind eye to various misdemeanours on the part of its officers, in the belief that it can retain and sustain them to mutual benefit. Finally, it is not an action based on his homosexuality, but rather the Jewishness of Redl’s background that leads to the fanatical pogrom heralded at the close of the play. But the fact that Redl betrays his country, and most of the people by whom he is surrounded, makes for a far less positive image of this wayward and alienated gay man than has sometimes been said.10 Similarly, Frank Marcus’s The Killing of Sister George (1965) presents such a collection of bizarre lesbian stereotypes that it, too, seems more homophobic than anything else. That said, the play is extremely funny, and manages to carry a certain wry sympathy for the central character, June. In the end, though, June is betrayed by life, her own failings and jealousies, and by the lack of loyalty of both her lover and employer. Her plaintive mooing at the end is poignant, but, prior to this, Marcus has been unable to generate any more empathy with the characters on the stage than with those in the radio soap opera, which is a continuing theme of the play. In fact, June may come over as more of a man’s man than a lesbian’s lesbian, and a number of her lines give her the flavour of a delightfully unreconstructed Edwardian roué. To the extent that the play makes a positive contribution to public awareness of lesbianism – apart from its endearing humour – it probably serves as a warning about the dangers of living a stereotype. But it is perhaps equally dangerous to take this play too seriously. The greatest exponent of sexual freedom on stage in the 1960s was almost certainly Joe Orton, especially in Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964), Loot (1966) and What the Butler Saw (1969) (all discussed in Chapter 5). However, none can be said to be dealing with homosexuality per se: all are attacks on the hypocrisy of British society in the general sexual arena. That there may be even greater levels of hypocrisy where homosexuality is concerned is not a particular theme of any of Orton’s plays. Their importance lies in their entirely non-judgmental presentation of sexual matters, rather than in any great polemical message. The 1960s, then, ended with significant changes in the state of Britain’s prejudices towards homosexuality. The Sexual Offences Act 1967 and the Gay Liberation Front had both come into being11, together with the first public stirrings of lesbian awareness, largely associated with the rise of feminism. Perhaps the biggest critique of social attitudes was mounted by Victim, which is more often cited by gay historians of the period than any stage play. But on stage, the abiding difference was that it had become possible to make casual reference to homosexuality without it having to be a great scandal, or even a dominant issue within the text. This may have owed much to Joe Orton’s refusal to treat homosexuality any differently from heterosexuality. For example, in Loot, Hal and Dennis’s sexual activities are happily and indiscriminately bisexual. And although Inspector Truscott comments on this, his perpetual synthetic outrage is a stage commentary, a parody on society’s attitudes. The voice of the play is determinedly even-handed in its treatment of sexual matters, whether heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. Orton’s suave indifference pioneered a trend evident, for example, in some of David Mercer’s

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plays of the late 1960s, in which homosexuality was present on stage without dominating the play. However, Orton was not the sole pioneer in the field. Roughly contemporary with Loot, for example, was David Cregan’s Three Men for Colverton (1966), a strange dissection of English village life and of the role of the Church of England, but which also contains a relaxed and straightforward depiction of the Anglican Church’s anxieties over its own attitudes towards homosexuality. Similarly, Caryl Churchill’s Lovesick (discussed in Chapter 2), a radio play first broadcast on 8 April 1967, shares with Orton’s What the Butler Saw the use of farcical comedy to expose the destructive power-hunger of the psychiatric profession, especially as regards the interplay between psychotherapy and sexual freedom. Lovesick is another play of the mid-to-late 1960s in which homosexuality is presented as one issue among several, without indulging in heavy polemics. This even-handedness is double-edged, of course, in that while the unhysterical presentation of homosexuality on stage may have helped de-scandalize the issue in society at large, the failure to make a liberationist case presumably did little to help alleviate the oppression suffered by many gay men and lesbians at the time. Post-1968 Liberation Days The emergence of a polemical gay theatre began in the early 1970s with GLF-inspired happenings or street theatre, and then was famously embodied in the company, Gay Sweatshop. The company was formed in the course of the Almost Free Theatre’s 1975 gay season, and is still widely regarded as having had a profound and positive effect on the self-awareness of many gay men and lesbians, and on social attitudes in Britain generally. Philip Osment, as a member of the company, cannot be regarded as an impartial witness, but many people outside Gay Sweatshop would agree with his view that the company’s work ‘has affected the lives of countless individuals and has played a significant role in changing attitudes towards homosexuality within the world of theatre and within society as a whole’ (Osment, 1989: vii). In 1975 and 1976 Gay Sweatshop produced two plays that had considerable influence on the development of gay and lesbian consciousness in Britain: Mr X and Any Woman Can. Though apparently never published in print, Mr X stands out in the memory of gay men of a certain generation as marking or helping to develop self awareness. Even as early as 1984, there seems to have been a pervasive nostalgia for the good old days of 1975. In the Royal Holloway archive an introductory page by Roger Baker, dated October 1984, says, it seems to recreate a world significantly different from that in which gay people live today…Mr X reminds me of what seems to have been lost: passion, discovery, that determination to take control of our own lives, and…a sense of the future. Mr X was heavily influenced by the GLF pamphlet, With Downcast Gays (Hodges and Hutter, 1974), an important text in the development of gay consciousness in the early 1970s. The play is a morality tale about coming out, and depicts the development of a gay man from boyhood, through various stages of self-oppressed closetedness, to angry liberation. In structure, the work presents a series of cameos, each depicting a different stage in Mr X’s development as a gay man. The naively homophobic attitudes of schoolfellows and workmates make easy targets for

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the play’s opening scenes, but it is the self-oppressive attitudes of many homosexuals themselves which are exposed in the later scenes, and which made the play epochal. In scene i, Mr X encounters hostility towards homosexuality and himself at school and elsewhere. He turns to the church for support and help. In exchange for a vow of eternal discretion, the church rebaptizes him Mr X, so that he can ‘hide from your wrath…be someone else’. Thus, Mr X’s life and consciousness begin a process of self-oppression followed by a developing awareness that is tracked through the play. Scene iii, ‘The Gay Scene’, finds Mr X joining a heavily discreet gay club whose rules include ‘no embracing, touching or holding hands’, ‘Politics – is out. Religion – is out. Personal relationships – out’, and in which ‘chat about Bette Midler, Beverley Sills or Joan Crawford’ is compulsory. Scene v finds Mr X setting up home with a partner met through a contact advertisement in Gay News – a genre hilariously sent up in scene iv of the play – in a parody of a heterosexual marriage: ‘It’s going to be our fairytale castle, our impregnable fortress against the world’, ‘I could shout it from the highest hill. Not too loud or the neighbours might hear.’ But Mr X’s acquired set of second-hand, second-rate values takes a public pummelling at the hands of a GLF activist:  Mr X says the only way for homosexuals to live is aping heterosexual conduct and behaviour. I say we’re gay and thank God for it – not for us sterile marriages and stereotypical role playing. Mr X says let’s be discreet and not rock the boat. I say let’s rejoice in being gay and don’t rock the boat, sink the bloody thing! After this debacle, Mr X’s lover leaves him, with the following exchange:  Mr X: There’s no reason for us to behave like this…like a straight married couple. Lover: I wanted to love, honour and obey you. And you wouldn’t let me. I’m going to to find myself a man that treats me…the way I want to be treated. And you can piss off. Mr X: I’d no idea you hated everyone and yourself so much. Lover: I’m going out. On the town. And they’ll drop at my feet like flies. Because I’m free. FREE! The play ends with the actor playing Mr X making a speech in his own persona, and giving his real name and address, ending:  for the first time I feel I am me and not half me or the bit of me I thought people might like. I’m me and I’m gay and I feel…it must be pretty close to happiness. It’s taken me twenty-five years to say this. The next twenty-five can only be better.

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Thus, while Mr X develops and achieves psychological growth through the process of coming out, the same cannot be said for his lover, who stands as a convincing monument to the perils of self-oppression. Between them, they represent an intense and real debate that was occurring at the time, between liberationists who saw the need for political and personal development, and the more conservative approach which placed a quiet life, respectability and attempts to achieve modest steps towards equality before the law, above what they regarded as the embarrassing and puerile actions of, among others, the Gay Liberation Front. The parodic portrait of the gay scene was only too recognizable at the time the play was making its successful rounds of university campuses and other alternative theatrical venues in 1975 and 1976. The recognition of the futility of establishing gay marriages which aped their equally oppressive heterosexual counterparts was a crucial part of a liberationist zeitgeist that was later echoed on the slightly more mainstream stage by Caryl Churchill in Cloud Nine (1979). In the event, AIDS combined with the turbulence of social and sexual attitudes to make the ethos of Mr X and its ilk seem attractive in retrospect, but also rather quaint. However, this is not to detract from the impact that the play had at the time. For example, the enthusiastically received production in Edinburgh in November 1975 was reviewed by Allen Wright as, ‘the neatest piece of propaganda which I have seen for a long time…it suggests that instead of meekly accepting the role which society imposes upon them, [homosexuals] should be declaring their independence and rejecting any sense of degradation.’12 And in a review of a slightly later performance, Nicholas de Jongh in The Guardian notes Gay Sweatshop’s ‘rejection of plays like Boys in the Band13 and Section Eight which treat homosexuality as a fascinating disease.’14 Having started out in 1975 as a men’s group, Gay Sweatshop began involving women after the Almost Free season, and in 1975–1976 was still a mixed theatre group, with both gay men and lesbians participating (though separate men’s and women’s companies were formed in 1977). That perhaps helps to account for the similarities between Mr X and Jill Posener’s Any Woman Can (1975),15 a coming-out play with considerable structural affinities with Mr X. Any Woman Can is composed of a series of monologues, and, though a bit lacking in theatricality, is quite effective as a simple consciousness-raising piece. Gay Sweatshop’s influence on the relationship between gay men’s theatre and politics was considerable, as it also was on the process of bringing gay issues to the mainstream stage. This latter impact is well illustrated by Noel Greig and Drew Griffiths’s 1977 play As Time Goes By, which sets out a history of gay oppression in the twentieth century, based on three settings and times: London in the 1890s, Berlin in the 1930s and New York in 1969. The play begins with a London gay brothel, presumably based on the house at the centre of the Cleveland Street scandal. The cynicism of the brothel-keeper, Hammond, is countered by a wistful idealism from his assistant, Arthur:  Arthur: What d’you think about all those Greeks, eh? Having each other like that and no one thinking anything of it. Wish it was like that now.

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Hammond:  If it were, my dear, you and I would be out of a job. Arthur:  I wouldn’t mind. I’d rather it wasn’t a job, more something you did because you wanted to… Hammond:  When pleasure’s against the law, it comes expensive. (Greig and Griffiths, 1981: 13) Arthur and Hammond are then subjected to blackmail, robbery, arrest and imprisonment, while their aristocratic customers make good their escape to France. The shipboard parting shot of one of them constitutes an extraordinary short analysis of the hypocrisy and self-interest that lay behind the Victorian establishment’s purported moral concerns about homosexuality:  Trevelyan: We have been held up to the world; the mirror image to be loathed and hated; the reversal of all that is good. Cast out by our own kind. How tragic. How necessary. It’s a small sacrifice to make, Reggie, if it means that authority regains the respect of the people. That’s why you must take a philosophical view of it all, a long-term view. You’ll soon see where your best interests lie. In authority that is respected. And in the long run that’s you and me. Chaps like us. (Greig and Griffiths, 1981: 27) For ‘our country’s good’, to paraphrase Timberlake Wertenbaker a few years later. But the above speech, in its ruthless assessment and assertion of class interest, also seems to foreshadow closely the concerns of Julian Mitchell’s Another Country (1981). Whether or not As Time Goes By exerted any direct influence on the writing of Another Country, the popular theme of homosexuality as a widely practised recreation among the upper and upper-middle classes prevails in both, as does the resultant anxiety about homosexuality as an influence simultaneously accepted and reviled within the heart of the establishment. This scapegoating of homosexuality is interestingly double-edged. On the one hand, the terms ‘authority’ and ‘respect’ surely invoke the language of power, reminiscent of the terms used by Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality. On the other hand, Trevelyan is in no doubt as to the authority his class position gives him the right to wield – so long as his sexuality remains hidden. The setting of the middle section of As Time Goes By is Berlin, contrasting the relatively benign atmosphere of 1929 with that of 1933–34, when, following the assassination of the prominent homosexual Nazi, Ernst Rohm, the Nazi terror turned on its own enemy within. According to the play, in 1929 Magnus Hirschfield’s Institute for Sexual Science was agitating for homosexual rights, and receiving support from the mainstream left. That support evaporated in the succeeding years, as more or less dishonourable efforts were made by German Social Democrats to find room for coexistence with the Nazis. Of course, Rohm is a particularly compelling example of the dangers for members of minority groups of trying to operate at the expense of other minorities. The central portion of the play ends with the moneyed homosexual club owner making his escape from Germany, while those left behind had to face the Nazi terror, and ultimately the pink triangle, the emblem of homosexuals in concentration camps.

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This portion of the play clearly has a theme in common with Martin Sherman’s Bent, and it is perhaps significant that the first published edition of Bent is dedicated to Alan Pope and Peter Whitman: Alan Pope was one of the very early members of Gay Sweatshop, and had a leading role in the original production of As Time Goes By. Apart from a portion of shared subject matter, a degree of influence seems to have been exerted on the later play by the earlier. Philip Osment says, ‘Martin Sherman pays tribute to the inspiration he drew from As Time Goes By when he was writing Bent’, and goes on to quote Sherman: ‘I travelled with the Sweatshop to Edinburgh for the run of As Time Goes By and that play pumped adrenalin into my eager veins…I quite literally wrote Bent for the Gay Sweatshop.’ (Osment, 1989: xxxviii) Like Another Country, then, Bent appears to be a vehicle for transference of the gay polemical fringe theatre of the 1970s, as embodied by As Time Goes By, to the mainstream stage of the early 1980s. The third portion of As Time Goes By is a cameo set in a New York gay bar. Various gay male stereotypes of the era exchange conversational gambits, in the course of which their lack of mutual support and strength is contrasted with the situation within the Women’s Movement and the Black Panthers. One of the principal characters, a student, comments:  Those guys who call me cissy and she and sister don’t really know anything, because in actual fact my real sister is the most interesting, involved, energetic, alive person I know. She and those women she hangs around with are really strong together…I’d like to belong to a group like that, instead of waiting around here, waiting, waiting for a trick. Jesus, if anyone calls me she in future, I’ll take it as a compliment. In due course, an undercover policeman attempts to arrest another central character, a drag queen, on trumped-up charges. But this time, there is resistance, and the play ends with the eruption of the Stonewall Riots, the iconic moment when flight and submission ended for gay men, to be replaced by a will to fight back: the birth of gay liberation. Whatever the merits of As Time Goes By on the stage, it remains an impressive account of homosexual experience in the western world during the first two thirds of the twentieth century. With hindsight, given the apparent foreshadowings of Bent and Another Country, it also seems to have exercised a quite profound influence on the development of the gay play, both in Britain and the US. The emergence of Gay Sweatshop as a company therefore provided an environment in which plays such as Mr X, Any Woman Can and As Time Goes By were written, performed and reviewed. That process may have helped establish a dynamic in which gay and lesbian self-awareness could flourish, enabling more gay and lesbian plays to enter the mainstream. Lesbians Out on Stage It is perhaps a measure of the fact that a modest male homosexual voice had been making itself heard on stage for some years prior to 1975, which an equivalent lesbian voice had not, that the late 1970s saw an efflorescence of gay men’s theatre on stage that remained

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unmatched by lesbian plays until the mid-1980s. However, another significant factor was the presence of a feminist theatrical voice into which the lesbian voice was subsumed. An example is cited by Lizbeth Goodman, referring to the history of Gay Sweatshop:  A considerable conflict of interests was apparent: the women in the company aligned themselves with other theatre women, while the men aligned themselves with other gay men. The emphasis was thus on feminist and cultural concerns for the women, and on issues of sexual (gay) politics for the men. (Goodman, 1993: 76) Whether this represented an entirely satisfactory state of affairs from a lesbian point of view is debatable, but gender and sexuality issues were at least being questioned by early feminist theatre. One issue foregrounded by feminist plays of the late 1970s was Artificial Insemination by Donor (AID), which, together with broader issues around child custody, was a matter of particular concern for lesbians. Three plays which explore this area continue to attract critical attention: Gay Sweatshop’s Care and Control (1977), Michelene Wandor’s Aid Thy Neighbour (1978) and Sarah Daniels’ Neaptide (1982). The polemic in the Gay Sweatshop play is wielded with a distinctly heavy hand, and Daniels seems to produce a similarly unbalanced formula, in which all the women turn out to be lesbian – however heterosexual their past lives have been – and all the men turn out to be unspeakable. In the Wandor play, the emphasis is more on AID as a feminist issue, in which lesbians – and a heterosexual and sympathetically portrayed man – happen to be involved, and her generally lighter touch and use of comedy arguably produced a more successful play. In Daniels’ case, different constraints may have applied. Four years after the initial production of Aid Thy Neighbour the social attitudes depicted in Neaptide – though not the voice of the play itself – are markedly more reactionary. One possible explanation is that Daniels was exaggerating the oppressiveness of social attitudes towards lesbianism in order to lend additional emphasis to her theme. Another is that, three years after the 1979 general election, social attitudes in Britain had genuinely moved backwards instead of forward. Another route taken by lesbian plays from the polemical fringes to the mainstream was as a component of the more broadly feminist play. Perhaps the best-known example here would be Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (1979). Although this play is discussed at greater length in Chapter 2, its gay and lesbian content is significant. The ludicrous hypocrisy which covers simmering gay and lesbian (and paedophile) activities in the nineteenth century colonial setting of Act I is transformed in the 1970s London setting of Act II. Churchill appears to be making a plea for a society in which some advance towards personal liberation can be achieved by means of openness about sexuality. This is not unqualified, however, as the male gay couple in Act II can only find dissatisfaction in their attempts to build a relationship based on the model of heterosexual marriage. It is the lesbian couple who seem to achieve real personal growth through their relationship, perhaps largely because they feel little impulse to retreat into any kind of ghetto. Instead, they are open about their relationship with one another, and still retain complete involvement with their children and other family members and friends. However, the ambit of the play is much broader than merely a manifesto in favour of the joys of lesbianism,

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embracing as it does a wide-ranging critique of sexuality and gender politics. It is probably one of the most positive images of lesbianism to have emerged on to the mainstream British stage in the late 1970s. Respectability for Gay Men The gay male play of the late 1970s was moving out of the campus theatre and into the mainstream. Mr X had served an important function as a vehicle for consciousness-raising, but it was very much the consciousness of the gay community that was raised. Given the make-up of its audiences, any effect the play may have had on society at large was more indirect, operating via its impact on what was producible on the mainstream stage. This particularly applies to Martin Sherman’s Bent (1979). Set in Nazi Germany, Bent is an account of the attacks made on homosexuals by the state, up to and including sending them to concentration camps, where they were lower in the hierarchy than Jews. It is also an account of the love between two men in a concentration camp, including the funny and poignant scene where Max and Horst talk one another to orgasm without actually touching. It ends, of course, with the death of both men. The play stunned audiences at the Royal Court and the Criterion in 1979– 80, though given the quality of the writing and production it is hard to say how much audiences were moved by the subject matter per se. Be that as it may, little in the way of education on gay matters took place via the theatre in the 1980s, at least in terms of the West End. Unfortunately, the other great gay success of the period – Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (New York, 1982, London, 1985) – is American, and so barely qualifies for inclusion here. But it was probably the last significant gay play to be performed in the West End before gay sensibility in Britain – and the British people’s understanding of gay experience – became overwhelmed by consciousness of AIDS, and perhaps also by general depression provoked by the repressive government of the day. Torch Song Trilogy is an impressive account of a New York Jewish drag queen coming to terms with loving and being loved, then with bereavement, and finally with himself and his family, in the shape of his adopted son, bisexual ex-lover and protective, but homophobic, aggressive but vulnerable, endearing but hateful mother. But there was a price to be paid. Cindy Kirstenberg distinguishes a category of pre-AIDS plays, including Torch Song Trilogy, which ‘appear to compromise the political for the aesthetic or entertainment value…For if they had challenged the audience to reconceive their notions of homosexuality, they probably would not have made it to Broadway.’(Kirstenberg, 1995: 50) Such compromise is familiar enough, but does not mean that the plays in question should be dismissed. As with Alan Ayckbourn’s ability to bring gender issues into the minds of middle England through his farces, so there was a considerable political value at this time in retaining the sympathies of the mainstream audience. Staged in London, with Anthony Sher in the lead, the play was an emotional tour de force, whose appeal to the mainstream British audience constituted an oppositional gesture at a time when the AIDS crisis was just beginning to make itself felt, with a consequential upsurge of homophobia among the dominant right-wing. The fact that the worst excesses of that homophobia remained (just) confined to the lunatic fringe16 may have owed a good deal to the positive images of gay men purveyed through theatre and television; the character of Arnold in Torch Song Trilogy was one such image.

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In the territory that lies between the fringe and the West End, the early 1980s saw the production of a small number of interesting and worthwhile narrative gay plays. One of the earlier of these was Julian Mitchell’s Another Country (1981), which uses a public school as an analogy for the English establishment, and, perhaps more simply, makes the point that a high proportion of that establishment has been drawn from public schools, which has the effect of distorting the way that British society works. The ambivalence towards homosexuality is highlighted by the fact that Bennett, the openly gay character in the play, is attractive and sympathetic on the one hand, but both potentially and actually treacherous on the other. He serves as a thinly disguised Guy Burgess, though with the play set in 1936, the timing would be a few years too late for Burgess’s schooldays. The central dynamic of the play is the action taken by the school following the suicide of a pupil caught in a homosexual encounter. The group of prefects at the centre of the play handles the situation, for the most part, with remarkable savoir-faire. The exception is one Fowler, whose desire for authoritarian measures leads to a broad conspiracy to prevent his achieving power in the school. But each of the boys seems to represent some facet of the attitudes prevailing among the upper middle classes, not only in the 1930s, but perhaps also in the late 1970s–early 1980s. The lazy, rather snobbish hypocrisy of Delahay – Silly bloody fools! What did they want to go and get caught for?…If you ask me, it all comes of having masters who aren’t old boys…An old boy would have more sense than to go prowling round Phot. Soc. Dark Room in the evenings. (Mitchell, 1982: 24–5) might be seen as having overtones of the latter-day grandees of the Conservative Party. Similarly, various attributes of the Church of England, agonizing over the proper thing to do, and the new and old wings of the Conservative Party are more or less evident in the play. The proto-fascism articulated by Fowler presages the kind of thinking that led, some years later, to the passage of Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which outlawed the promotion of homosexuality as a lifestyle equally valid to heterosexual marriage – an extraordinarily repressive measure. Within this microcosm of British society, it is the fate of the openly gay Bennett that is central to the play. At first, he successfully uses blackmail to evade a punishment vindictively arranged by Fowler. But thereafter, Bennett finds he has overplayed his hand, and has to submit to discipline and give the appearance of conforming in order to make progress in the school’s hierarchy and become a prefect. Then, in a moving exchange with his friend, the communist, Judd, Bennett explains that the suicide was not simply the result of the boy’s having been found out, but of having been repulsed by the boy he loved and fears for his future prospects. Bennett goes on to explain his own feelings about love, that his homosexuality is neither simply about sex, nor is it borne of a desire to generate outrage. This point may have been new to a British mindset still inclined to associate homosexuality with uniquely genital contact. The play is not a straightforward appeal for toleration of gay people, however. Bennett is a complex and dangerous character, as revealed by his response to Judd’s characteristically robust approach to gay liberation: 

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Judd:  Fight it. Every time someone calls you a name – thump him. – The suffragettes didn’t get the vote by whining. – You have to change the fundamental social attitudes. – Either you accept the system, or you try to change it. There’s no alternative. Bennett:  Why not? Why not both? Pretend to do one, while you really do the other? (Mitchell, 1982: 100–3) At a time when a degree of hysteria was being generated in Britain over third, fourth and fifth men,17 culminating in the exposure of Anthony Blunt, a figure at the heart of the establishment who turned out to have worked for the Soviet Union, Mitchell manages to avoid crude propaganda with his proto-Burgess character. Instead, he draws Bennett as a largely sympathetic figure forced by the pressures of living in a homophobic society to adopt perhaps rather unhealthily subtle survival techniques. The message, then, is that a homophobic society does not just victimize individual gay men, but risks creating an enemy within, to the potential detriment of all. Prior to the arrival of AIDS awareness, there was also a distinct preparedness of playwrights to discuss sexual matters on stage in a very overt way. This was in spite of the attempted prosecution of Michael Bogdanov, following his direction at the National Theatre of Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain (1980), with its simulated male rape scene, a prosecution that may have created an inhibiting influence on writers and directors. Notwithstanding, the 1985 London production of Torch Song Trilogy which contained a graphic and hilarious solo depiction by Anthony Sher of a man being fucked: perhaps the fact that the main character is at that moment alone on stage gave the producer confidence that no prosecution would ensue. A similar openness concerning sexual matters is discernible in a play such as Kevin Elyot’s Coming Clean (1982), which contains graphic scenes of sex between men, and some robust verbal exchanges:  William: I reckon what you need is a good fucking. Tony:  I had a ‘good fucking’ two nights ago…Actually, it wasn’t so good…I had to ask him to stop. William: I bet Greg wasn’t too happy about that. Tony:  He’s used to it…It’s easy for you. You’ve got a cast-iron arsehole. Mine’s very sensitive. William: You can take it if you really want it. Tony:  He can use a ton of grease and it’s agony. And other times, with only a dab of spit, I’ve opened up a mile and felt ecstatic. (Elyot, 1984: 47–8)

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Quite apart from dialogue that makes few concessions to genteel hypersensitivity among its audience, the play also offers critiques of the tension between sterile promiscuity on the one hand and stifling domesticity on the other. Witty repartee and a quite ambiguous ending demonstrate considerable sophistication and progress over the earnest polemic of Mr X a few years earlier. But it is notable that the production history of the play is short, and contemporary reviews in the mainstream were varied. On the whole, however, reviews did not shy away from the homosexual physicality of the play, as they might from a similarly unrestrained work once the AIDS crisis had unfurled itself. Coming Clean achieved both a repertory run and publication by a mainstream publisher, an achievement unmatched in Britain by any other robust gay play (if such existed) for at least a decade, probably due the impact of AIDS. AIDS and Oppression In 1982 Another Country was voted the Society of West End Theatres’ Play of the Year. That, however, was as far as acceptance of homosexuality on stage was to get for some time. Here is Rosalind Carne, writing in the Financial Times on 6 January 1983:  The last word goes to our gay brothers, whose own bid for liberation appears to have taken them out of the closet and into the rut. After the hysteria of ‘The Boys in the Band’ and the polemic of Gay Liberation, we now have the constraints of liberal domesticity. Fidelity or passion? An urban Ambridge or an urban ‘Heaven’? Carne was evidently worried that Coming Clean, in particular, had confined itself to an unduly domestic setting, at the expense of larger or more exciting milieux. Whatever the rights or wrongs of her approach, such tones of cool, urbane concern that the gay movement was not doing itself justice would not be heard in the mainstream press again for over a decade. Neil Smith in What’s On of 21 December 1994 wrote: ‘This year gay plays didn’t just come out of the closet, they started re-decorating the bedroom.’ Apart from the AIDS crisis, what had been going on in the twelve years between these two comments? Stephen Jeffery-Poulter reminds us of some of the things that gays had found themselves up against in the meantime. On Sunday 11 March [1984] no less than 50 police officers descended on the Bell gay pub…to investigate an alleged infringement of the licensing laws. It was against this background that the raid by the Customs and Excise on…Gay’s the Word took place on 10 April…over 800 books (30 per cent of its total stock) [confiscated] on the grounds that they were imported titles from America which might be ‘indecent or obscene’. Many of these titles were readily available in British editions…[There took place] simultaneous raids on the homes of two of the shop’s directors and its manager which resulted in prolonged questioning, refusal of permission to contact solicitors and the seizure of ‘business data’ – including certain items which were outside Customs’ jurisdiction. It was later revealed that the shop’s telephone, along with those of CHE [the Campaign for Homosexual

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Equality] and several other gay organisations had mysteriously ceased to operate during the period of the raid.’ (Jeffery-Poulter, 1991: 168–9) It does appear that the tide had turned against any continued relaxation of the historic official disapproval of homosexuality, and this may help to account for the relatively small number of gay plays to emerge on to the mainstream British stage in the later 1980s. It is notable that the AIDS crisis in America inspired a number of plays of a very high calibre, culminating in Tony Kushner’s superb Angels in America (1990). In Britain, on the other hand, there is not a single 1980s play concerned with AIDS that seems likely to be revived. As Ian Lucas notes, ‘British theatre…has made a very poor response to the subject and challenge of AIDS.’ (Lucas, 1994: 64) That remained the case until Kevin Elyot’s My Night With Reg (1994), which is a black comedy about promiscuity and fear of the spread of AIDS among a group of North London gay men. The play is both accurately observed and funny. There is a distinct edge to the proceedings as it gradually becomes clear that each of the six characters who appear on stage has at one time or another had sex with the unseen Reg, who dies of AIDS. Elyot only quite slowly allows it to become apparent that a period of two years has elapsed between scenes 1 and 2, in the course of which time Reg’s death has occurred. A similar lapse of time exists between Scenes 2 and 3, which, again, is only gradually revealed, as is the fact that the (anti-) hero, Guy, has meanwhile died of AIDS. Without being unduly dogmatic, Elyot makes an important point about the indiscriminate nature of AIDS, through the contrast between Reg and Guy. The unseen Reg seems to be everybody’s dream man, and to have slept with everybody – a gay man whose unbridled promiscuity has resulted in his contracting AIDS. Guy, on the other hand, is very much on stage, and an extremely sympathetic down-toearth, everyman figure – convincingly always in love with the wrong man and never managing to have sex with anybody, except for the disastrous once that led to his dying of AIDS. The uneasy possibility exists at the end of the play that the other characters will also die of AIDS, sooner rather than later. All of this is conveyed with Elyot’s characteristically robust dialogue. For example, two characters comment on Reg in two separate scenes:  Benny:  He was a good fuck. Bit noisy, though…Enjoyed the sound of his own vice, you might say. – I’m pretty fucking worried, I don’t mind admitting. (Elyot, 1994: 55) – Guy:  It was so irresponsible. Even the vicar told me what a good fuck he was outside the crematorium! (Elyot, 1994: 38) Certainly, the use of humour in My Night With Reg gives the play a quality of digestibility. It may well be this that contributed to the play to being almost universally positively reviewed, and to being broadcast on BBC2.

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Apart from the possible effect of hardening official attitudes against homosexuality, as indicated above, there is no real evidence of the reason for the dismal quantity and quality of gay plays in the UK during the mid-to-late 1980s, but it seems likely that the nature of the publicity about AIDS had a lot to do with it. In the developed world AIDS had far more impact in the US than in Europe. The virus appears to have spread fairly far and wide in the US before its true nature and the fact that it was transmitted sexually was realized. In Europe, on the other hand, spread of the virus had reached a comparatively small part of the gay population by the time research, conducted mainly in the US, established it was a viral infection that was sexually transmitted. Alan Sinfield expresses it thus:  There is a different density in UK experience, chiefly because the initial transmission of HIV was slower and later. We had not developed, or been allowed to have, bath-houses and back-rooms, so knowledge about safer sex arrived in time to hinder the rate of infection. (Sinfield, 1999: 328) The comparatively high level of infection in the US meant that the direct cultural impact was considerable: playwrights, among others, were individually affected by the real fear of death and actual loss of friends and lovers to the disease. They responded in a wide variety of ways, including responsive playwriting, some of it of a high quality. In Britain, on the other hand, it appears with hindsight that knowledge of the AIDS outbreak in the US arrived not long after the virus itself. Perhaps that knowledge, combined with the retrogressive public policy of the era, brought about a crippling depression. And although the British gay community, particularly in London, was affected by the loss of friends and lovers, and by fear of infection and death, much of the emotion aroused had already been experienced more strongly in the US before being imported to Britain. This effect is perhaps an offshoot of that described by Harry Coen: ‘Fear of catching the mysterious killer-disease AIDS is causing more harm in Britain than the disease itself…hundreds of patients suffering from AIDS-related anxiety – some to the point of considering suicide.’18 In short, much of the British emotional reaction to the AIDS crisis was experienced second-hand, and, as such, was perhaps incapable of generating a strong artistic response. Probably the two most important British male gay works of the mid-to-late 1980s were Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code (1986), and Hanif Kureishi’s film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). The significance of both lies most in the context of their production. This was one of the lowest points in the post-1960s gay experience: Section 28 was looming, the AIDS crisis was expanding, with no hope of anything more positive than containment, and the hard line on any form of individual self-expression, on the poor, the disadvantaged or the marginalized, appeared to be spreading from the right wing of the government into the mainstream of popular opinion. Homophobia was widespread. Breaking the Code exposed the homophobic persecution that led to the suicide of Alan Turing, possibly the greatest single contributor to the outcome of World War II and the inventor of the first electronic computer. Though not the most optimistic theme, the daily performance by Derek Jacobi, one of the most famous actors in Britain at the time, and in the West End, to boot, provided a welcome sense that the dominant

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forces of the day were not having it all their own way. It seems that the progressive dynamic between the theatre and social attitudes, which had shaped developments from 1954 onwards, had by this time broken down to some extent, presumably because of the AIDS crisis. Breaking the Code was at least a glimmer in an otherwise rather relentlessly gloomy era. The bulk of the contemporary reviews were positive about the play and its anti-homophobic theme, but there is evidence of a tinge of worry about the prevailing ideology. Sue Jameson, in London Broadcasting, said, ‘Even though the climate is different in the eighties, I can’t believe that a similar situation wouldn’t happen again in the top echelons of security.’19 And Jim Hiley, in the Listener:  Horror follows when war’s monochrome certitudes are inflicted on private lives. This argument was thought to have been won during the 1960s. It wasn’t, and that makes Breaking the Code all the more valuable an enterprise – and all the more pleasant a surprise in our nervous West End.20 The fragility of the gains made in the 1960s was being made clear by the increasingly bigoted and illiberal views expressed in the Houses of Parliament and elsewhere, no doubt provoking Hiley’s unease. Breaking the Code, then, served as a demonstration of the dehumanizing impact homophobia had had in the past. Lesbian Self-confidence Although the impact of AIDS on lesbians was obviously far smaller than that on gay men, the output of lesbian plays of the mid-to-late 1980s remained small. There is, however, a discernible quality of joyousness, or at least of self-confidence among some of the lesbian plays written in this period. One such is Debby Klein’s Coming Soon (1986). Although a relatively slight play, it ventures into territory that had been largely unexplored by lesbian drama up to this time. For example, realism is dispensed with: the main characters are crudely drawn through vivid caricatures, while a series of stereotypes engage in almost pantomime situations. Quite apart from the pun in the play’s title, there is a distinct farcical aspect presented among the lesbian characters by a series of fallings into and out of each other’s beds, while the final victory of good over bad is again reminiscent of pantomime. However, this moving away from the earnest realism of earlier lesbian plays is surely symptomatic of a greater self-confidence than had been possible before (despite the generally gloomy note struck by the introduction to the collection in which the play was published). In her 1988 afterword to the published version of the play, Klein says, ‘I…wanted to reclaim the trivial, and to crack…the myth that only gay men can be camp.’ (Davis, 1989: 33) So the play represents a celebratory attitude towards lesbianism, an attitude perhaps previously swallowed up in the need to proselytize, to defend lesbians from the oppressive attacks of an unsympathetic press and legal system. If Coming Soon is fairly lightweight, Sandra Freeman’s Supporting Roles (1988) is a complex, serious lesbian comedy drama, addressing an impressive range of issues, from ageing and the menopause to ageism and its impact on sexual perceptions. Freeman’s remarkable characterization includes a sort of dea ex machina, one Rick, who combines a species of

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radical commonsense with the speech patterns of an Edwardian roué. Here Rick comments on the relationship difficulties of Suzie:  Suzie:  I had an ordinary family life followed by the ordinary life of a couple. Rick:  But we’re not ordinary couples. Last thing I ever wanted, to be part of an ordinary couple. Suzie:  That’s just what we’ve tried to be. Worked hard at having lots of heterosexual friends, never go to clubs. Rick:  Oh my God, what a bore! No wonder you’ve had enough. Suzie:  I didn’t say that. Rick:  All needs pepping up. Before it’s too late. Not a marriage after all. Better than that… (Davis, 1989: 74) Rick’s advocacy of the lesbian lifestyle as a radical and better alternative to aping heterosexual marriage has echoes of Mr X, but is expressed with great humour and verve. Like Coming Soon, it represents a progression from the more issue-based plays of the 1970s and early 1980s. More ambitious than Coming Soon, however, it is a welcome and comparatively light-hearted approach to important aspects of the real lives of real lesbians. Freeman herself makes little of the radical aspect of the play: ‘Lesbianism is not here offered as a radical alternative to established society, it is shown functioning comfortably within that society.’ She also refers to the vacuum which had previously existed regarding lesbian plays: ‘I wanted to write about a generation of lesbians who had found no theatrical voice, because when they were younger such plays were impossible and now they are older they don’t really think about their lesbianism any more.’ (Davis, 1989: 91) Supporting Roles, then, offers a perspective on sexuality that is not represented elsewhere. Post-AIDS and into the Mainstream Returning now to male gay plays, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, little that presented a hopeful view of the gay male perspective could be seen in the British mainstream until Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing (1993). This is a touching post-AIDS gay play in which two 16-year-old boys living in a Thamesmead block of flats discover their love for each other, while the mother of one them and the wayward girl next door discover the possibilities of lesbianism. Some of the harshness of their difficult lives retreats in the face of their self-discovery. Alternatively, the gay or lesbian lifestyle is posited as a better, less destructive way of leading one’s life than conformity with the constraints imposed by heterosexual patriarchy. The abusive father and brother of one of the boys, and the useless male lover of the other’s mother, are respective embodiments of the brutalizing influence of conforming to masculine heterosexual tribalism and its norms, and the disabling effect of trying to opt out with nowhere else to go. That said, the

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play’s implied critique of patriarchal norms is significantly blunted by its easy and undemanding optimism. It is a slight work, which may account for its otherwise extraordinarily successful transfer to the West End in 1994, and the subsequent (1996) television screening of a film of the play. Had the play offered a more radical and serious critique, and been less humorous in its affirmation of the benefits of gay and lesbian lifestyles, it might have been altogether too indigestible for a West End audience, and hence an insufficiently commercial proposition for cinema, as well as too risky for television. This seems to have been a point of view to which Harvey himself was alive. Dominic Shellard quotes him: ‘We don’t have a picture of two boys hugging outside the Duke of York’s theatre because that would put people off. Audiences go to the theatre to enjoy themselves. I want to help them to do that.’21 By 1994, a move of male homosexuality to the mainstream stage was distinctly perceptible. A number of critics reviewing London theatre in 1994 drew special attention to Elyot’s My Night With Reg and Harvey’s Beautiful Thing. Jane Edwardes wrote in Time Out of 21 December 1994:  It was the year in which gay dramatists and directors found themselves addressing a mainstream audience, not under a cloak of subterfuge as Binkie Beaumont and Noel Coward had before them…Were these productions part of a pink conspiracy, a desire to exploit the pink pound, or could it possibly be that gay writers are simply writing the most exciting plays? This, then, was a period in which gay theatre was moving in from the margins, a development that was not confined to new writing, but extended to reclaiming existing texts. The 1994 Donmar Warehouse production of Coward’s Design for Living is a case in point, and was certainly an instance where the bisexual subtext was brought into full view by the production. It is perhaps a measure of the extent to which gay issues had previously been absent from the mainstream stage that critics attached such importance to My Night With Reg and Beautiful Thing. After all, neither play, though amiable, is particularly challenging intellectually or emotionally. However, the fact of their West End productions in 1994 may be indicative of a more assertive approach to sexuality on the mainstream stage that emerged over the next few years. Beautiful Thing lacks weight, but perhaps reflects a more general shift in public perception of homosexuality. Increasingly in the 1990s it was sexuality in general that was under discussion, at the expense of the hetero/homo binarism that had freighted the outlook of British society through most of the century. The gay man and lesbian had, by 1994, largely stopped being regarded as anything remarkable, to be either censured or pitied. This shift in attitudes is clearly visible in plays produced during the later 1990s. Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996), for example, is a bleak drama in which love is subordinated to sex, and sex can only work as a financial transaction. Spiritual values are subordinate to drugs and, especially, money. The play offers a critique of an exploitative, materialistic society, in which commodification of sex is just one among many sources of alienation. Although most of the sex depicted or discussed in the play is between men, it is not the homosexual nature of the sex

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that is at issue. The principal sexual dynamic is between Mark, who wants love from Gary, a rent boy who wants to be killed in a commercial transaction, apparently to somehow expunge his childhood rape by his stepfather. Both the staging and the dialogue are quite startlingly explicit, a far cry from the hidden nature of the sexuality in Rattigan’s Separate Tables, while the sexuality is also problematized in a very different way from that of the 1950s West End. A curious parallel is discernible, however, with Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. The commodification of sex also features in the Delaney play, in the relationship between the mother and her boyfriend, while the irrelevance of the love felt by the most sympathetic characters – Mark in Shopping and Fucking and Geoffrey in A Taste of Honey – serves in both cases to expose the amorality and materialism of their respective milieux. Again, in Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (1998), a bleak view of the world is presented, in which love is depicted as non-conformist, and therefore culpable, according to the prevailing prejudices of the dystopia she creates. In a play of amazing violence, which includes enforced changes of sex, it is not easy to identify the nature of the sexualities being punished, though the torturing, murderous, disembodied voices give some clue: ‘Dead, slag/ She was having it off with her brother/ Weren’t he a bender?/ Fucking user.’ (Kane, 1998: 25) These reactionary voices, however, are perhaps simply being used by the sinister and controlling Tinker, a drugdealer-cum-doctor, to provide a homophobic or misogynistic cover for his own, even bleaker agenda. For Tinker seems determined to punish, with the most extraordinary visceral torture and destruction, anybody in the play who allows love towards another person to motivate them. Although it is Carl, one of the gay characters, who suffers the most gruesome physical destruction, this is not about his homosexuality as such, but about the disclosure of love for his lover, and his subsequent enforced betrayal. With Shopping and Fucking and Cleansed, then, homosexuality ceased to be a fully engaged topic in its own right, and instead became absorbed into a broader consideration of where sexuality, morality and commerce intersect. This trend continued in the latter part of the 1990s, and by about 2000 the gay or lesbian play as such had perhaps achieved all that that it could for the time being. Certainly, if Jonathan Harvey’s plays are taken as examples, this would seem to be the case. His Guiding Star (1998) successfully combines a number of different issues including that of coming out, and is only incidentally a gay play. As Michael Billington puts it, Harvey ‘tackles loss, guilt, death and post-Hillsborough stress as well as the painful process of coming out,’ and ‘has clearly progressed as a writer, in that he is now able to face the dark side of life without sacrificing his resilience or his belief that…we have to make our own destiny.’22 Following the success of this play, in which homosexuality is dealt with as an issue existing alongside others, Harvey returned to more purely gay theatre with Hushabye Mountain (1999). Here, he attempted to celebrate the results of combination therapy in keeping people with AIDS alive for much longer than would have been considered possible until recently. Unfortunately, the play is structurally inept and burdened by its attempt at ponderous dialogue, though it makes a slight nod towards a post-AIDS issue – unexpected survival – about which there is no doubt a successful play to be written. Indeed, a more intriguing treatment of this subject matter appears in Mark Ravenhill’s Some Explicit Polaroids (1999), in which his unexpected

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survival eventually generates a death wish in one of the gay characters, Tim, who says: ‘I don’t want to be alive’, ‘I knew where everything was going. Bit by bit my immune system would break down’, ‘I used to know everything and that’s what those fucking pills have taken away from me.’ (Ravenhill, 1999: 56–9) Tim is unable to cope with the prospect of having to take responsibility for a life in which his fate is no longer sealed. The hectic, nihilistic hedonism that has apparently dominated his adult or post-diagnosis life will not do. But neither is he prepared, it seems, to make the effort necessary to form a meaningful relationship, or to take a positive or responsible approach to living his life. This is one despairing theme among several in a play in which Ravenhill uses a misguided zealotry to characterize the early 1980s, contrasting it with a mindless and irresponsible hedonism characteristic of the late 1990s. The comparison seems to emerge from Ravenhill’s own experience. In an interview with Andrew Smith,23 Ravenhill speaks of his disenchantment with the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) in the 1980s. But Smith goes on to say of the SWP:  At the same time, what they did have was some sort of moral framework with which to make sense of the world…but the hedonistic young people Ravenhill’s activist met [in Some Explicit Polaroids] had nothing to guide them by way of principles or higher purpose. The bleak outcome of the play leaves questions and little comfort in the minds of its audience, on a canvas in which sexuality in general – including, but not exclusively devoted to, male homosexuality – is a prominent theme. Ravenhill’s Mother Clap’s Molly House (2001), on the other hand, does devote itself to the gay male experience. But in doing so, the play contrasts a vital, rambunctious eighteenth century existence with a singularly bleak vision of mindless and destructive twenty-first century hedonism among gay men. It seems that the male gay play in the twenty-first century can either depress us all or broaden its scope. The latter path is followed by Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur (2005), which combines a hallucinogenic vision of the pursuit of physical pleasures with a critique of self-indulgence and violence. In doing so, the play extends and enriches the broader canvas of Cleansed and Shopping and Fucking. Thus, the gay play may not have been completely absorbed into a new mainstream of poly-sexuality, but the more successful works of the mid-1990s and onwards featuring gay and lesbian issues have done so by treating these as part of a broader spectrum, a critique of society that extends beyond homosexuality. Notes   1. The Guardian, 27 December 1995.   2. Dolan, Jill (1996), ‘Fathom Languages: Feminist Performance Theory, Pedagogy and Practice’ in Martin, pp. 5, 9.   3. ‘[Rattigan] saw Kenneth Morgan in Hester Collyer, and himself in her devoted husband…’ (Wansell, 1996: 217).   4. Accounts differ as to the sequence of events. Curtis maintains that ‘in the first draft his offence was a homosexual one’ (Rattigan, 1985: xiv). However, he seems not to be correct in this, because Rattigan’s letter (cited below) to Bob Whitehead reads as if the amendment was being made for the

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first time, rather than reinstated. And according to Michael Darlow and Gillian Hodson, ‘Rattigan was persuaded to rewrite it with the Major as a homosexual’ (Darlow and Hodson, 1979: 228). Whether the word ‘persuaded’ is the mot juste in this instance is another matter. Wansell describes Rattigan’s ‘desire to be accepted as a dramatist prepared to tackle sensitive issues’ (Wansell, 1996: 273), as understandable, given that he was probably anxious not to be written off as an irrelevant anachronism in this revolutionary period following the first production of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.   5. Perhaps both are accurate and Wansell is referring to the reception given at the end of the play.   6. Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, 4 September 1957, chaired by Sir John Wolfenden. Many of the provisions of the report were eventually enshrined in the Sexual Offences Act 1967.   7. This is taken from Dirk Bogarde’s shooting script for the film: Farr is referred to as Carr on numerous occasions throughout.   8. Stephen Jeffery-Poulter cites many examples, such as, ‘ “Supporters of lax laws for homosexuals were routed in the Commons last night”, reported the Daily Express [in June/July 1959] with unrestrained delight.’ (Jeffery-Poulter, 1991: 52).   9. With some apparent justification. Stephen Jeffery-Poulter reports that ‘the Scotsman started a series of articles…which showed the Home Secretary’s views to be positively progressive in comparison with prevailing opinion north of the border.’ (Jeffery-Poulter, 1991: 48). 10. Michael Billington, for example, said of the play, ‘it offered one of the very few totally unsentimental accounts of homosexuality ever seen in the theatre. No excuses were made for the hero…We were not asked to admire him because he was a genius, an artist or a tragically persecuted figure. We were simply asked to accept his homosexuality as a fact.’ (Morley, 1971: 222). 11. To be accurate, the birth of the London GLF took place in 1970: it was the New York GLF that was founded in 1969. 12. The Scotsman, 5 November 1975. 13. Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band was first produced on 14 April 1968 in New York. In British eyes, its self-oppressed campiness would probably have looked dated even then, and its obsolescence was assured in the US as well with the liberating influence of the Stonewall Riots later that year. The play has become an icon of all that gay culture and politics should move away from. 14.  The Guardian, 25 February 1976. 15. First produced at the Leicester Haymarket in 1975, and adopted for a Gay Sweatshop season in 1976. 16. Which unfortunately included the prime minister of the day and other senior figures in government, together with senior police personnel, including the Chief Constable of Manchester. 17. Burgess and MacLean being numbers one and two. 18. Sunday Times, 14 August 1983, quoted in Weeks (1985: 46). 19. Sue Jameson, London Broadcasting, 22 October 1986. 20. Jim Hiley, The Listener, 30 October 1986. 21. Shellard (1999: 195), quoting an article from the Sunday Times, 2 October 1994. 22. Michael Billington, The Guardian, 1 October 1998. 23. ‘Play for Today’, Observer Magazine, 31 October 1999.

5 Gender and Farce: Ayckbourn and Orton

Introduction Given the post-war legacy of Whitehall farces, it might be considered an improbable theatrical medium for the exploration of gender questions. I want to examine how this genre can carry the potential for social critique, either as a restraining factor, enabling social discontent to find a safe outlet, or as a focus for a will towards reform. I will argue that, among farceurs, Alan Ayckbourn and Joe Orton offer two contrasting public personae. Orton’s is that of an anarchist attacking the establishment through the use of sex and sexuality in his plays. Ayckbourn, on the other hand, has adopted the persona for playwriting purposes of a middle-England insider. The term farce is itself fraught with difficulty. Kierkegaard observed that ‘Every attempt at an aesthetic definition founders upon the farce’ (Kierkegaard, 1942: 51), and indeed authorities present a bewildering range of often conflicting and frequently unilluminating definitions of what farce is.1 Whatever the difficulties, for present purposes I take the term farce to describe a play which is comic, in which the comedy relies substantially on both visual impact and dialogue, and in which characterization, as opposed to caricaturization, is relatively unimportant. The content critiques the way in which society operates, with the negative aspects of social and sexual mores being held up for scrutiny and assault. There is a distinct problem here. If farce works to expose the futility and oppressiveness of political and cultural structures, then such an experience takes place in an environment in which, as Eric Bentley says, ‘shielded by delicious darkness and seated in warm security, we enjoy the privilege of being totally passive while on stage our most treasured unmentionable wishes are fulfilled before our eyes’ (Bentley, 1965: 229). This suggests a process of catharsis in which any politically revolutionary impulse on the part of the audience is stilled by the enactment of fantasy. In fact, the impact of farce can go far beyond any mere catharsis, at least to judge from

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the reaction to some of the plays of Alan Ayckbourn and Joe Orton by press and audience members, as instanced below. C. W. E. Bigsby ascribes to Joe Orton an expansion of the critical role of farce as genre:  Orton is indeed a farceur, for the world of farce is of course a world of partial beings, role players whose mask is constantly in danger of slipping, even if this is conveniently reinstated at the climax of the play. But here Orton differs. His social characters are made of sterner stuff. His characters cannot be so conveniently restored to their featureless norm as can the heroes of old farce; their wounds cannot be cauterized by a graceful arabesque of plot. (Bigsby, 1982: 53–4) A similarly innovative status is accorded to Ayckbourn by Albert Bermel: Ayckbourn’s geometrical manipulation of scenes; his cool and sometimes callous depiction of his characters, all of whom he keeps at a satirical remove…and his intelligence of a high order make him a transitional playwright between popular and intellectual farce. (Bermel, 1982: 250) In both these critical reassessments there is a discernible willingness to credit farce in general, and the plays of Orton and Ayckbourn in particular, with a potential for social critique not addressed by more conventional criticism. Another aspect of the political impact of farce lies in the effect of its performance (as opposed to the text). There is a longstanding and widely held view that performance and immediate visual impact operate in farce at the expense of its content. This raises a question of whether the textual content of a farce is capable of surviving its performance. In the case of a play like Ayckbourn’s How the Other Half Loves (1970), much of the force of the visual action centres around the grisly embarrassments associated with social hierarchy. Because this kind of social commentary necessarily involves subtle nuance, the text may actually come to be undermined by its performance, as discussed below. Orton’s more robustly sexual message in What the Butler Saw (1969), on the other hand, is surely reinforced by the visual comedy of exchanging and losing clothes. The textual content of Orton’s plays tends to be enhanced in performance, while the same is not necessarily true of Ayckbourn’s work. Indeed, some of Ayckbourn’s darkest critique is contained in those of his plays that are least unequivocally farcical in form. An important matter here is the extent to which farce serves to obscure its subject matter or to carry it beneath the skin of the audience. Does farce take pain through the cultural digestive system without leaving a trace behind, or is it the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down? Probably both are true. While the radical presentation of gender politics is a salient feature of Ayckbourn’s plays on the page, the extent to which this radicalism survives in performance must be open to question. There is also the vexed question of whether Ayckbourn succeeds in bringing gender politics in disguise to an audience that would shy away from

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the issue in its undisguised state. Or does the medium destroy the message? The West End audience, determined to enjoy a knock-about farce, is probably quite capable of doing exactly that and departing quite untroubled by any ripples of unwelcome awareness. Ayckbourn the Pendon Insider Ayckbourn rebuts any suggestion that he is a feminist writer: ‘I think that what I’m doing is trying to reflect [women] as they are, not as the feminist movement would like them to be.’ (Dukore, 1991: 8) Indeed, according to Michael Billington, ‘Ayckbourn rather shudders at the label of “feminist dramatist”.’(Billington, 1990: 181) But such unwillingness to acknowledge the feminist potential of his work seems disingenuous in light of the content of his plays. Ayckbourn can perhaps be seen to attitudinize, to pose as one of the relatively narrow-minded people with whom he populates his plays, in order to escape any accusation of being in tune with the culture of an era largely at odds with that of his own Pendon, the fictional locale in which a number of his plays are set2: ‘the imaginary microcosm for Britain’, as Christopher Innes puts it. (Innes, 1992: 321) Here is a paradox that is central to Ayckbourn and to his work. On the one hand he has created, in Pendon, a boiled-down essence of middle England, the better to assault the crippling smallmindedness of its values. On the other hand, he has to belong to Pendon to effectively attack it. From the inside he can identify with its values and aim the barbs of comedy directly at them; as, for example, when he agrees with Ian Watson that: [he takes] the form of the middle class comedy and [uses] it not as, say, Rattigan or Coward have done in many of their plays, to confirm the complacency of that cosy little world, but actually to question and tear apart, as often as not, the people [he places] within it. (Watson, 1981: 114) It is because he needs to maintain this insider status, I would suggest, that Ayckbourn appears to scramble in alarm away from the suggestion that he is a feminist writer. Pendon man sees feminists as, by definition, conforming to the strident image propagated by the right-wing press. True to his Pendon self, Ayckbourn must adopt a belief in the stereotype of what a feminist is, so that his antagonism towards it reinforces his image as Pendon man. He views feminism through a lens created in his own imagination as the view of middle England. Ayckbourn’s plays, at least in the late 1960s and early 1970s, display an awareness of gender political issues markedly ahead of their time. And it may be that these plays provided an effective critique of social attitudes in Britain, partly because his Pendon man reached parts of the British psyche wholly inaccessible to a more identifiably committed writer. Ayckbourn goes some way to defining his approach to art and politics when he says: Art is such a dirty word in England…It’s like it’s poofy, it’s female, it’s elite, it’s exclusive… I’m on a crusade to try and persuade people that theatre can be fun; but every time I start doing that, some hairy bugger from the left comes in and tells them it’s instructive, and drives them all out again. (Watson, 1981: 108–9)

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The phraseology – particularly the ‘hairy bugger’ – is wonderfully, self-servingly, Pendon. Ayckbourn insists on displaying an image of himself as incapable of outraging the middle-class, middlebrow audience with which his plays have become associated. But his plays may well have got underneath the protective armour of play-going middle England. As Albert Kalson puts it: The theatergoer who recognised his wife in a character in Absurd Person Singular, who sobbed in Richard Briers’s dressing-room…achieved a catharsis he would not soon forget. Another, a little ashamed of his laughter as he left the theater after a performance of Just Between Ourselves, could not leave the play behind him…Laughter comforts, but it does not mask truth. (Watson, 1981: 105) Kalson, then, is in little doubt that Ayckbourn’s plays serve to bring about real changes in personal outlook. Evidence that Ayckbourn’s plays elicit powerful emotional reactions is also recorded by Paul Allen. (Allen, 2001: 217) Ayckbourn’s Feminist Farces At the heart of Ayckbourn’s work is an exploration of the way in which marriage creates victims, especially female ones. Ayckbourn himself has gone on record with his views on conventional marriage:  The marriages I do see are either fraught or dull…In general, I don’t think people were meant to live with each other for too long…As soon as people feel that they are married, there’s a sense of entrapment. (Watson, 1981: 119) Michael Billington describes Ayckbourn’s attitude towards marriage ‘as a form of mutual incomprehension, as a means of colonising third parties,’ and ‘a dilapidated institution, that… nearly always works in favour of the man’ (Billington, 1990: 84). Repeatedly in the plays – perhaps most vividly in Just Between Ourselves (1977) and Wildest Dreams (1991) – there is an explicit recognition that the institution of marriage is not only constricting and damaging to its inhabitants, but that women get the worse deal from it. Again, according to Billington, Ayckbourn goes further:  Ayckbourn is perhaps claiming [in Men on Women on Men3] that the only hope lies in eroding the notion of the manly man and the womanly woman; and that only when we get away from the usual self-deceptive stereotypes will there ever be any hope of sexual harmony. Given this analysis, it is fair to see Ayckbourn’s plays as recognizing not only that marriage treats women poorly, but that conventional gender roles make victims of men as well. An identifiable progression takes place in Ayckbourn’s work, from the fairly conventional beginnings of Relatively Speaking (1965), to the more outré How the Other Half Loves (1969)

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and the intense rage and black humour of Absurd Person Singular (1972). It is here that Ayckbourn’s position as a playwright significantly ahead of the conventional politics of his time becomes unmistakable. His dynamic relationship with British political and cultural mores has, from time to time, placed him in the avant-garde of gender politics – a position from which he is constantly being dislodged by virtue of the continuous absorption of the avant-garde by the mainstream. For example, between Absurd Person Singular (1972) and Intimate Exchanges (1982), there is little evidence that Ayckbourn’s characters made much progress during a decade when attitudes in Britain towards gender relations shifted dramatically. However, that is not to say that the impact of his writings necessarily lessened, merely that a process of consolidation was taking place, whereby a more Pendon-based constituency was coming to recognize the significance of gender issues. Two developments, then, are discernible: one is the move into rather bleak psychological territory with Woman in Mind (1985) and Wildest Dreams (1991); another is the impact on Ayckbourn’s depiction of gender issues during eight or nine years of the Thatcher government, giving rise to a new development, in which the worst villainy can be embodied in a woman – as in Jill Rillington in Man of the Moment (1988). Considering Ayckbourn’s development in more or less chronological terms, Relatively Speaking (originally Meet My Father, 1965) is more in the tradition of Whitehall farce than its successors. In accordance with convention, there is a young couple, Ginny and Greg, who are in love, and an older man, Philip, over whom young love must triumph. Perhaps less conventionally, Philip is Ginny’s ex-lover, and is himself married to the ostensibly much-wronged Sheila. In a spectacular series of misunderstandings, Philip’s self-serving machinations are defeated by the power of young love, while Ginny and Greg enjoy the prospect of romantic bliss at the end of the play. Of course, this being Ayckbourn, such romantic bliss stands every chance of being blighted by the dubious pleasures of conventional marriage. Indeed, there is a high degree of cynicism about marriage running through the play, as when Philip says, ‘Couldn’t have a happier couple. I’m sure it’s because he spends nine months of the year in Rio de Janeiro.’ (Ayckbourn, 1968: 26) And there is uncertainty as to how seriously we should take Philip’s references to Sheila’s affair: the letters she has been reading over the breakfast table may or may not be love letters, but this is not clarified in the central confusion. It is never quite clear how much knowing irony underlies the exchanges between Philip and Sheila. For example:  Philip:  If he was, say, for instance a rather remarkable man. Sheila:  If he was all that remarkable he wouldn’t be carrying on behind his wife’s back, would he? Philip:  Unless he had a singularly unremarkable wife. Sheila:  Probably his fault if she was. Presumably he was quite happy with her when he married her. Philip:  Perhaps she proved a bit of a disappointment. (Ayckbourn, 1968: 74)

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In this exchange Philip is using the opportunity provided by the apparently hypothetical nature of the conversation to mount an attack on Sheila. Whether Sheila is innocently making a statement based on principle, or dealing in the same coin as Philip, though, is less clear. One is left with the suspicion that Sheila’s letters are written by herself to herself as a defence mechanism, because she is all too well aware of Philip’s philanderings, and that she, too, is using the cover of a discussion about third parties to go on the attack in precisely the same way. Philip’s attempted blackmail of Ginny makes clear, once and for all, that he is the villain of the piece. Then, when the tables are turned on Philip, the path is cleared for Greg and Ginny to enter into what Sheila describes as: ‘a disastrous marriage but great fun for them while it lasts.’ (Ayckbourn, 1968: 86) Sheila lands up gleefully envisaging Greg and Ginny in a battlefield. Indeed, her reaction, when it is apparent to her – and only to her – that Ginny must have been having an affair with a third party, is one of malevolent glee. Still waters in this case run not only deep, but with a startling degree of bad faith to them. The control exercised by a middle-aged, middle-class woman crops up again with Fiona in How the Other Half Loves (1970). The difference between Sheila and Fiona, though, is that, unlike Fiona, Sheila has right on her side. While in Relatively Speaking Ayckbourn normalizes the scheming woman as a perennial stereotype about whose behaviour little can be done and on whom the play remains neutral, How the Other Half Loves takes a clear moral stand. Scheming is no longer an essential ingredient of feminine behaviour, but the product of an individual case. Thus Ayckbourn’s caricaturization has moved on to a point where the reader/audience is invited to adopt a more nuanced and critical viewpoint. How the Other Half Loves has thus shed the traditional masculine view evident in the earlier work that it is in the nature of women to commit intrigue to achieve their ends. By the same token, the vision of married life conjured by Sheila is much less gloomy than that evoked in, say, Bedroom Farce (1975). The same relatively unpoliticized but utterly cynical view of marriage can still be discerned – though with a slightly more politically aware twist to it – in How the Other Half Loves. Here, Ayckbourn’s now-familiar terrain of marital strife and sexual infidelity is overlaid with a theme of restrained class warfare, a combination echoed two years later in Absurd Person Singular. In How the Other Half Loves a mixture of real and imagined sexual affairs occur among the three couples: the upper-middle-class Fosters, middle-middle-class Phillips’s and the aspiring lower-middle-class Featherstones. There can be no doubt as to the unpleasantness of the principal male villain in this play – William Featherstone. He infantilizes his wife in a way reminiscent of Torwald Helmer’s treatment of Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, as, for example, in the stage direction, ‘He takes her hand from her mouth and smacks it like he would a child’s’ (Ayckbourn, 1972: 41). William receives retribution in various ways, from the soup tureen hurled at him at one dinner party to the dubious drip he sits under at another. But he remains a stranger to any sense of self-doubt, at least for the time being. ‘Do you realize…the hours I’ve put into that woman?…With my own hands I have built her up…coaxed her, encouraged her to think – even perhaps bullied her…I’ve done everything.’ (Ayckbourn, 1972: 95) So by his own admission, William has played the role almost of a latter-day Frankenstein. Later, the tables are turned: hitherto William has spoken not only for himself but also for his wife, Mary; but the

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last word is hers: ‘It’s difficult for him. He’s never been wrong before, you see.’ (Ayckbourn, 1972: 109) William is not only no longer speaking for them both, but is becoming an object spoken about. A less extreme redressing of marital relations goes on between Bob and Teresa Phillips, with the partial domestication of Bob. Although Bob’s drunken bullying and philandering behaviour is outrageous, it can be read as a frustrated response to Teresa’s interfering incompetence. Hence, there is a more endearing quality to Bob than there is to William. In addition to being one of Ayckbourn’s frustrated housewives, Teresa is rather a hopeless case, as exemplified by her embarking on telephone sex because of a witless misunderstanding. In fact, Teresa’s inability to cope extends across the board, through childcare and homemaking to her entire modus vivendi. She is something of a prototype of the later Ayckbourn women who are destroyed by marriage. Moreover, shades of Dennis in Just Between Ourselves (1977) are already present in Teresa. Both she and Dennis devote themselves to varieties of diversionary time-wasting in order to avoid communicating with their spouses. The more difficult relationship in the play is between Fiona and Frank Foster. Ayckbourn describes Fiona as, ‘really a quite vicious character…an unfaithful wife who deceives her husband and plays a very sly game.’(Watson, 1981: 76–7) Presumably, Ayckbourn bases this view on the fact that she connives with the fiction built up – unwittingly – by her husband, regardless of the impact this is bound to have on the Featherstones’ relationship. Yet by the end of the play, while Fiona has suffered no retribution for her unfaithfulness, it is Frank who thinks that he is about to embark on a new sexual affair. That this assumption is based on a misunderstanding makes no difference to the intention. There may also be an undercurrent of Frank’s sexuality revealed by the last line of the play, after the would-be telephone sex between Frank and Teresa: ‘Just a boy I was at school with, dear.’(Ayckbourn, 1972: 115) Whether or not this is an involuntary indicator of an alternative strand of sexual desire, there is a sort of urbane infantilism about Frank. While Mary Featherstone begins to grow up in the course of the play, Frank Foster does not. The class issue clearly is of some significance in one’s perceptions of the characters in the play. The lasting unpleasantness of William Featherstone stems from a curious ambiguity: on one reading, the deadening impact of devoting oneself and one’s spouse to a species of social-climbing prissiness is not only more unattractive than common-or-garden adultery, but constitutes much worse behaviour. Alternatively, and perhaps more probably in light of Ayckbourn’s remark to Ian Watson, Fiona Foster may serve as an awful warning that those further up the social scale can get away with things those lower down cannot – the sexual equivalent of white-collar crime. While the sexual politics of How the Other Half Loves show no great advance over Relatively Speaking, the stage action is much more sophisticated, with two places and two times superimposed on one another, so that they occupy the same stage space simultaneously. It may be that the sheer performance experience of the play removes some of the pain depicted.

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Thus we find in Ayckbourn’s plays that sexual politics are frequently in a dynamic relationship with commentary on class warfare. As with How the Other Half Loves, Absurd Person Singular (1972) is based around three couples – the lower-middle-class Hopcrofts, the middle-middleclass Jacksons and the upper-middle-class Brewster-Wrights. A noticeable facet of the play is the dynamic that operates between the relative economic standing of the couples and the degree of solidarity shown in each case between husband and wife. For example, Jane Hopcroft in Act I is almost entirely the passive victim of her husband’s bullying. By the end of Act III, however, when the Hopcrofts’ economic standing is much stronger than at the beginning of the play, she is complicit with her husband, an active partner in their bullying of the other couples. An opposite shift takes place in the relationship of Ronald and Marion Brewster-Wright; the dissolution of their solidarity parallels the decline in their assurance of economic and social superiority. The power of the final scene of Absurd Person Singular, when the Hopcrofts get the other characters to dance to their tune, is beyond doubt. To that extent, the socio-economic thrust of the play is at the fore. But its moral crux lies in the repeated suicide attempts of Act II. Here, in the person of Eva Jackson, we have a woman driven to suicide by the prospect of the vacuum she faces if her marriage ends, and even in this extreme state she cannot get herself taken seriously. Every attempt is interpreted by those around her as some humdrum domestic task, as, for example, when her attempt to gas herself is read by the other characters as a valiant effort to clean the oven. Her role as a housewife is simply not allowed to extend itself into the larger moral drama of taking her own life. The unequivocal gender political message here is perhaps the most striking of Ayckbourn’s comments on the imprisonment and destructiveness of conventional marriage – a forlorn vision of wifely despair that has echoes in Woman in Mind and Wildest Dreams (1991). In Act I Jane Hopcroft denies her own identity and her right to be in her own house in the interests of keeping up the appearance of what she regards as her proper domestic role. This is powerful in its own right, and is the theme that balances the final scene of the play, when she and her husband vulgarly and vengefully celebrate their material advancement over the other characters as a form of power. But it is the despair of the suicide attempts – this bleak vision of what society does to women through the institution of marriage – that stands at the play’s core. Ayckbourn’s depiction of the desperation of a married woman in Absurd Person Singular (1972) reached a new pitch of bleakness in Just Between Ourselves (1977). In the former case, Eva’s desperation is brought about by the prospect of her marriage coming to an end, and the absence of an alternative mode of life available to her; she then takes the dramatic step of repeatedly attempting suicide. In the later play it is the prospect of the continuation of marriage that begets Vera’s desperation, whose reaction is to render herself negligible, cocooned and largely silent; she is in a self-induced permanent vegetative state. Ayckbourn’s vision here takes us into a territory more horrible than suicide. Marriage to Dennis and sharing the house with Marjorie has driven Vera into a state usually associated with the aftermath of a severe stroke, or with (barely) surviving a car crash.

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The car motif is central to Just Between Ourselves. The garage and the yard or patio are the two settings for the action, as the characters seem to feel the need to escape from the house. Dennis, the central male, occupies the garage, where he increasingly takes his friend Neil with him. The garage is the site of Dennis’s assumed manliness – the useless tinkering with gadgets, which serves no purpose other than to construct a myth of capability from which he can belittle his wife and escape from any kind of worthwhile reality, or from communication and interaction with his family. If Dennis was capable of maintaining an existence independent of his male role playing, then he might be the ‘very, very nice’ man Ayckbourn originally thought he was.4 However, Dennis has allowed himself to be almost completely taken over by a cardboard male role, which deals with life only through the mediation of mechanical objects and DIY. Even when Vera makes the effort to bridge the communication gap between them in a desperate appeal for help and support, Dennis uses his false masculinity as a means – cataclysmically – of avoiding contact:  Vera:  …I need help, Dennis. Dennis:  Yes, but don’t you see, you’re not being clear, Vee. You say you need help but what sort of help do you mean? Vera:  Just help. From you. Dennis:  Yes, well look, tell you what. When you’ve got a moment, why don’t you sit down, get a bit of paper and just make a little list of all the things you’d like me to help you with. Things you’d like me to do, things that need mending or fixing and then we can talk about them and see what I can do to help. All right? (Ayckbourn, 1978: 37) Dennis’s failure to understand is probably not even wilful: any individual identity he may originally have had has been progressively leached out of him by the all-too-active presence of his appalling mother and pedestalized father; the resulting void has been filled with attributes associated with what Dennis thinks a man should be. He tries to be unemotional (and succeeds); he also tries to be practical, but fails miserably – perhaps because to succeed in mending something would take away his excuse for continuing to be in the garage rather than the house. It is notable that the garage doors stay broken until after Marjorie has triumphed over Vera, by which time Vera’s catatonia means that Dennis, de facto, no longer has a marriage to run away from. The one thing Dennis succeeds in is exploiting the assumed powers of manliness so as to sap Vera’s confidence and undermine her to the point of complete breakdown. As Michael Billington points out (Billington, 2007: 277–8), the clearest example of this process is his assertion, ‘you’re not being clear, Vee’. From Dennis’s point of view, any breakdown in communication between Dennis and Vera is somebody’s fault – and inevitably that somebody is Vera. The problem with Dennis is that while he may be a person of goodwill, ready to do his best for others, he lacks a firm identity of his own. Indeed, he is a prime instance of Ayckbourn’s impermeable male archetype, arguably an even more insensitive and destructive version of

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Douglas in Man of the Moment. Dennis’s sense of personal identity has emerged from a lifetime of being belittled by his parents. The synthetic male persona developed in response has as its principal attribute an urge to self-empowerment – exercised almost entirely at the expense of his wife. In this case, the sins of the parents are visited via their son on her, with catastrophic results. The ‘Just Between Ourselves’ of the title cues Dennis’s repeated demonstrations of his lack of real personality, almost always used as the prefix for an indiscreet damning of Vera, in a way that establishes his power to stand in judgement over what he sees as her female incompetence. Meanwhile, the male bonding between Dennis and Neil is utterly destructive, consolidating Dennis’s own emotional neglect of Vera, and Neil’s physical neglect of Pam. It also leads to Neil’s disastrous investment: any potential freedom of action which might have been available to Neil and Pam is chipped away when Neil loses all his money, by following Dennis’s advice to invest in George Spooner’s business. Spooner, in turn, embodies a particular sort of stereotypical masculinity: it would be the case that the business on which he is embarking should be painting and decorating – along with building repairs, the very epitome of an environment of oppressive masculinity and male camaraderie, which replaces human contact with crude gender constructs and tribal behaviour. Of course, to Dennis, George Spooner is ‘a good man. I’ve known him for years.’ (Ayckbourn, 1978: 24) And when Spooner does a bunk with his secretary and all the money, Dennis finds this amazing, not only because ‘he just didn’t look the type’, but mainly because ‘He was a Capricorn.’(Ayckbourn, 1978: 47) Because Dennis has no personality of his own, he has no criteria by which to form a judgement of people (though his belief in astrology, strikes a false note; this flight into a construct of maleness would surely disallow any concern so closely associated with a construct of femininty.) His judgements are based on the tenets of a false masculinity, and the hollowness of those tenets is encapsulated in, among other things, the disappearance of Neil’s money. Dennis’s failure is also demonstrated by his attitudes towards, firstly, the car at the centre of the play, and then towards Vera. At the beginning of Act I he says, ‘Vital to keep a car under cover’ (Ayckbourn, 1978: 4), while towards the end of Act II, he says of Vera after her breakdown, ‘I think we’d be happier if she was under cover.’(Ayckbourn, 1978: 46) Dennis’s sham masculinity comes to the fore in a slightly different context in the scene between him and Pam, interpreted (wilfully) by Marjorie as adulterous, but actually the product of mere physical ineptitude – inevitably situated in the car. This event catalyzes Vera’s one great outburst of emotion, when she goes for Marjorie with the electric drill (with sanding attachment, of course). Marjorie is an appropriate target, for she is not only responsible for driving Dennis into his adoptive masculine persona, but is herself a wholly selfish and inhuman machine for running houses efficiently, and has done her best to undermine both Dennis and Vera. Marjorie will do anything to achieve domestic power – and does so, when her niggling interference drives Vera over the edge, leaving the seat of domestic power vacant for her. The counterpart to Dennis’s persona of vacuous masculinity in the play is the empty ritual of birthday celebrations. Three of the four scenes in the play end with ‘Happy Birthday to You’,

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sung at moments of frozen tension or extended melancholy. In these circumstances, the song bears as honest a relationship to the prevailing atmosphere as Dennis and Vera’s marriage does to the ideal of matrimony as an ever-renewing source of emotional, intellectual and material support – that is, none. There is a bitter irony to the song at the end of the play: ‘Happy Birthday to Vera’, sung by the people who have reduced her to a physical and nervous wreck – infantilizing her to the end, when her small cake with one candle takes her symbolically back to pre-toddlerhood. Another play in which Ayckbourn presents underlying pain so searing as to be incapable of disguise is Woman in Mind (1985). Here, Ayckbourn traces the destruction of his heroine, Susan, when in a moment of epiphany the reality of a life devoted to an ungrateful and inhumane husband and child is placed in stark contrast to an internal vision of life with an ideal family. In a new departure, which makes more explicit than hitherto Ayckbourn’s sympathy with the plight of women whose marriage has become a trap, the play is written entirely from Susan’s internalized viewpoint. Her breakdown and understandable retreat from reality are thus presented to the audience with compelling force. Wishful thinking might provide sufficient refuge from reality, were it not that Susan’s dream family is increasingly polluted by leachings from the real world. Her real family therefore succeeds in destroying for Susan even her dreams. Politically, it seems that Ayckbourn is reprising a familiar theme about the destructiveness of married life for those who participate in it, and doubly so for women. The destructive reality of marriage is territory Ayckbourn has explored before, in Intimate Exchanges (1982), Absurd Person Singular (1972) and others. Susan, though, takes Ayckbourn’s audience into a different area by demonstrating that dreams of idealized conventional marriage – the stuff of cultural propaganda on a colossal scale – are equally dangerous. It is not just the practice of marriage, then, but its essence that is perilous. Susan has been conned by this cultural propaganda into wasting her life because of a belief in what might have been. The play, however, focuses on the shattering of her faith. Being Ayckbourn, the instrument of Susan’s epiphany is a garden rake – it almost has to be, since what other article could so satisfactorily embody the snake of sexuality in the Garden of Pendon? From rake to snake to phallus seems a straightforward-enough connection to make, though the phallus is only one aspect of the comprehensive lack in Susan’s life. Her generally loveless and unfulfilled existence is the root of the problem, with sexual frustration constituting merely one element. Hence, the phallic garden rake is a catalyst, rather than a main cause. Family life is idealized in Susan’s hallucination at the beginning of the play, but the idealization is cardboard, the language a caricature, an emanation from a wartime propaganda film. Given the unsympathetic nature of Susan’s husband, Gerald, when he makes his appearance on stage, it is immediately apparent why Susan should have sought retreat into a fantasy. What is also clear is the extent to which she had previously allowed herself to be caught up in a mythology of homemaking. ‘I used to be a mother. And I loved it…I’d say…this is a proper job. But now it isn’t any more.’(Ayckbourn, 1986: 24) The unsatisfactory nature of the housewifely role Susan has cheerfully adopted is exposed by the unconvincing nature of her dream and its

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subsequent pollution. Her entrapment in this role gives her every reason to break down, while the role of married person has become a shell surrounding the vacuum of a lonely, sexless relationship. Her son, Rick, also exposes the distorting effect that social expectations have had on relationships between Susan and his girlfriends:  Rick:  You always want to finish up being girl friends with them… Susan:  Better than some mother-in-laws. Deadly rivals. Rick:  Maybe that’s healthier.(Ayckbourn, 1986: 55) So Rick is positively anxious to embrace the kind of values that have destroyed his mother. Of course, part of the problem with the role expected of Susan by her family is that it consists mainly of being a scapegoat for other people’s failings. However, this is mediated through Susan’s point of view, and so may be open to exaggeration. Benedict Nightingale quotes Ayckbourn: ‘By the end the audience should realize it’s thrown in its lot with a woman who isn’t altogether to be trusted.’5 After the burning of Gerald’s book, the awfulness of the marriage is revealed:  Gerald: Why? What terrible, nameless, unmentionable thing can I possibly have done to you? Susan:  Married me? (Ayckbourn, 1986: 78) With this epiphany of Susan’s tortured real life, the poisoning of her fantasy becomes complete, as a controllable dream turns into an uncontrollable nightmare. Susan’s wedding should never have taken place if her sanity were to be saved – the institution of marriage has destroyed her life. Ayckbourn goes even further than this in the bizarre approach to gender relations in Man of the Moment (1988), which constitutes a turning point in his work. Hitherto, his outrage at the injustice of men’s treatment of women – especially within marriage – has predominated. From now on there is increasing bleakness, born perhaps of the conviction that any simple tipping of the balance in favour of women will only lead to further injustices. In Man of the Moment Jill, the television anchorwoman, has achieved an apogee of career-orientated competitiveness generally associated with male aspirations. Ayckbourn’s earlier male anti-heroes are condensed here and have had their biological sex changed. But nothing really changes: the Thatcherite woman who makes a go of it by adopting unreconstructed masculine values poses as much of a nightmare for Ayckbourn as her unrepentant male counterpart. Of course, Jill’s negative attributes go further than just careerism: she is also made to embody the medium in which she works – television, with which Ayckbourn has had a somewhat unhappy relationship: the production of his one work written ab initio for an adult television audience was a fiasco.6 Ayckbourn’s point is that Thatcherite woman is successful only at the expense of all that is worth

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having; she takes on the male and wins on male terms. In this respect, Jill is reminiscent of her slightly older sister, Marlene, in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1982). But in entering this combat, Jill adopts a persona that is not worth having (and presumably jettisons another), in the process using up energies that could be more constructively spent, in Ayckbourn’s words, ‘eroding the notion of the manly man and the womanly woman’. The shifting balance of power in Man of the Moment can be viewed as an allegory of the state of the nation’s sexuality and gender relations. The central character Douglas has, in all innocence, been partly responsible for the injuries that disfigured his wife Nerys through his intervention in Vic’s armed robbery: as a result of these events Douglas was able to declare his love for Nerys and marry her. What he has not succeeded in doing, however, is creating happiness for either of them, a fact which his robust, rubbery persona – encapsulated by a ghastly complacency – denies in the early stages of the play. But the façade Douglas has created is increasingly vulnerable to Jill’s worldly critique. First, Jill describes Douglas’s ‘dingy little house…on the edge of a roaring main trunk road’ (Ayckbourn, 1990: 18), then Douglas himself exposes the lack of sensitivity with which he treats Nerys’s disfigurement, later admitting his desire to exorcise the nightmare that the seventeen years since the robbery have really been. Ultimately, however, Vic’s wife Trudy manages to catalyze some revelatory (and to some extent endearing) honesty in Douglas’s disclosures. Douglas, then, is almost made redeemable through the intervention of Trudy, herself largely a victim of Vic. Trudy is an interesting mixture of somebody who is incompetent when trying to perform the kind of wife demanded by Vic’s stultifying patriarchal conventions, but highly competent when she emerges from this conventional role playing – for example when it comes to getting Douglas to see and express his situation as it really is. Trudy echoes Betty in Act I of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (1979) in her inability to cope with the handling of (foreign) servants, who use their foreignness against her, just as Joshua turns his Africanness against Betty in Cloud Nine. Marbella, then, serves as the overseas posting for Britain’s neo-colonialists, and their efforts at imperialism are exposed as a futile masculine vanity, as when Churchill exposed the exploits of their earlier exemplars in Africa. Trudy is also very accepting of her role as Vic’s trophy wife, while being quite realistic about it (and hence complicit in Vic’s brutality). In the course of the play she transforms herself, as her hitherto subdued strength and moral sense come to the fore. Vic, on the other hand, moves from victor to victim in the course of the play. Initially, he gets away with his role as genial and successful host, the reformed character made good, but increasingly the tabloid nature of his public persona is exposed. In fact, Vic speaks in the calculated synthetic language of a tabloid newspaper editorial right from the start: ‘Do you know what I’d like to do to people who hurt kids?’, and He has got to get up and do the very best with that which God has granted him to make amends with and try and put something back in the world, in the brief time left to him. And that is what, hand on heart, I have tried to do. (Ayckbourn, 1990: 26, 30–1)

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But gradually the brutality behind this East End, tabloid mawkishness comes through: when Jill wants the interview with Vic to focus on the bank robbery rather than on Vic’s time as a reformed character, she is told that she is ‘out of order’; Vic then gives a cynical tutorial on how to be interviewed to maximum advantage; he bullies Sharon and finally resorts to violence. As a character, Vic remains irredeemable and unredeemed. Sharon, the agent of Vic’s death, stands victorious not merely over but on top of Vic. Standing on his body, Sharon is the embodiment of mindless maternity, just as Vic is of mindless brutality: she is unheroic, perhaps, but, on the whole, a positive rather than a negative figure. So, if Vic and Sharon have played out their symbolic battle like primitive statues, and both Douglas and Trudy have emerged from shadow into light in the course of the play, this leaves Jill with the last word. The anti-hero might be seen as snatching victory from the milder and more humane figures. By comparison with Jill’s ruthless and self-interested technique of exposé, Douglas and Trudy represent truth and honesty. But the last word is given first to Jill, with her final-scene travesty of what has gone before, and finally, uniquely, to the audience, who are made complicit in Jill’s triumph by being virtually forced to respond to the ‘studio-manager’s’ call for applause. Behind our complicity in Jill’s triumph lies an uneasy awareness of the woman who has not appeared in the play. Nerys is still there – the antithesis of Jill, seeking security behind a wall of make-up, remaining in the house in Purley, nursing her shattered life. Our awareness of that, and the role Jill has had in traducing her life, perhaps cancels out Jill’s triumph. If so, then the moral force of the play returns to Douglas and Trudy and to their emergence as human beings capable of undeceiving themselves – quite unlike the layers of deceit built up by Vic and by Jill. Ayckbourn’s victory goes, then, to a humane transcendence of the constraints imposed by hypocrisy and role play. Whether a similar transcendence has occurred with regard to sexuality, however, is more questionable. Douglas and Nerys have not had sex for fifteen years – a revelation to which Jill memorably reacts:  We spend most of our lives trying to work out how we can get someone to have it with us and then, once we’ve had it, how we can get rid of that person we’re having it with, so we can have it with someone else. (Ayckbourn, 1990: 57–8) However much such a declaration underlines the clash of values between Jill’s milieu and that of Douglas and Nerys, it is clearly an aspect of life that has been expunged for Nerys. Nerys remains, fifteen years without sex, perhaps the darkest embodiment of Ayckbourn’s neglected women – delineated even more grimly than Susan in Woman in Mind (1986). There is an ambivalence in Man of the Moment which may suggest that Ayckbourn was beginning to be caught up with the spirit of the age. Perhaps his earlier radicalism had, by this time, given way to a kind of state-of-the-nation commentary, which encapsulated the weary zeitgeist of latetwentieth century Britain.

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Perhaps the strongest sense of continuity from one Ayckbourn play to another appears in the similarities between Vera in Just Between Ourselves and Hazel in Wildest Dreams (1991). In Wildest Dreams Ayckbourn’s stress on the ‘tragi’ in tragi-comedy is at its most evident. Hazel’s total physical and mental breakdown is comparable to that of both Vera and Susan in Woman in Mind, while Larry’s physical violence has been foreshadowed by Vic’s in Man of the Moment. But bringing these together in a single play, associating them with the far from comic pathos of the other characters, and then concluding with the bleak triumph of the resumption of the game gives a new strength to Ayckbourn’s increasingly bleak vision. In Wildest Dreams the fantasy game played by the four main characters provides a means of escape from a real world that has become intolerable. However, what we see of the game itself suggests that the tedium and banality of the real world must be very problematic indeed if this is a desirable fugue. Perhaps the real world really is that problematic for the players: Hazel and Stanley not only have to cope with their sexless and frustrating marriage, but also with the constant bullying of Hazel’s brother, Austen; Rick still experiences flashbacks of her teenage abuse at the hands of her stepfather, and Warren is undergoing the usual pains of adolescence, exacerbated by his own ungainliness and his mother’s inept sermonizing. With the arrival of Marcie on the scene, everything changes. Stanley’s misplaced crush on Marcie leads him to defy his brother-in-law for the first time, thereby prompting Austen’s stroke and liberating Hazel and Stanley. However, Stanley’s reaction is to plan to abandon his marriage to Hazel. As with Dennis in Just Between Ourselves, this will somehow become the fault of the abandoned woman: ‘You’re going to drive me to it at this rate, you know, Hazel.’(Ayckbourn, 1993: 46) Like Eva In Absurd Person Singular, Hazel has become so institutionalized by marriage that she is unable to cope with the prospect of it evaporating. She infantilizes herself, thereby making herself physically dependent on Stanley, who is morally obliged not to abandon her. Middle-aged women receive peculiarly harsh treatment in this play, with willed or imposed incontinence the most powerful motif, arguably a metaphor for the disempowerment of women in conventional marriages. Hazel’s reversion to wearing nappies on stage is paralleled by Warren’s mother’s inability to get out of her bedroom to go to the lavatory. The sacrifice of Hazel’s life to Austen and to Stanley – or at least to the condition of being married to him – has effectively destroyed her. Her self-oppression is such that she blames Stanley for not having raped her: ‘You should have made me have [children]…You should have just – taken me by force. Forced me to have them.’ (Ayckbourn, 1993: 18) Any idea that having children leads to self-fulfilment for women is rapidly dispelled by the experience of Warren’s mother. Warren’s combination of adolescent delusion and practical competence – catalyzed by his sudden crush on Marcie – almost produces a similar sacrifice in his mother. ‘Mother. I’m sorry. I am having to switch on the force fields to prevent unauthorized movement around the house,’ ‘there is now mains voltage running through your bedroom door handle.’ (Ayckbourn, 1993: 79) While all this is going on, the relationship between Rick and Marcie develops into a wary, irritated, but, on the whole, affectionate domesticity, though one in which Rick feels somewhat trapped: she is swept along into something she is not sure she wants and from which she

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eventually seeks escape. Marcie seems to be a female version of some of Ayckbourn’s earlier inept male characters – perhaps Norman from The Norman Conquests (1973). She is insensitive and irritating, and manifests a strange combination of self-fantasy and self-centred practicality. But there is no sense of her acting maliciously – unlike her violent ex-husband. The incident with the key in this play is an example of sadistic violence unparalleled in Ayckbourn, except perhaps in Way Upstream (1981). By way of contrast to this sadism, the emotional carnage Marcie leaves in her path is the product of a kind of holy innocence. If Marcie is regarded as a kind of updated Norman, the fact that the bumbling and insensitive partner is now a woman, and the limiting relationship a lesbian partnership rather than a conventional marriage, suggests a responsiveness to social changes that had taken place between 1973 and 1991. But although both the sex and sexual orientation of the participants have undergone change, the unsatisfactory nature of the relationship has not. This is not like Jill in Man of the Moment, where a straightforward transfer of masculine attributes to a woman had taken place: Marcie is unmistakably a female stereotype – albeit rather dimwitted and insensitive. Perhaps that is the point: so long as people adopt stereotypical gender identities instead of discovering their real selves, those around them will have no choice but to flee or risk being destroyed. Thus the play reprises Ayckbourn’s vision of the dangers of a failure in ‘eroding the notion of the manly man and the womanly woman’. At this stage of Ayckbourn’s writing, he is still pitting his female characters against the constraints and injustices generated by a masculine vision of marriage, in particular, and emotional relationships, in general. But in the plays of the early 1990s there is greater recognition of equality between the sexes – equality, that is, in terms of the amount of damage done. For example, whereas in Woman in Mind Susan falls victim, so to speak, to the lack of physical affection in her marriage, in Wildest Dreams Stanley is at least as much a victim of sexual frustration as Hazel. Or so Hazel would have it, though her version of events has to be treated with care, having been filtered through her self-oppression. Like Susan, Hazel may be something of an unreliable witness. The outside world is composed largely of abusive men – Austen, Rick’s stepfather and Marcie’s ex-husband – while Marcie both provides a means of escape from the cycle of self-immolation in which the main characters find themselves and simultaneously threatens their whole existence. At the end of the play it is Marcie who embodies the outside world, an embodiment that is found wanting, so that Stanley, Hazel, Warren and Rick reverse their previous decision to abandon the game and deal with the real world on real terms. In Wildest Dreams, then, Ayckbourn has arrived at a position where laughter is over. Marriage is a condition to be escaped from at any price (and marriage itself can now include a lesbian relationship), and if that escape takes the form of flight into a game, then so be it. His characters in Wildest Dreams end as they began, retreating into a game in which they are empowered to a degree they clearly are not in the outside world. Some progress has been made, however. Rick still has domestic bliss of one kind or another with Marcie, Warren has begun to come to terms

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with the existence of his mother, Hazel may be emerging from her self-imposed infantilization and Hazel and Warren are not being bullied by Austen – though the threat of Austen’s return to health looms. The advances are small – smaller than they might have been – a representation in miniature, perhaps, of Ayckbourn’s view of the state of gender relations in Britain at large. Since Wildest Dreams, the same bleak vision seems largely to have been absent from Ayckbourn’s plays,7 though it is clear that the tragedy of entrapment in marriage and childbearing remains. In society as a whole there may have been some progress towards what Ayckbourn saw as the desideratum of the less manly man and less womanly woman, but the plays are more concerned with the fear that the more manly women – the Jill Rillingtons – are in the ascendant. By the time of Things We Do for Love (1997), the acute tragi-comedy of women being destroyed by marriage has given way to a portrait of a potential marriage destroyed by the power of sexuality. As Benedict Nightingale puts it, ‘the crusty, curmudgeonly spinster at [the] centre does not end up a hopeless schizophrenic, a crazed alcoholic or a human vegetable, like the characters in some of his earlier plays’.8 But all the characters sustain damage of one sort or another. Barbara and Hamish inflict physical injury on each other – consistent, perhaps with the physical nature of their passion. Nikki, who departs to her mother’s house, white and strained, has clearly suffered emotional damage. And Gilbert breaks a leg as a result of his sexual obsession with Barbara. At the centre of all this is Barbara: the damage is caused by her and Hamish’s lack of physical restraint. The love-starved Susan of Woman in Mind has given way to the self-contained career woman, who succeeds in finding love, but at considerable cost to others in the fall-out. Ayckbourn’s earlier concern with the larger issues of sexual politics has been supplanted in Things We Do for Love by a rather bitter look at destructive self-indulgence on a small scale. Ayckbourn’s best-known play of more recent years is probably the House/Garden dyad (1999). By this time, the motifs of the blandly impervious husband and oppressed and frustrated wife are embodied in Barry and Lindy, and played almost entirely for laughs. The ability of farce to overwhelm the critical potential of its content has asserted itself once more. Moreover, social comment had, by this time, become the preserve of younger playwrights of the in-yer-face 1990s, leaving Ayckbourn, the farceur, to fulfil the stereotype of entertainer. Orton and Outrage If Ayckbourn uses his Pendon persona to get under the skin of middle England, Orton goes for the full-frontal assault. Not only did reaction to his plays create headlines in the newspapers, but Orton himself went out of his way to throw a little paraffin on the flames by writing to the papers under a number of assumed names, most famously that of Mrs Edna Welthorpe. This embodiment of Rattigan’s ill-judged Aunt Edna is equipped with a poisonous narrow-mindedness,9 which Orton exploited to generate scandal. His success in this endeavour contributed, in a complex way, to the development of the continuing debate on gender and sexuality issues in the theatre. Some critics have seemed determined to minimize the potential political impact of Orton’s plays. For example, Katharine Worth writes that ‘It’s rather curious to find this dream subversiveness sometimes taken by critics firmly towards social commentary,’ and ‘Orton’s farces seem to be…

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working out dark fantasies in extravagant cosmic terms that both express and exorcize them.’10 But this view of Orton’s work as having only a personal psychologically cathartic effect seems unduly narrow. The conflict between the sexuality of his characters and the constraints imposed by authority figures has a political aspect, and the self-serving hypocrisy of characters like Ed in Entertaining Mr Sloane, Truscott in Loot and Rance in What the Butler Saw is made transparent as Orton holds these vicious representatives of patriarchy up for critique. It is entirely feasible to view his plays as ‘social commentary’. Orton’s hostility to establishment or established values is clear: for example, in response to his own and Kenneth Halliwell’s convictions and prison sentences for defacing library books, Orton says, ‘The old whore society lifted up her skirts, and the stench was pretty foul.’ (Lahr, 1980: 152) Despite this, there is a peculiar mismatch between the tone of many contemporary reviews of the plays and later commentaries. When the plays were first produced, a number of reviewers took a line of almost dismissive detachment, at odds with later recollections of shock and outrage. Orton’s work, as recalled in the 1980s, comes across as far more shocking than the 1960s reviews suggest. Notwithstanding the outrage factor, however, a reasonably sensitive reading in the 2000s reveals a rich satire of the sexual and social mores of 1960s Britain, which still has significant reverberations. Orton’s three most celebrated plays attracted a mixture of reactions, some of them vigorous. When Entertaining Mr Sloane premiered in London on 6 May 1964, it was reviewed thus by W. A. Darlington in the following day’s Daily Telegraph:  Not for a long time have I disliked a play so much…In its backhanded way, this is a compliment. If an equally nasty play had been ineptly written or ineffectively acted I should have been able to dismiss it with contempt. But I can’t despise this one because it comes to life: I feel as if snakes had been writhing round my feet. Darlington’s unease is manifest in this review. The fact that the play ‘comes to life’ means that it is constituted as threatening. Revisiting the play some weeks later, Darlington still finds ‘the chief characters in it shameless and repulsive in the extreme’. This time, however, he resiles from his previous position, now maintaining that ‘one laughs at their outrageousness because to be shocked at them would be waste of time and tissue.’ There is a sense of protesting too much in this, however. Perhaps Darlington felt that he had conceded a dangerous amount of power and authority to the play in his earlier review, and now regarded adopting a more dismissive tone as the safer tactic. Of course, not all critics reacted in the same manner as the Daily Telegraph. In The Guardian Christopher Driver rather haughtily described the play as ‘a milk-curdling essay in lower-middle-class nihilism’, but then proceeded to review it in a more characteristically dry and uninflected tone.11 Perhaps more surprisingly, neither the Daily Mirror nor the Daily Mail reviewers were prepared to be horrified by the play. Hindsight may have provided commentators with material for a more positive assessment of Orton’s radicalism than was possible to perceive at the time. David Hirst is very clear that ‘It is important to stress that from the start [that] Orton was a shocking and subversive writer [emphasis added].’ (Hirst, 1979: 98) In fact, this view of Orton’s work as shocking and subversive is not

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really borne out by contemporary reviews, as indicated above. Many later commentators, on the other hand, evidently took much the same view as Hirst, as for example in Robert Hewison’s review of Loot cited below. Also, Maurice Charney observes with regard to John Russell Taylor’s ‘disparaging and patronising chapter on Orton in The Second Wave’ that: Since [it] was published in 1971, Orton no longer seems to be merely a footnote in the history of modern drama but merits at least a significant chapter. His growing popularity must come as a surprise to many critics and reviewers, who thought of him as a slickly clever, commercial dramatist. (Charney, 1984: 131) Similarly, even as early as 1971, James Fox says, ‘Orton was outrageous and anarchistic… He has become a tradition [emphasis added],’ and goes on to quote Frank Marcus on What the Butler Saw:  I think…it’s a much more profound and serious play than Chips With Everything or Look Back in Anger. I think it will survive and tell people more about what it felt to be alive in the Sixties than almost anything else of that period.’12 In each case there is a perfectly understandable sense of retrospective assessment. The comparative lack of outrage at the time nevertheless seems surprising, given the prevailing moral climate of the 1960s, to judge by contemporary press coverage. For example, on the day after Entertaining Mr Sloane was reviewed, Lord Mansfield was reported as having contributed to a House of Lords debate on the future of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, to the effect that as far as obscenity was concerned, ‘a large section of the population wished to see the present situation strengthened’.13 (The context makes clear that he is referring to a widespread desire for the maintenance of censorship, not the reverse.) At the same time, in the course of an article running to almost a full page, one of the Daily Mail’s columnists, apparently without intentional irony, wrote, ‘every girl can give the benefit of the God-given feminine attributes of good sense, stability and grace to the young man who finds her so enchanting.’14 Meanwhile, Marjorie Proops in the Mirror worried about the morals of American teenagers:  Girls in gay print shirts and skirts or cute shift dresses with fancy hairdos. Boys in very tight jeans – often white – clinging to their lean hips…girls and boys can dress to attract each other. And I think they do.15 An apparent genteel morality pervades the news and comment pages of these newspapers, vividly evoking the zeitgeist that Orton was at pains to undermine. Following a thoroughly bad premiere in Cambridge in March 1965, Loot opened in London on 29 September 1966, and was greeted with reactions ranging from nil through lukewarm to great enthusiasm.16 The play subsequently won the Evening Standard award for the best play of 1966, to the headline, ‘SCANDAL! BUT LOOT HAS IT’, which suggests the play must have

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had more impact than is evident from, for example, Bryan Magee’s Listener review: ‘[Truscott] is outraged…we are not. And because we don’t care we don’t laugh. The humour of outrage can be as beautiful as music: but before feelings can be outraged they must be involved.’17 Times seem to have been changing, as is evident from the same issue of the Listener’s editorial on ‘the new-wave theatre’:  [Loot deals] in irreverent and jocular terms which would scarcely have been possible in earlier times with subjects like homosexuality…playwrights have to go further and further if they still want to shock their audiences; some people have even complained…that Orton’s Loot, instead of being shocking, is rather too mild and almost boring! However, even through this prevailing ennui ‘it is good to see that the living theatre has not succumbed…to the competition of television but rather seems…a more vital part of our cultural life than it has been for a long time.’ Perhaps following the lead of the W. A. Darlington reviews cited above, reaction to the posthumous première of What the Butler Saw on 5 March 1969 seems to have included what must surely have been a deliberate and perverse refusal to acknowledge that the play was sexually subversive. In his review in the Daily Telegraph of 6 March 1969 John Barber wrote: ‘high camp and low comedy do not mix…The censor would have resisted some of Orton’s material, though his use of it is innocent enough [emphasis added].’ This curious approach to Orton seems to be echoed in the 1984 Sheridan Morley piece cited below. Again, it may be that the forces of reaction had concluded that the best way to disarm Orton’s subversiveness was simply to refuse to acknowledge its existence, instead treating his work as if it had been written by Brian Rix.18 The audience reaction, however, was less half-hearted: a significant number of people hated the play, or the production, according to who one chooses to believe. D. A. N. Jones seems to place the blame firmly on the director in his review in The Listener of 13 March 1969: ‘I think the gallery booed because of boredom, not “shock”: they had not been made to feel concerned. The direction and casting…seem more to blame than the author of this shapely piece.’ However, since Jones also refers to ‘public fascination and rage’ in the same piece, there may be more to it than simply an unfortunate production. John Lahr, for one, seemed to want to have it both ways. On the one hand: ‘no first night in the sixties was more volcanic than that of What the Butler Saw. The production and the premiere were a shambles. Critics mistook the flaws in the production for limitations in the script.’(Lahr, 1980: 334) On the other hand, Lahr seems to be describing a reaction to something more fundamental than just production values when he quotes Stanley Baxter: ‘There were old ladies in the audience not merely tearing up their programmes, but jumping up and down on them out of sheer hatred…Even the house manager had to leave town.’ (Lahr, 1980: 332) Similarly, Michael Billington notes that there were shouts of outrage from the audience at the opening of the play. (Billington, 2007: 178—9) Orton’s approach is an anarchistic use of sexuality to shock his audiences. He says of ‘sexual licence’, ‘It’s the only way to smash the wretched civilization,’ and that ‘Sex is the only way to infuriate them. Much more fucking and they’ll be screaming hysterics in next to no time.’ (Lahr, 1986: 125) There is no question of seeking to attack from within, as Ayckbourn does. Instead,

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Orton’s plays witheringly expose the hypocrisy of everyday life, with an unsettling clarity, born of a detached perspective. Orton’s Sexual Farces Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964), Loot (1966) and What the Butler Saw (1969) are probably the three plays in which Orton most effectively deploys sex. Entertaining Mr Sloane very plainly establishes sex as a species of transaction; success in this amoral marketplace transcends in importance the more established virtues such as filial piety or romantic love. While the play’s air of menace is very reminiscent of Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1958), there is a new, additional element of sexual subversion detectable from the outset of Sloane. C. W. E. Bigsby says: In many respects Meg and Kath are simply two versions of the same character. Both display a grotesque mixture of motherly love and lust; both are the uncomprehending victims of impulses and circumstances which they fail to perceive in any adequate way, animated as they are only by a grotesque sexual urge. (Bigsby, 1982: 29) However, Kath’s flirtatiousness is lent meaning by her sexual history in a way which that of Meg in The Birthday Party is not, while the sexual nature of the ‘felony’ Kemp had discovered Ed committing ‘in the bedroom’ is made fairly clear by Sloane’s question, ‘Anticipating some such tendencies on his part?’ (Orton, 1976: 71) Even Kemp’s sexuality is brought into question by the implication that his discovery of Ed’s original homosexual adventure was the anticipated result of deliberate voyeurism on his part, when he removed the lock from Ed’s bedroom door. Or perhaps Kemp is the embodiment of prurient outrage, determined both to stay as outraged as possible and to interfere with other people’s lives as much as possible. Sexuality creates a curious reversal of power relations in Entertaining Mr Sloane: Kemp, whose only sexual role is to thwart the progress of others, is infantilized by Kath, ignored by Ed and threatened, injured and eventually killed by Sloane. Sloane uses his sexuality to get away with murder, not to mention menacing and exploiting Kath and Ed, but his non-sexual criminal activities eventually give Kath and Ed sexual power over him. Kath is infantilized by Ed and exploited and threatened by Sloane, but eventually turns the tables on both of them. In the past Ed’s extreme misogyny has led him to force Kath to give up her baby, in revenge for her having slept with his ‘friend’:  Kath:  If you send him away I shall cry like the time you took my real baby. Ed:  You were wicked then. Kath:  I know. Ed:  Being rude. Ruining my little matie. Teaching him nasty things. That’s why I sent it away. (Orton, 1976: 107)

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The viciousness of Ed’s reaction against female sexuality is startling, but perhaps that viciousness is a reflection of what Orton saw as the real attitudes underlying the declared mores that prevailed. Kath and Ed’s concern with surface materiality, and the vulgarity which provides the driving force for both of them, are also presumably the targets identified by Orton’s satirical comment as the motives underlying most people’s behaviour most of the time. The play-off between Kath’s women’s-magazine platitudes and Ed’s sexism appears to set them poles apart:  Kath:  Ladies are nice at a gathering. Ed:  We don’t want a lot of half-witted tarts. Kath:  They add colour and gaiety. Ed:  Frightening everyone with their clothes. (Orton, 1976: 90) But, in fact, they have in common a rapacious sexuality, whose fulfilment takes priority over every other aspect of their lives. In that sense they are Orton’s view of Everyman and Everywoman. Rather than individuals whose peculiarities could be dismissed as sui generis without wider implications, Kath and Ed are presented as broadly recognizable types, whose motivations, if not their behaviour, could be uncomfortably familiar. Orton is exposing the hypocrisy of a society in which sexuality is repressed and denied for the sake of keeping up appearances. Orton also brings Greek tragedy to the suburban sitting room – thereby no doubt adding a few more to the list of sensibilities offended by his work. When Kath tells Sloane that she is pregnant, she refers to the putative baby as ‘A baby brother’, and elsewhere to herself as Sloane’s ‘mamma’. She thus casts Sloane in the role of Oedipus and herself in the role of Jocasta. This being a London suburb, of course, some of the details of the tragedy have undergone change in the process of making the journey from Thebes: the killing of Kemp takes place after the bedding of Kath, and there is a slip of a generation; similarly, Ed might be regarded as an unlikely Creon, and so on. Given that Orton and Halliwell made very specific classical connections with regard to What the Butler Saw,19 Entertaining Mr Sloane colourably becomes Greek tragedy translated into the not-so-genteel London suburbs. This elevation of modern suburban morality, of course, makes the venality of Kath and Ed all the more potent as a means of deflating their pretensions and those of contemporary Britain. However, this venality is a source of power so long as it manages to shake off any traces of sentiment or emotion. In turn, Sloane only becomes vulnerable when he allows a modicum of decency to make itself felt, as when he defends Kath against Ed’s onslaught in which he compares Kath to a sow.

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The mercenary nature of Ed’s approach to sexuality becomes clear when he discusses his previous ‘friend’ with Sloane: ‘I’m the possessor of two bank accounts…And all because I turned my back on him.’ (Orton, 1976: 115) Leaving aside the sexual suggestiveness of this remark, abstinence from a sexual or emotional relationship is therefore equated with financial success, whereas Ed’s involvement with Sloane is represented as a constant drain on his financial resources. This mercenary outlook combines with a greater regard for appearances than for reality. Regarding Kath’s pregnancy, Ed insists that Sloane lie to him rather than expose him to the uncomfortable truth that Sloane has been sleeping with Kath. But the very fact that Ed says, ‘Lie to me’, makes it clear that he has already absorbed the truth. Like Prentice in What the Butler Saw (1969), it is not reality that particularly concerns Ed but its appearance – even its appearance to himself. Ed’s sexual cupidity for Sloane is quite powerful enough to enable him to overcome his misogynistic disgust at Sloane’s heterosexual goings-on with Kath. Ed’s insistence that Sloane lie to him about having slept with Kath is then matched by Kath’s insistence that Sloane’s murderous attack on Kemp was both provoked and less serious than it really was. Thus both Ed and Kath will ignore objective facts in order to create a new version of truth, which can be bent to their respective sexual purposes. Perhaps the most memorable example of Ed’s approach to truth comes in Act III:  No principles? Oh, you really have upset me now. Why am I interested in your welfare? Why did I give you a job? Why do thinking men everywhere show young boys the strait and narrow? Flash cheque-books when delinquency is mentioned? Support the Scoutmovement? Principles, boy, bleeding principles. And don’t you dare say otherwise or you’ll land in serious trouble. (Orton, 1976: 134) The sexual suggestiveness associated with all the ‘principled’ activities is made concrete by the last sentence of his speech. Again, it is an acknowledgement to himself, to Sloane and to the audience of the hypocrisy by which he lives. But even when everybody can see the hypocrisy for what it is, it has to remain intact to provide some sort of comfort-blanket for Ed. Ed shares with Inspector Truscott in Loot a determination to demonstrate that he can, and will, tell blatant lies – an echo of Goldberg in Pinter’s The Birthday Party. In all three cases, their entrenched power enables them to demand complicity from their auditors on stage. Orton’s exposure of a self-serving hypocrisy so entrenched and self-assured that it can afford to make such a demand constitutes perhaps the central target of his social commentary. However effective Eric Bentley’s shield of delicious darkness may be in other respects, Ed and Truscott’s blatancy pierces it. This, at the very least, is where Orton’s farce enables a radical critique to present itself. For her part, when Kath discovers that Kemp is dead, her main concern is for his pension. And then, of course, there is the denouement, when Kath and Ed join forces to blackmail Sloane into being their lover turn and turn about. The death of their father ultimately functions solely as a means of giving them a hold over Sloane. Throughout, the language they use is overwhelmingly that of detachment. As Maurice Charney says:

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All the characters speak in the slick, vapid, moralistic and sentimental clichés of mass entertainment, especially television. They strive to conceal their gross needs beneath a veneer of genteel banter and polite chit-chat, so that even the murder of their old father is processed with the detachment of daytime television. (Charney, 1984: 16) However detached the language of daytime television may be, Orton’s view seems to be that there is reality underlying the exchanges between Kath and Ed. John Lahr quotes Orton as saying, ‘I don’t write fantasy. People think I do, but I don’t.’ (Lahr, 1986: 28) So Orton’s view of the values held by British society at large is probably that they are much the same as those of Entertaining Mr Sloane. In the case of Loot, there is also a series of transactional relationships which take place, and the sexual ones are generally subordinate to those related to death and institutional authority. John Lahr observes that, ‘in its capering with “human remains” and its gleeful celebration of police corruption, Loot attacked the most deep-seated myths of English culture.’ (Orton, 1976: 21) Orton’s view of the hypocrisy with which British society deals with sexual matters is naturally capable of extending to death, as well. And it may be, as Maurice Charney suggests, that Hal’s cavalier treatment of his mother’s corpse owes much to the ghastly upbringing inflicted on Orton (in Orton’s own view) by his mother. (Charney, 1984: 82–3) On some counts, Loot may qualify as Orton’s most directly subversive play. Truscott’s monstrous sanctimony, donned to cover his brutality and corruption, apparently had roots in the reality of corruption among the London police.20 In that sense, Truscott is not a joke, but an awful warning. Given that Truscott emerges from the play with his position intact and his bank balance enlarged, he serves less as a figure around which to build an anti-corruption campaign than as a truthful embodiment of the inevitability of brutality and corruption within an organization whose masculinist culture fosters a kind of clubby criminality. Truscott embodies a collective mentality which subsequent anti-corruption drives of the 1970s and 1980s showed were entrenched in British police forces. He represents a mindset in which any arrest which results in imprisonment is probably justified: if the person imprisoned happens not to be guilty of the particular crime for which they have been imprisoned, then the odds are that they are guilty of something for which they could have been legitimately punished if only the evidence had been to hand. Another aspect of this kind of CID psychopathy is the similarity between the thinking of the police and that of the criminal fraternity. If everybody is guilty of something in the eyes of the police, then moral distinctions disappear, and bonds tend to be formed with those whose psychological approach bears the greatest resemblance to one’s own. In Loot the greatest empathy is between Truscott and Fay, and Hal and Dennis, with McLeavy the bewildered outsider. Truscott and Fay are two of a kind: ruthless, amoral and successful, preserving a deliberately transparent adherence to trivial ethical principles. For example, when Truscott says, ‘We’re open to serious discussion, sir, but not bad language’ (Orton, 1976: 260), or Fay, ‘I don’t think a publican’s tribute should be given pride of place’ (Orton, 1976: 213), they cannot and do not expect to be credited with the kind of easily bruised

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sensibility that could give rise to such objections sincerely. But they do expect to be taken seriously. Like Ed in Entertaining Mr Sloane, the sheer ludicrousness of the lies on which they base their demands for other people’s responses is a demonstration of their power. To request rational action for rational reasons says nothing about one’s personal standing in a hierarchy; to be able to demand irrational action arbitrarily is a demonstration of personal power, and this, above all else, is the currency being exchanged in Loot. Truscott is able to cut off the water and telephone – not for any valid reason, but as a demonstration that he can. Similarly, Fay can let it be known that all her previous husbands have died in suspicious circumstances while still demanding that McLeavy marry her, to become her next victim. Hal and Dennis are bank-robbers and violators of corpses, happily amoral sexual beings, whose actions might normally be found horrifying. The fact that almost to the end of the play they come over as relatively sympathetic is perhaps an effect of their comparative powerlessness and honesty. Ruthless they may be, but at least they do not hide their criminality behind a veil of piety: indeed, Hal is honest to a fault. Orton invites his audience to sympathize with Hal and Dennis, to wish to allow them to get away with it against all the odds. That sympathy only dissolves when they finally overcome the odds against them by working in complicity with Truscott and Fay, blithely allowing McLeavy to go to his ‘accidental’ death, and then eulogizing Truscott’s open mindedness and reliability. In the end, they are caught in the trap of their own complicity, their relationship’s future gin-trapped by Fay’s ‘We must keep up appearances’. This last line of the play represents the triumph of conventional gender role playing over the happy bisexuality of Hal and Dennis. The hollowness of Fay’s respectable façade represents the vacuity of any conventional role that suppresses honest emotion and real personality. This has been McLeavy’s fatal failing. His protestations of belief in the rectitude of the authorities – whether the Water Board, police or Roman Catholic Church – have taken the place of any human qualities he might otherwise have been able to accommodate. He has become a shell, where the process of keeping up appearances has become more important than finding or maintaining a real identity for himself – perhaps foreshadowing Ayckbourn’s Dennis in Just Between Ourselves in the farce tradition of caricaturization. McLeavy has not even the excuse of Truscott and Fay – personal gain – to justify his consensual dehumanization. In a sense, his accidental death foreshadowed at the end of the play is no more than symbolic: his real death took place years before, in the course of a life-time of fake devotion, and denial to himself and everybody around him of the virtues of living a real life – sexual, emotional and unfettered by fear of religious or lay authority. Loot, then, can be seen as a determined assault on the nonsense of unrestrained and corrupt authority. The frightening, dehumanizing and desexualizing power of the police and the Roman Catholic Church stand exposed, together with the guilt by association of those who allow corruption to enjoy power, all in a quest for a species of bogus respectability. But the question of whether the medium may have undermined the message once more comes to the fore. Martin Esslin, in Plays and Players for November 1966, describes Loot – apart from its assault on ‘the cult figure of the policeman’ – as ‘harmless old-fashioned fun’, which hardly suggests a play

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carrying a subversive impact. Similarly, in 1984 Sheridan Morley in Punch launched a more general attack on Orton’s work:  Orton did indeed have a wonderful ear for suburban cliché…a sense of parody…and a talent for dialogue…which would at times have been the envy of Coward or Wilde. But he was essentially a cobbler of unusually stylish Whitehall farces, and…other claims that have been made for him…are beginning to look a little exaggerated.21 Can it be the fact that Loot is a farce that has contributed to the erasure of its political content in criticism of the play? That is hard to believe when the blatant corruption and self-interest of Truscott is so angrily exposed, and when Truscott’s hypocrisy is highlighted, for example when he says to McLeavy, ‘You’re fucking nicked, my old beauty. You’ve found to your cost that the standards of the British police force are as high as ever.’ (Orton, 1976: 273) This line presents an interesting contrast with his earlier ‘You’re at liberty to answer your own doorbell, miss. That is how we tell whether or not we live in a free country.’ (Orton, 1976: 235) Thus it seems inappropriate to dismiss Loot as ‘harmless old-fashioned fun’. Robert Hewison’s review in the Sunday Times of the 1984 revival of the play seems nearer the mark: ‘There is a hard political centre to Loot, comparable to that in the plays of Dario Fo…[Orton’s] farces have the same subversive effect.’22 And that subversive effect includes a significant assault on the values of conventional gender roles as expressed in ‘respectable’ marriage. What the Butler Saw (1969) is possibly Orton’s most effective attack on contemporary British mores. The weapons with which he had familiarized his audience in his earlier plays included using the language of magazine advertising to convey overt sexual desire,23 reversing moral values and undermining figures of authority through comedy. In What the Butler Saw he transfers the milieu in which these weapons are deployed from the private houses of Entertaining Mr Sloane and Loot to the lunatic asylum. The analogy seems plain enough: Britain is the lunatic asylum,24 in which arbitrary or self-serving decisions are taken by those in power, heedless of the impact of their actions on the lives of others. But the underclass can fight back, primarily using sexuality as a weapon. Eventually, it is Dr Rance, the supposedly objective assessor of other people, and the one person without any overt sexual involvement with any of the other characters, who is the most menacing and destructive figure in the play.25 Arguably, Geraldine Barclay is the opposite of Dr Rance – her physicality is passive, and sexuality is only apparent in her as a catalyst for the improprieties of others. Her powerlessness is defined partly by contrast with Rance’s powerfulness. The play’s achievement, then, is to expose the nature of the sexual cage in which British society finds itself entrapped. The initial interview between Prentice and Geraldine is composed of a series of conventional exchanges, each subverted by a sort of malformed juxtaposition of clashing and contrasting mundanities. Then, of course, the power of Dr Prentice as a prospective employer, an interviewer, translates smoothly into that of doctor over patient. Orton makes the analogy between interviewer/doctor/seducer/male on the one hand, and interviewee/patient/seducee/female on the other, operating in a milieu in which the nature of the complete nonsense being

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exchanged is momentarily veiled by the conventional nature of the language, all of which serves to conceal the real sexual transaction taking place. A similar exchange occurs between Mrs Prentice and Nick. In the sexual marketplace she is empowered over him by virtue of social position and money, but he empowers himself by exploiting her desire to maintain a front of respectability – by blackmailing her. This transaction segues into that between Dr and Mrs Prentice. The hypocrisy that exists between the Prentices then becomes their principal currency of exchange: the more each has to conceal, the less power they hold. Their capacity for fulfilment is undermined by concern for the outward appearance of conventional sexual respectability. And the inability of the Prentices to act other than in accordance with a farcical convention in which concealment is paramount both provides the vehicle for the play and the barrier to their ability to interact with one another on a more positive level than the hostile and superficial. Orton’s argument is that social constraints cause people to play the most incredible and disabling roles, particularly in the sexual arena. In the Prentices’ mutual exchanges, the deadpan frankness of ‘They’ll send you to your grave in a Y-shaped coffin’ (Orton, 1976: 371), and ‘My uterine contractions have been bogus for some time!’ (Orton, 1976: 372) strike an altogether different note from concern for the preservation of appearances. But then all becomes clear when Prentice says, ‘Do you realise what would happen if your adventures became public? I’d be ruined. The doors of London society would be slammed in my face.’ (Orton, 1976: 374) The sexual reality of the situation is entirely subject to considerations of income and social position. Rance’s motivations, on the other hand, are to force the facts into a form that will cohere with his lurid theorizing, with a view to a profitable later publication. This is particularly evident in the language of his ‘text-book case’ speech (Orton, 1976: 383). Rance, the authority figure, has it in his power to determine who is mad and who is sane. Three lines in particular illuminate Rance’s attitude: ‘I am a representative of order, you of chaos’ (Orton, 1976: 417), ‘The sane appear as strange to the mad as the mad to the sane’ (Orton, 1976: 418) and, notoriously, ‘You can’t be a rationalist in an irrational world. It isn’t rational.’ (Orton, 1976: 428) So, not only does Rance place himself in a position of judging what is ordered/sane and what is chaotic/ mad, he also undermines in advance any would-be critics of his judgement. Anybody who disagrees with his view of the world is ipso facto mad, and so in a position to have sanctions applied against them. Just for good measure, anybody who claims to have an objective measure of what is rational is trying to apply the inapplicable, and is therefore mad. It is tempting to suggest that the audience’s view of Rance’s behaviour is similarly implicated in all this. To judge Rance mad is to place oneself irretrievably in Orton’s Dionysiac camp: to judge Rance sane is to put faith in the judgement of authority, no matter how crazy those judgements might seem. A very similar binarism operates in Loot: McLeavy’s blind and destructive faith in the authority of Truscott is counterpoised by the anarchic self-interest of Hal and Dennis. This is perhaps a reasonable analogy for Orton’s concern with the processes undergone by political society. The more ordered a society, the more restrictive it is of personal freedom: such restriction may be acceptable to an individual broadly in sympathy with the order being imposed, but intolerable to those who feel themselves anywhere but at the top of the prevailing hierarchy.

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Orton’s own view of the internal dynamic of What the Butler Saw, as between order and chaos, is fairly clear, but is perhaps most starkly demonstrated in the looking-glass nature of the relationship between Rance and Prentice. To preserve his position in society, Prentice is seeking to conceal the truth of his attempt on Geraldine’s virtue. Rance, on the other hand, is seeking to advance his social position by promulgating falsehood as truth. Both attempts are objectively discreditable, but the double layer of falsehood implied by Rance’s efforts makes his position even more discreditable than that of Prentice. The one thing to be said in Rance’s favour is that he lacks the cynical awareness displayed by Ed and Truscott of the false and self-serving nature of their respect for proprieties. Perhaps the most subversive theme in What the Butler Saw is the triumph of Dionysiac chaos over order. Sergeant Match arrives as the personification of uniformed law and order, but his authority is undermined as he is successively stripped of his uniform, dressed in women’s clothes and drugged. Finally, he is the upholder of the Churchill phallus – draped in leopard skin he becomes the embodiment of Dionysiac celebration of the physical, and is empowered over the merely legal or cultural. Led by Match in his leopard-skin dress, the cast ‘pick up their clothes and weary, bleeding, drugged and drunk, climb the rope ladder into the blazing light’. If Truscottian authoritarianism triumphed in Loot, the victors in What the Butler Saw are the forces of physicality, asserting themselves over the straitjacket of law and order. By the time of the writing of What the Butler Saw, Orton apparently felt able to celebrate victory over his vicious and hypocritical villains. Comparing Ayckbourn to Orton, the former as an insider, the latter as an outsider, both achieved substantial commercial success, and because of or despite this, both perhaps contributed to the change in British attitudes to issues of gender and sexuality that gathered pace in the 1960s and 1970s. Though quantification is impossible, the high-profile outrage generated by Orton’s plays may have had a significant impact. Ayckbourn’s almost diametrically opposite approach, on the other hand, seems to have changed the thinking of at least some of his largely mainstream audience: the anecdotal evidence regarding the impact of his plays may reflect changes in attitude that took place in society at large. What is clear is the radicalism to be found in both Ayckbourn’s work as well as Orton’s. An anger at the constricting and distorting impact on individuals of conventional sex and gender roles – especially in marriage – shines through. Orton may have created the headlines, but Ayckbourn presents a startling critique of the attitudes and beliefs frequently attributed to middle England. In the plays of both men, farce is deployed to shatter cherished illusions that all is well in British sexual politics. Notes   1. Ayckbourn himself found his work the subject of a heated dispute as to whether it was or was not farce, and there is a sense of exasperation in his subsequent declaration: ‘I have resolved with any future plays I write to give them no description at all. Henceforth they will all be plays. I will leave others to brand and pigeon-hole them if they want to.’ (Ayckbourn, 1981).   2. At least Relatively Speaking (1967), Time and Time Again (1971), Confusions (1974), Ten Times Table (1977), Sisterly Feelings (1979), Way Upstream (en passant, naturally, 1981), and Chorus of

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Disapproval (1984) have an explicit reference to Pendon. Many of the other plays share the Pendon cultural environment without explicitly being set there.   3. Unpublished revue, first performed in Scarborough, June 1978.   4. Albert Kalson reports that ‘When he began Just Between Ourselves…he thought he was writing about “a man who hasn’t any friends, who is very very nice”. But out of the corner of his eye he saw the man’s wife. Originally intended as a subsidiary character, she suddenly became the play’s “riveting point of interest”.’ (Kalson: 1993: 144-5).   5. Benedict Nightingale, ‘A Woman of Two Minds, Both in Turmoil’, New York Times, 14 February 1988.   6. Service Not Included, BBC, 1974.   7. Paul Allen in 2001 makes the point that ‘there is less suppressed fury in his work…over the last decade’. (Allen, 2001: 312).   8. Benedict Nightingale, review in the Times, 4 March 1998.   9. The figure of Aunt Edna was created by Rattigan in the introduction to Volume 2 of his Collected Plays. She was the epitome of a certain type of London theatre-goer, and it has been suggested – by Christopher Innes, in a paper delivered at a conference, ‘British Theatre in the 1950s’, at the British Library, 6 December 1997 – that she was part of the inspiration for Orton’s Mrs Edna Welthorpe. 10. Katharine Worth, ‘Form and Style in the Plays of Joe Orton’ in John Russell Brown (1984: 76). 11.  Christopher Driver, reviewing Entertaining Mr Sloane in The Guardian, 7 May 1964. 12.  Fox, James, ‘The Life and Death of Joe Orton’ in Morley (1971: 67–8). 13.  The Guardian, 8 May 1964. 14. Lucy Iremonger, writing in the Daily Mail, 7 May 1964. 15. Marjorie Proops, writing in the Daily Mirror, 7 May 1964. 16. Though withheld or hostile reviews may have had more to do with casting and direction than with the inherent quality of the play. John Elsom in the Listener of 24 July 1975 observes that ‘we know that Orton’s plays are difficult to cast and direct. The first production of Loot…looms as an awful warning.’ 17. Bryan Magee, The Listener, 6 October 1966. 18. Though the March 1969 production seems to have been miscast and misdirected to such an extent that contemporary reviews are misleading. John Lahr goes so far as to describe the production as ‘notorious’. (Lahr, 1980: 330). 19. ‘The Euripidean ending [of What the Butler Saw] works, surprisingly, as “all is forgiven”.’ (Lahr, 1986: 242) 20. ‘Inspector Truscott owes a good deal to the real life figure of Detective Sergeant Challoner, who was suspended from the police force in 1965 after a police enquiry found that in his zeal to secure convictions, he had planted evidence on law-abiding citizens. As Orton said, when receiving the Evening Standard award for Loot as the Best Play of 1966: “Everyone else thinks the play is a fantasy. Of course, the police know that it’s true.”’ (Smith, 1989: 16). 21. Sheridan Morley, Punch, 21 March 1984. 22. Robert Hewison, Sunday Times, 18 March 1984, pp. 35. 23. ‘His dialogue was a collage of the popular culture.’ John Lahr in the introduction to Orton The Complete Plays (Orton, 1976: 9).

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24. In fact, Britain itself might be regarded as a metaphor: the nation state as the embodiment of a more widespread ideological state, in which the defining features are the prevailing sexual mores. This is the Northern European/North American WASP culture, which Orton hated and reacted against both in his life and work, as he makes clear in the Diaries. 25. Though Katharine Worth suggests that by the end of the play, Rance’s façade is slipping to such a degree that an underlying lust towards the androgynous Geraldine/Nick figure becomes discernible (Worth, 1973: 154).

Conclusion

This book has looked at a range of plays from 1950–2000 in which gender and sexuality can be seen as central concerns. Indeed, I take the view that gender and sexuality were the central concerns of the period. Has there, however, been a discernible heyday, which is now over, for gender political theatre? If it has now become appropriate to think of gender political theatre in the past tense, then this is partly the result of the power of its own dialectical engagement with society at large. Attitudes in Britain towards homosexuality, for example, have changed hugely since the mid-1980s. Similarly, a very widespread recognition now exists of the demands of the women’s movement. These changes owe a certain amount to the impact of gender political theatre, which to that extent has been the victim of its own success. Of course, there remains a great deal to be achieved in the field of sexual liberation or gender politics, but the intensity of the need has been mitigated, and the push for a theatre in which gender identities are put in question therefore reduced. The current dynamic seems to involve a search for new issues around which an innovative theatre can build theatricality. There is both a strengthening and weakening of the role of gender politics in the theatre. There is no paradox here, for it seems that the entry of gender politics into mainstream theatre has occurred in parallel with a reduced perception in new theatrical writing of the relevance of those issues. With revivals of issue-based plays forming a significant part of the material being staged in commercial theatre, gender political plays have become a prominent part of the mainstream. However, so far as innovative writing is concerned, the politics may have melted into the matterof-fact, or into a more generalized existential angst. As a result, a new kind of resistant or counter-cultural response is now being sought. The nature of that response is not entirely clear, although academic initiatives may serve as signposts for the future. There are indications among recent academic papers of an endeavour to discover or foster the emergence of a new kind of sexually transgressive theatre. One strand of this consists of celebrating the effeminate man and masculine woman; another is the effort to identify a particular gay aesthetic, perhaps in the form of a reclamation of music-hall camp. But these developments have a limited compass,

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and may be doing no more than reiterating a theatre that has already been articulated. The celebration of gender transgression is unmistakably present in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, for example, a play whose revivals place it firmly in the mainstream. There would be little gained by its successors covering the same ground while retreating into an obscure academic redoubt. Similarly, the search for a gay male aesthetic that celebrates camp was conducted by Neil Bartlett in the early 1990s. Furthermore, there are clear dangers that the exploitation of this aesthetic could collapse into decadent self-indulgence, as demonstrated with Mark Ravenhill’s Mother Clap’s Molly House (2001). Whatever the strength of these academic indicators, there appears to have been a conscious attempt in Britain to draw away from gender political theatre. As indicated in Chapter 2, Sarah Kane specifically rejected gender politics as the basis for her plays. Perhaps more significantly, in her work of the later 1990s and 2000s, Caryl Churchill also moved away from any overt treatment of gender and sexuality issues, and into a particularly theatrical theatre. Her Blue Kettle (1997) ventures into an experimental area in which syntax is gradually destroyed, leaving intact a peculiarly theatrical experience. In Heart’s Desire, which formed a dyad with Blue Kettle, she also reprises the strategy Olwen Wymark used in The Inhabitants, of repeatedly stopping and restarting the dialogue. And in Far Away (2000) Churchill depicts a vivid but determinedly unexplained theatrical landscape, to considerable, if rather bewildering, effect. The violent background of war and betrayal in Far Away suggests that Churchill may have come to endorse Sarah Kane’s dictum that theatre should expose the generally violent nature of society rather than its more specific symptoms. Similarly, and as discussed in Chapter 3, Howard Barker’s 1998 Ursula: Fear of the Estuary moved into uncompromisingly theatrical terrain. These may be no more than straws in the wind, but Churchill and Barker both seem to have found new and distinctive voices for theatre, in which the dynamic between cultural ideology and the stage is less apparent than previously in their work . The dynamic here forms a particularly intriguing subject for speculation. Churchill and Barker appear to be concentrating their energies on a more abstract theatrical form than had been prominent in British theatre before. As with abstract painting, this genre is less likely to appeal to a mass audience than more realist/expressionist work – an aspect that no doubt appeals to Barker. It may be inevitable that today’s avant-garde is destined to become tomorrow’s mainstream. However, there is a remoteness in this form of abstract theatre which may make it difficult to re-establish a working dialectic with the larger canvas of British cultural life. If the above examples are reliable indicators, then perhaps post-war theatre is over. That is to say, there is a strong case for identifying British post-war theatre with the theatre of gender politics, a dramatic genre that seems to be on the decline. If this is correct, then the phenomenon I have described as post-war British drama has a beginning and an end. This is not to suggest that gender political theatre began abruptly in 1950 and ended equally abruptly in 2000. However, that fifty-year period can be isolated as one in which an extraordinary intensity in the dynamic between theatre and gender politics came into being and – apparently – began to die away. Prior to 1950, gay plays and other gender political plays probably existed, subject

Conclusion |   145

to the problems of definition addressed in earlier chapters, while after 2000 such plays were obviously still being written and produced. But in those that flourished between 1950 and 2000 other preoccupations were less prominent than gender politics, which does not seem to have been the case beforehand – or, as far as one can tell, afterwards. Although it would be entirely possible to produce a gender political reading of most plays written and staged during these periods, the amount of work involved in doing so, I contend, would be noticeably greater than with the bulk of the plays produced in the years under scrutiny. Taken as a coherent era, then, does a consistent developmental pattern emerge? The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that the patterning of the period is complex. Significant gender political plays by men feature heavily in the 1950s, whereas the weightiest grouping of gender political plays by women falls later than this, in the late 1970s and the 1980s. As discussed in Chapter 1, there are certain socio-political factors in the immediate post-war period that seem highly probable causes for the comparatively late development of gender political writing by women. But even aside from this, the patterning of gender political writing by men across the period seems to be substantially different from that of women. Also, in general, the wildly disproportionate numbers of plays written by men rather than by women tends to force a larger number of male-authored plays into the purview of the analysis here, as discussed in preceding chapters. Overall, significant gender political plays by men form a slightly more consistent backdrop to the sustained peak of plays by women that dominated the late 1970s and 1980s. As indicated in Chapter 3, the masculine anxiety exhibited by John Osborne in 1956 seems to have been still prevalent in the late 1990s plays of Patrick Marber. And the backwardness of men in the area of gender theorization does not rule out a gender political impact by this family of plays, even if it was largely reactionary. While sexuality continued to feature in plays by Mark Ravenhill or Phyllis Nagy, for example, into the late 1990s, it tended to be equated more with pessimism and destruction than with the creation of positive identities. Instances of this occur in the denouement of both Ravenhill’s Some Explicit Polaroids and Nagy’s Never Land, which depict the painful and destructive tension of establishing an honest identity – particularly a sexual identity – in a violent and nihilistic world. The other important shift that has taken place in British theatre in the 2000s is the rise to prominence of black writing, which has established itself as a particularly vital area. In black writing for theatre, 2003 was the same kind of annus mirabilis that 1958 was for women’s writing. Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Elmina’s Kitchen and Roy Williams’s Fall Out were both extraordinarily powerful plays first produced that year, while Williams’s Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads was revived in a full staging in 2003, following its 2002 debut on a temporary stage at the National Theatre. In 2003 Debbie Tucker Green’s Dirty Butterfly also had its first production, cementing the impact of black writing. With the RSC première of Williams’s Days of Significance in 2007, and a revival in 2008, the first decade of the twenty-first century looks set to see black writing as the centre of gravity for vital, essential, culturally-aware theatre. This is not to say that black writing is unconcerned with issues of gender and sexuality, but that there

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has been a shift of emphasis, and that the interplay between gender, sexuality and theatre was particularly intense in the period 1950–2000. How effective, then, has the theatre of sexual liberation been as a phenomenon? If the social impact of this theatre has been truly significant, can its absence continue to leave a fruitful gender political debate in its wake? Is there a rather frightening impact yet to take place of Kane and Ravenhill’s theatre of violence and alienation? For the present, at least, the impact of the gender political theatre is still being felt, as demonstrated by its continuing presence in the theatrical mainstream, and by the ability of television to take a questioning stance on gender politics. Whether this positive influence will be sustained in future, however, is much less certain. There is a possibility that a new stasis will come into being. If gender and sexual identities cease to form part of a permanent undecidability, there may, in due course, need to be a rebirth of gender political theatre. Whether that theatre will, in fact, appear remains to be seen.

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—————— (1991), Epistemology of the Closet, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. —————— (1994), Tendencies, London: Routledge. Segal, Lynne (1988), ‘Look Back in Anger: Men in the Fifties’, in Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford (eds.), Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity, London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 68–96. —————— (1990), Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men, London: Virago. —————— (1999), Why Feminism? Gender, Psychology, Politics, Cambridge: Polity. Seidman, Steven (ed.) (1996), Queer Theory/Sociology, Cambridge, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell. Shellard, Dominic (1999), British Theatre Since the War, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Sierz, Aleks (2001), In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, London: Faber. Sinfield, Alan (1999), Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Smith, Leslie (1989), Modern British Farce, Basingstoke: MacMillan. Stephenson, Heidi and Langridge, Natasha (1997), Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on Playwriting, London: Methuen. Summerfield, Penny (1989),Women Workers in the Second World War, London: Routledge. —————— (1998), Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Taylor, John Russell (ed.) (1968), John Osborne Look Back in Anger: a Casebook, London: MacMillan. Trussler, Simon (1969), John Osborne, London: Longmans Green and Co. for the British Council. Wandor, Michelene (1986), Carry on, Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul plc. —————— (1987), Look Back in Gender: Sexuality and the Family in Post-War British Drama, London: Methuen. Wansell, Geoffrey (1996), Terence Rattigan: a Biography, London: Fourth Estate (1st ed., 1995). Watson, Ian (1981), Conversations with Ayckbourn, London: MacDonald Futura. Weeks, Jeffrey (1985), Sexuality and its Discontents: Meaning, Myths and Modern Sexualities, London: Routledge. Wesker, Arnold (1994), As Much as I Dare, London: Century. —————— (1985), Distinctions, London: Jonathan Cape. Wittig, Monique (1992), The Straight Mind and Other Essays, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Worth, Katharine (1973), Revolutions in Modern English Drama, London: G Bell and Sons Ltd. Wyllie, Andrew, Caryl Churchill Cloud Nine in The Literary Encyclopaedia, http: //www.litencyc.com. Zeifman, Hersh (ed.) (1994), David Hare: a Casebook, New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc.

Index

Aeschylus 12, 19   The Oresteia 37 AIDS crisis 83, 96, 100, 103–6 Allen, Paul 116, 141n7 Almost Free Theatre, London 21, 94, 96 Amis, Kingsley: Lucky Jim 52 Anderson, Michael 54 Angry young men 24, 26 Aston, Elaine 9, 21, 84 Aston, Elaine and Reinelt, Janelle, eds.: The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Playwrights 22, 23, 24, 46 Ayckbourn, Alan 9, 25, 74, 100, 140 feminist farces 116–29 the Pendon insider 115–16 Absurd Person Singular 116, 117, 118, 120,   123, 127 Bedroom Farce 118 Chorus of Disapproval 140–41n2 Confusions 140n2 House/Garden 129 How the Other Half Loves 114, 116, 118–19,   120 Intimate Exchanges 123 Just Between Ourselves 116, 119, 120–22,   127, 137, 141n4 Man of the Moment 31, 117, 122, 124–8 Men on Women on Men 116 The Norman Conquests 128

Relatively Speaking (originally Meet My   Father) 116–19, 140n2 Sisterly Feelings 140n2 Ten Times Table 140n2 Things We Do for Love 129 Time and Time Again 140n2 Way Upstream 128, 140n2 Wildest Dreams 65, 116, 117, 120, 127–9 Woman in Mind 117, 120, 123–4, 126–9 Baker, Roger 94 Barber, John 132 Barker, Howard 25, 66, 144 The Castle 19, 54, 68–71, 72 Claw 66–7 The Love of a Good Man 67–8, 71 Ursula: Fear of the Estuary 71–2, 144 Bartlett, Neil 144 Baxter, Stanley 132 BBC2 104 Beaumont, Hugh ‘Binkie’ 108 Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot 53 Bell pub, Camden, London: 1984 raid 103 Benedict, David 64 Bennett, Susan 23–4 Bentley, Eric 113, 135 Bermel, Albert 114 Berney, K.A. 23, 24, 26, 31, 45 Bigsby, C.W.E. 114, 133

156   | sex on stage

Billington, Michael 31, 57, 61, 74, 83, 85, 109, 111n10, 115, 116, 121, 132 Black Panthers 98 Blake, William: The Vision of the Last Judgement 50n20 Blunt, Anthony 102 Bogarde, Dirk 111n7 Bogdanov, Michael 102 Boys in the Band, The (Crowley) 96, 103, 111n13 Braine, John: Room at the Top 52 Brater, Enoch 23, 26 Brenton, Howard: The Romans in Britain 102 Briers, Richard 116 Burgess, Guy 52, 101, 102 Butler, Judith 16 Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) 103–4 Carlson, Susan 41, 46 Carne, Rosalind 103 Case, Sue-Ellen 11, 38 Charney, Maurice 131, 135–6 Christie, Agatha 50n6 Church of England 94, 101 Churchill, Caryl 23, 25, 49, 144 Blue Heart 48 Blue Kettle 144 Cloud Nine 17, 25, 38–9, 40, 46–7, 96,   99–100, 125, 144 Far Away 144 Heart’s Desire 144 The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution 47 Lovesick 34–5, 50n12, 94 Schreber’s Nervous Illness 35–7 Top Girls 17, 30–31, 39, 50n10, 125 Vinegar Tom 22 Cleveland Street scandal (1889) 96 Coen, Harry 105 Cohn, Ruby 43 Conservative Party 101 Conway, Harold 80n5 Coward, Noel 108, 115, 138 Design for Living 108 Cregan, David: Three Men for Colverton 94

Criterion Theatre, London 100 Customs and Excise (UK) 103 Daily Express 87, 111n8 Daily Mail 130, 131 Daily Mirror 130, 131 Daily Telegraph 58, 130, 132 Daniels, Sarah: Neaptide 17, 99 Darlington, W.A. 130, 132 Darlow, Michael 87, 88, 111n4 Davis, Jill 84, 106 de Beauvoir, Simone 16 The Second Sex 15, 51 de Jongh, Nicholas 96 de Lauretis, Teresa 10 Delaney, Shelagh: A Taste of Honey 15, 21, 26–7, 50n9, 90–91, 109 Devine, George 54, 90 Dolan, Jill 84 Donmar Warehouse 108 Downie, Penny 71 Driver, Christopher 130 Duffy, Maureen: Rites 44–5 Duke of York’s Theatre, London 108 Dunn, Nell: Steaming 40, 43, 44, 45, 47 Edwardes, Jane 108 Edwards, Tim 53–4 Elsom, John 141n16 Elyot, Kevin Coming Clean 102–3 My Night With Reg 104, 108 Esslin, Martin 137–8 Euripides: The Bacchae 27, 44 Evening Standard Best Play of 1966 award 131, 141n20 Fairley, Michelle 47 Fierstein, Harvey: Torch Song Trilogy 100, 102 Financial Times 103 Foucault, Michel: History of Sexuality 37, 97 Fox, James 131 Freeman, Sandra: Supporting Roles 24, 106–7 Freud, Sigmund 31, 35, 36

Index |   157

Gale, Maggie B 23 Gamson, Joshua 11 Gay Liberation Front (GLF) 93–6, 111n11 Gay Sweatshop 22, 94, 96, 98, 99 Care and Control 99 Mr X 39, 94–6, 98, 100, 103, 107 Gay’s the Word book shop, London: 1984 raid 103 Gems, Pam 22, 23 Queen Christina 25, 26, 28–9, 38 German Social Democrats 97 Gielgud, John 87 Glover, David 8 Goodman, Lizbeth 23, 24, 26, 99 Granger, Derek 80n5 Green, Debbie Tucker: Dirty Butterfly 145 Green, Janet 91 Greig, Noel and Griffith, Drew: As Time Goes By 96–8 Guardian, The 96, 130 Guptara, Prabhu 34 Halliwell, Kenneth 130, 134 Hare, David 52, 66, 72 The Absence of War 61 Murmuring Judges 61 My Zinc Bed 61 Plenty 59–61 Racing Demon 61 The Secret Rapture 61 Skylight 61 Slag 61 Stuff Happens 61 Hart, Lynda 12 Hartley, Anthony 80n5 Harvey, Jonathan Beautiful Thing 107–8 Guiding Star 109 Hushabye Mountain 109 Hewison, Robert 131, 138 Hiley, Jim 16 Hirschfield, Magnus 97 Hirst, David 130–31 Hobson, Harold 80n5

Hodges, Andrew and Hutter, David: With Downcast Gays 94 Hodson, Gillian 87, 88, 111n4 Homden, Carol 59 House of Lords 131 Hunter, Richard 35, 36 Ibsen, Henrik: A Doll’s House 118 Innes, Christopher 90, 92, 115, 141n9 Institute for Sexual Science, Berlin 97 International Brigade 55 Jacobi, Derek 105 Jameson, Sue 106 Jeffery-Poulter, Stephen 103–4 Jellicoe, Anne 49 The Sport of My Mad Mother 15, 21, 26,   27–8 Jones, D.A.N. 132 Kalson, Albert 116, 141n4 Kane, Sarah 18, 24, 25, 144, 146 Blasted 48–9 Cleansed 48, 78, 109, 110 Kaplan, Cora 8 Kennedy, A.F. 27 Kierkegaard, Søren 113 Kirkpatrick, D.L. 34 Kirstenberg, Cindy 100 Klein, Debby: Coming Soon 106, 107 Komporaly, Justina 28 Krays, The (film) 79 Kritzer, Amelia Howe 36 Kureishi, Hanif 105 Kushner, Tony: Angels in America 104 Kwei-Armah, Kwame: Elmina’s Kitchen 145 Labour Party 14, 61 Lacan, Jacques 31 Lahr, John 130, 132, 136, 141n18, 141n19, 141n23 Langridge, Natasha 18, 24 Langton, Robert Gore 47 Leicester Haymarket 111n15

158   | sex on stage

Listener magazine 106, 132, 141n16 Littlewood, Joan 52 Livings, Henry 77 Loaded magazine 53–4 Local Government Act (1988): Section 28 101, 105 London Broadcasting 106 Long, Jennie 23 Lord Chamberlain’s Office 83, 86, 131 Luckham, Claire: Trafford Tanzi 44 MacAlpine, Ida 35, 36 McCormick, John 91 McCrindle, Jean 12–13 MacDonald, Sharman: When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout 39–40 MacLean, Donald 52 Magee, Bryan 132 Mamet, David: Oleanna 61 Mangan, Michael 12 Mansfield, Lord 131 Marber, Patrick 54, 145 Closer 63–5 Dealer’s Choice 17, 61–3, 64 Marcus, Frank 131 The Killing of Sister George 84, 93 Mercer, David 93–4 Mitchell, Julian: Another Country 97, 98, 101–2, 103 Monstrous Regiment 22 Morgan, Kenneth 110n3 Morley, Sheridan 132, 138 Mulvey, Laura 47, 50n16 My Beautiful Laundrette (film) 105 Nagy, Phyllis 25, 145 Never Land 47–8, 49, 145 Namaste, Ki 11 National Theatre, London 102, 145 Nightingale, Benedict 124, 129 O’Connor, Sean 88, 89 Orton, Joe 9, 79, 113, 114 Orton and outrage 129–33 sexual farces 133–9

Diaries 142n24 Entertaining Mr Sloane 53, 93, 130, 131,   133–6, 137, 138 Loot 93, 94, 130, 131–2, 133, 136–8, 139,   141n20 What the Butler Saw 35, 50n12, 93, 94, 114,  130–35, 138–40, 141n18, 141n19, 142n25 Osborne, John 25, 26, 27, 52, 53, 61, 64, 65, 72, 145 autobiography 58 Déjàvu 57, 80–81n6 The End of Me Old Cigar 17, 57 The Entertainer 56 The Hotel in Amsterdam 58 Inadmissible Evidence 54, 58 Look Back in Anger 13, 15, 51–8, 60, 65, 79,   90, 91, 111n4, 131 A Patriot for Me 54, 57, 92–3 Under Plain Cover 57 The World of Paul Slickey 80n6 Osment, Philip 94, 98 Pinter, Harold 51, 53, 54 Ashes to Ashes 76 The Birthday Party 53, 72–6, 78, 80, 133,   135 The Caretaker 77, 78 Celebration 77 The Dumb Waiter 77 The Homecoming 17, 73–5, 76–7, 80 The Lover 57, 75–6 Mountain Language 76 One for the Road 76 The Room 77 Plays and Players magazine 137 Plays By Women series (Methuen) 25 Pope, Alan 98 Posener, Jill: Any Woman Can 25, 94, 96, 98 Prichard, Rebecca 24 Proops, Marjorie 131 Pugh, Martin 13, 14 Punch magazine 138

Index |   159

Rabey, David Ian 67, 69, 71 Rattigan, Terence 50n9, 51, 115, 129 Cause Célèbre 90 Collected Plays 141n9 The Deep Blue Sea 54, 85, 90, 110n3 Man and Boy 90 Separate Tables 15, 55, 83, 85, 89, 90, 109 Table by the Window 89 Table Number Seven 85–9, 110–11n4 Variation on a Theme 26, 89–90, 91 Ravenhill, Mark 54, 77, 145, 146 Mother Clap’s Molly House 110, 144 Shopping and Fucking 48, 67, 83, 108–9,   110 Some Explicit Polaroids 109–10, 145 Rebellato, Dan 24, 54, 90 Reinelt, Janelle 24 Ridley, Philip The Fastest Clock in the Universe 77–80 Ghost from a Perfect Place 77–80 Mercury Fur 80, 110 Piranha Heights 77, 80 The Pitchfork Disney 77–9, 80 Vincent River 80 Rix, Brian 132 Roberts, Michèle 25 Rohm, Ernst 97 Roman Catholic Church 137 Rosenkavalier, Der (Richard Strauss) 57 Royal Court Theatre, London 24, 52, 54, 90, 100 Royal Holloway College, University of London 94 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) 71, 145 Rudkin, David 90 Afore Night Come 92 Sakellaridou, Elizabeth 75 Schreber, Daniel Paul 35–7 Memoirs of My Nervous Illness 35, 36 Scolnicov, Hanna 11–12, 26, 43–4, 49 Scotsman newspaper 111n9 Scott, Benedick: Lambs of God 85, 92 Section Eight 96 Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky 16, 18

Segal, Lynne 13, 14, 51, 52, 54 Seidman, Stephen 10 Seton, Frances 38 Sexual Offences Act (1967) 83, 92, 93, 111n6 Shellard, Dominic 108 Sher, Anthony 100, 102 Sherman, Martin: Bent 98, 100 Sierz, Aleks 48, 64, 80 Sillitoe, Alan: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 52 Sinfield, Alan 84, 105 Smith, Andrew 110 Smith, Neil 103 Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) 110 Society of West End Theatres’ Play of the Year (1982) 103 Spare Rib magazine 38 Stephenson, Heidi 18, 24 Stonewall Riots (1968) 98, 111n13 Storm, Lesley: Roar Like a Dove 24 Suez crisis (1956) 52, 59 Summerfield, Penny 13 Sunday Times 138 Taylor, John Russell: The Second Wave 131 Thatcher, Margaret, Baroness 21, 117 Time Out magazine 108 Trussler, Simon 56 Turing, Alan 105 Tynan, Kenneth 56, 90 Victim (film) 91–2, 93 Wandor, Michelene 15, 22, 24–7, 50n6, 80n1 Aid Thy Neighbour 30, 99 Wansell, Geoffrey 54, 85–8, 90 Watson, Ian 115, 119 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 23, 25 The Break of Day 26, 29–30, 46, 49 The Grace of Mary Traverse 42, 43 The Love of the Nightingale 21, 42, 43, 71 New Anatomies 23 Our Country’s Good 40–1, 42–3, 97 Three Birds Alighting on a Field 45–6

160   | sex on stage

Wesker, Arnold 12, 25, 52–3, 54, 72 Caritas 80n1 Chicken Soup with Barley 53, 65, 66 Chips With Everything 131 I’m Talking about Jerusalem 66 One Woman Plays 53 Roots 53, 65–6 Trilogy 17–18, 52, 53, 54, 65, 66 What’s On magazine 103 Whitehead, Ted 59, 88 Whitemore, Hugh: Breaking the Code 105–6 Whitman, Peter 98 Wilde, Oscar 138 Williams, Emlyn: Accolade 85 Williams, Roy Days of Significance 145 Fall Out 145 Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads 145 Williams, Tennessee: A Streetcar Named Desire 62–3

Wittig, Monique 16 Wolfenden Committee 15, 51, 52 Wolfenden Report (1957) 90, 111n6 Women’s Company, The 22 Women’s Festival of Theatre 21 Women’s Liberation Movement 21, 34, 98, 143 Women’s Theatre Group, The 23 Work to Role 25 World War II 51, 52, 55–6 Worsley, T.C. 80n5 Worth, Katharine 23, 129–30, 142n25 Wright, Allen 96 Wymark, Olwen 49, 77 Find Me 34 The Gymnasium 33, 44 The Inhabitants 33, 144 Lunchtime Concert 24, 32–3 Stay Where You Are 33–4 Zeifman, Hersh 59

Wyllie

Sex On Stage Gender and Sexuality in Post-War British Theatre By Andrew Wyllie

With its full treatment of this important aspect of British theatrical history and exploration of the intense relationship between theatre, gender politics and society, Sex on Stage will appeal to academics and students of drama, gender studies and cultural studies. Andrew Wyllie is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of the West of England.

ISBN 978-1-84150-203-8

00

9 781841 502038

intellect / www.intellectbooks.com

S E X ON S TAG E

In the post-war period, theatre provided an important critique of the way in which British society engaged with issues of the politics of gender and sexuality. Sex on Stage examines how British playwrights brought gender politics, including women’s sexuality and gay and lesbian issues, to the cutting edge of drama after World War II. Through a close reading of playwrights such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Terence Rattigan, alongside accounts of their socio-political context and public reception, Andrew Wyllie reveals that this more progressive age was also one in which masculine anxieties and a consequent reaction were discernible.