Women and Theatre - April de Angelis

The University of Birmingham MA in Playwriting Lecture

I thought I'd just start off by reading two speeches from John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger". Bearing in mind the issues around female sexuality. This is Jimmy at the end of Act 1 taking to Alison his wife. "Oh my dear wife, you have so much to learn. I only hope you learn it one day. If only something - something would happen to you, and wake you out of your beauty sleep! If you could have a child, and it would die. Let it grow, let a recognisable human face emerge from that little mass of india rubber and wrinkles. Please - if only I could watch you face that. I wonder if you might even become a recognisable human being yourself. But I doubt it."

"Do you know I have never recognised the great pleasure of lovemaking when I didn't desire it myself. Oh, it's not that she hasn't her own kind of passion. She has the passion of a python. She just devours me whole every time, as if I were some over-large rabbit. That's me. That bulge around her navel - if you're wondering what it is - it's me. Me buried alive down there, and going mad, smothered in that peaceful looking coil. Not a sound, not a flicker from her - she doesn't even rumble a little. You'd think that this indigestible mess would stir up some kind of tremor in those distended, overfed tripes - but not her! She'll go on sleeping and devouring until there's nothing of left of me." And then Alison, his wife, at the end of the play when you kind of have an answer to that speech goes on to say, "It doesn't matter! I was wrong, I was wrong! I don't want to be neutral, I don't want to be a saint. I want to be a lost cause. I want to be corrupt and futile! Don't you understand? It's gone! It's gone! That - that helpless human being inside my body. I thought it was so safe, and secure in there. Nothing could take it from me. It was mine, my responsibility. ut it's lost. All I wanted was to die. I never knew what it was like. I didn't know it could be like that! I was in pain, and all I could think of was you, and what I'd lost. I thought: if only - if only he could see me now, so stupid, and ugly and ridiculous. This is what he's been longing for me to feel. This is what he wants to splash about in! I'm in the fire, and I'm burning, and all I want is to die! It's cost him his child and any others I might have had! But what does it matter - this is what he wanted from me! Don't you see! I'm in the mud at last! I'm grovelling! I'm crawling! Oh God." So I wanted to place these two side by side.

I'm not attacking "Look Back in Anger", I think it is an incredible play but I thought it would be quite interesting to bear in mind how it says what so often rumbles underneath; it says the unsaid, the unsayable. I thought I'd talk a little bit on the back of that about putting into context women in plays in theatre; originally in medieval times women were banned from theatre because of their sex; sexuality. They were seen as dangerous; to actually see women on stage would arouse uncontrollable lusts and desires in the men watching so that the church - who were opposed to theatre and found it very threatening - prohibited women from appearing on stage. And I think that's really interesting; that you could be infected by a woman's desire. That somehow it was chaotic - "the devil's gateway", and all those kind of terms that we've got. Somehow a women's desire was uncontrollable and had to be restricted. And you get to the 17th century and - in my brief thumb sketch of theatre history - the first time you get women on stage.

The story goes that one day Charles II was waiting for a play to go on and he asked "why is this play taking so long?" and he was told "the Queen is shaving", because men played all the parts, and that prompted him to say "let's have women on stage". That's the colloquial story. So in the new secular age, women took to the stage - Pepys mentions this - it was their faces and figures and especially their legs and breasts that were really entrancing and focused in upon. Men used to pay to go into their changing room to watch the actresses undress. So the actress's body and sexuality were there to be consumed and enjoyed by an audience of men and women. There was a great fashion for rape scenes in restoration drama. Often you wouldn't actually see the rape scenes but you would see the woman afterwards recovering with her top off and all the rest of it. That gave a great opportunity for people to see a women's body and enjoy it. It is possible to look at how women's sexuality was used in the restoration theatre and to say that the actual role of the audience was very voyeuristic and it's through the role of the voyeur that formed the function in containing desire and so the audience had a very strong role that contained the kind of sexuality that was on stage and therefore owned it and controlled it. Also it is worth pointing out that the actresses often had keepers which were rich men in the audience. It was another way in which their sexuality was contained. They were paid - but not very well - and in order to be able to afford your costume and have a good part you'd have to make sure that you had someone in the audience who was going to pay for it, who of course was going to be your rich lover.

And so there are all these ways in which women's sexuality was harnessed. And also prostitution thrived in theatres because when you came out having seen a show, your senses were alive; there's a crowd of people who have been titillated and there were prostitutes, traditionally through the history of theatre - to pick up. I don't think it's like that now at the Birmingham Rep.

So coming on to the present day, the last twenty years and women writing for the theatre. I've picked out, at random, four great plays of the eighties or the most well known plays written by women. I came up with "Top Girls", "Masterpieces", "My Mother Said I Never Should" and "Low Level Panic". They're pretty representative, they're classics in a way of feminist theatre of the eighties. In a sense sexuality is absolutely integral to these plays. Very obviously in "Low Level Panic", it's about eroticism and pornography, and in "Masterpieces" that's about pornography from a woman's point of view. In "My Mother Said I Never Should" and "Top Girls" are focussing on women's reproduction in that sense of sexuality and male and female relationships. In a way feminist writing of the eighties has re-invented a place for women's sexuality on stage and I think they've done that very strongly under the umbrella of feminist ideals in which women's writing is very strongly linked to the women's movement.

Also Alison has become an almost anti-heroine. It's always quoted how she is a demon; how she has been demonised, how absolutely atrocious the portrayal of women has been in the past. She's almost like a vampire.

If that's what women were doing in the eighties, what about the nineties?

When I set out to do a piece of work, I have this moment of panic of how are you going to pick your way through this infinite amount of experience and information around you and create an argument or a theory, to take something that's unfluid and chaotic - like sexuality - and make it something coherent and understandable, interpretable and put an ideology to it -how are you going to do that?

That moment contains some of the terror that I'm not going to be able to organise the world into an acceptable world view and that means for me - as a women writer coming out of the eighties - a view in which women are positively presented of if not then they are placed in a political context where their bad behaviour is understood correctly. For example if you look at a play like "Top Girls" you know that Marlene is the bad sister, she exploits other women because she has had a tough upbringing. She comes from an underprivileged class and has had to claw her way up to make it and she exploits her sister who looks after Marlene's child and so while Marlene makes it to the top, she's stuck at home and exploited. And we come away from that play thinking, it's dreadful that women have few choices and we understand why Marlene has done that - we don't feel that she's right but we understand, it's in an accepted political context to us. I'm talking about me as a feminist and those used to feminist ideas and critiques and accepts them as good. But what that play's actually done is take a desire to be top and it places it in a context that contains it and makes it acceptable and that context is feminism.

I'm going to go back to that moment of panic, will I be able to organise the stuff of life into something acceptable , a correct play and always have this little worry; what would happen if I wrote a bad play - not a bad play in the sense of it being boring to watch or something - but a play with a woman consumed by a horrible sexual jealousy what if I wrote that character and didn't actually put her in a correct political context I didn't take the sting out of the desire. Oh, my god what would happen to me? It would be terrible. I'd feel like a traitor - this is my thinking - because there are people out there - men - who are waiting to jump on such characterisations and say "it's not us who are saying women are weak, bad or stupid. It's her. If she's saying it, it must be true and if it's true we were right all along to say women have no rights in society, should get back to the kitchen, have children, etc" and I would have unwittingly become a pitiful bedfellow with the monsters that want to put women back into the ice age. That's a fear of writing an incorrect, women character.

I began to write, finally, and behind the revolution in women's writing. It had put a huge new energy onto the stage; they were writing of things that had been hidden, marginalised and were able to deal in sexuality. Not in the sense of how John Osborne perhaps looked at it in terms of Alison but they were able to write it in our own framework and in our point of view. I think the premise behind all those plays was that people - men- who exploit other people - women - are wrong and people - women - who collude in it are also wrong but understandably so. I think that is the accepted wisdom of these plays and there were many, many subjects to try that premise out on. It was a wonderful revolutionary premise that released great work. Then I think what started to happen - in my experience - people switched their focus into the form of the play. There was a lot of debate in the late eighties of the actual structure of plays. The debate went something like "didn't the male three -act well made play misrepresent female sexuality and female experience and didn't the well-made three act play represent male sexuality: it all builds up to one big bang and its over. Women's sexuality is different. Shouldn't women be writing plays with a sort of shape that corresponds to women's sexuality. The sort of play with lots of peaky bits. You could still have the old premise of men exploiting women but you could inject new life into that old premise by having a different sort of shaped play. Now I think that was a crisis of limitation in a way. What happened was the old premise started to become repetitive or it started to become reductive or tired; we switched to form in a kind of an anxiety about the fact that we became limited within this premise and so we switched to form to try and allow ourselves to be feminists and writers in a fresh way or to allow ourselves to be the writers we had been in the past ten years.

Why can't we write the sort of plays that were being written in the eighties now? Why wouldn't we feel as happy with that sort of play now? Why doesn't the cutting edge of new work work any more? Why are those plays great but of the past. - This is all what I think, it isn't necessarily true - thinking about it, it seems to me that the general feeling about the present time is that big ideas have died. All the ideas that are based on Marxism and all the big humanist philosophies, encompassing philosophies that provided an answer for every part of your life, social, political, economical and the rest of it have failed us. The failure of communism - as well as capitalism. I think all that had a really being effect on our emotional space. The kind of feminism I grew up with in the 80's and when I was a student I really embraced completely and utterly - it might have been only me that did this, I'm sure there were other people who had great scepticism - but I didn't, I totally and utterly embraced it, I just feel that it demands a kind of faith - the fundamentalist sort of faith - I feel that you're either going to be a fundamentalist - and you can see that in the world now - or there's a great sense of doubt about "an idea" that encompasses everything. So that gets back to the confusion of that moment where we make sense of everything. I, like a lot of women writers in the '80's, had a sense of identity because we could re-construct the world in terms of feminism that was what made sense of the world to us. And when you piece the world together under a big idea like that, you make connections through it, you understand the world, you pledge yourself in it and when you pledge yourself you have an identity and you have a voice, and if you don't have a voice you can't write or I think it's very hard to write.

So what I'm saying in this talk is that there's a huge problem for writers in the nineties, especially women writers, who want to write about or come through a notion of feminism, I think that we have to independently find an identity outside of feminism that allows you to write. I think that for a lot of women what feminism was wasn't just a big idea. I personally rejected my own lover and got another one which was feminism; that was my new lover that was going to give me everything and feed me in every way. So it's quite a difficult thing to do. The problem with leaving an idea behind or accepting that perhaps the world is perhaps more fragmented, confused, less able to be made cohesive through an idea is that if you don't start out with a strong notion of what you want to say, what if you end up with something monstrous? That I suppose is the tension that exists for me and I can only really talk about me I suppose, but having said that I think that's the most incredibly creative problem. I think it's fabulous, I think problems like that when you think about them can be incredibly creative.

Just a couple of questions that come up for me. Stephen Daldry at the Royal Court said that what's happening now is that writers are writing from a much more personal and idiosyncratic view and that the kind of old, big political play is dead. It's up to people to decide whether they think that's true and whether they think they should mourn that old certainty, that old wider view, the big political play. The other question is if you abandon it, the worry is that the big ideas came out of humanism, they came out of an idea that progress was possible and that humanity was good. I think that has implications for plot. Progress through a play you're constructing. Something like "Angels in America" and "Butterfly Kiss" are much more fragmented. They focus on an intense personal experience and they don't really follow a notion of real progress as plays did in the past. That's my worry that if you abandon the big idea do you then abandon the idea of humanism, which is progress is possible, change is possible, people are basically good. Do you abandon a strictly feminist perspective when women aren't even liberated?