Aston Elaine. Feminist views on the English stage. Women playwrights, 1990-2000

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Feminism past, and future?

Johnson’s Shang-a-Lang focuses on a friendship between three

women – marking a gender shift from her early, debut play at the Bush,

Boys Mean Business (1989).

Like The Break of Day, Pauline, Jackie

and Lauren are three long-standing friends who get together to cele-

brate Pauline’s fortieth birthday party at a Bay City Rollers weekend

at Butlins in Minehead. As the names, setting and event suggest, un-

like Tess, Nina and April, these are working-class, not middle-class

women. They do not talk of a feminist past as a moment of empower-

ment in their lives, but their teenage lives ﬁgure retrospectively as the

best time of their lives. After some delightful ‘bad’ behaviour and sev-

eral quarrels, the play ends with the friendship between the women

dismissed by Pauline as not a friendship but a ‘habit’,

and with them

all going their separate ways: Jackie goes home to a husband to con-

fess to having had a one-night stand; Lauren takes off with members of

the Roller’s tribute band, and Pauline stays on at the Rollers weekend,

with her dreams of Woody.

The idea that women from the 1970shave

grown up with only their teenage pop idols to sustain their emotion-

ally and ﬁnancially impoverished lives, overall makes for a depressing

drama, despite some very funny observational moments (which I, and

several of the other fortysomething women in the matinee audience

of the touring production of Shang-a-Lang clearly enjoyed).

Johnson

since has found commercial success with the 1970s, going on to create

the Abba musical Mamma Mia.

What haunts Shang-a-Lang is feminism’s failure in the 1970sto

bring ‘adventure’ to the working-class lives of young girls like Pauline

and her ‘mates’. The failings of a 1970s feminism is the subject of April

de Angelis’s ironically titled, The Positive Hour. There are points of

continuity between the production of The Break of Day and The Pos-

itive Hour: both were directed by Stafford-Clark, and performed by

Out of Joint (Positive Hour was in a co-production with Hampstead

Theatre). As the titles to both plays suggest, each interrogates a mo-

ment of (feminist) hope, but missing from The Positive Hour is the

glimmer of optimism that heralds the possibility of change. ‘Because

I do not hope to know again/ The inﬁrm glory of the positive hour’ is

the quote from T.S. Eliot which prefaces the play,

for which read the

‘inﬁrm glory’ of feminism’s ‘positive hour’.

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feminist views on the english stage

There are connections between Wertenbaker and de Angelis as

writers – not in respect of style (de Angelis is far more eclectic), but

in terms of interests. Like Wertenbaker (although towards the end

rather than near the beginning of the 1980s) de Angelis had support

for her early work from women’s and new writing companies (Iron-

mistress was staged by the women’s company Resisters in 1988; other

plays were staged by the new writing companies Paines Plough and

Red Shift). Playhouse Creatures, premiered by The Sphinx Theatre

Company in 1993, like Our Country’s Good and After Darwin, works

through a theatre setting (looking at Restoration actresses and histori-

cising past and present inequalities for women working in the theatre.)

Where both women playwrights share materialist-feminist con-

cerns in their earlier work, their attitudes to feminism in the 1990s,

as reﬂected in their respective plays, are quite different. All of the

characters in The Positive Hour are in crisis and the forum used to

stage this is a women’s group counselling session – an echo of earlier

consciousness-raising sessions in the WLM. As in The Break of Day,

women come together to talk, but it is a much darker conversation and

much harder for the women to make connections. Participants in The

Positive Hour group include Paula (working-class, single mother with

violent boyfriend whose daughter, Victoria, has been placed with fos-

ter parents), Nicola (young single woman whose alcoholic bereaved

father refuses to let her have a life of her own) and Emma (middle-

class, divorced and dealing with the break-up of her marriage). These

are women having troubles, not adventures. Even Miranda, the group

leader and social worker is dysfunctional (she has recently had a ner-

vous breakdown and her own marriage breaks up during the course

of the play). Systems of self-help, deemed so important in the climate

of 1970s feminism, are now seen not only as insufﬁcient, but pos-

sibly even dangerous to lives in the 1990s, as attempts of the group,

under Miranda’s direction, to form a women’s only space to make ‘pos-

itive’ changes in their lives, fail to cope with dangerous realities. The

most poignant evocation of this comes in the closing moments of the

play as Miranda reveals that the real reason behind her breakdown

was ﬁnding a dead child: a child left to starve to death and whose

body was covered in ‘hundreds of tiny cuts’, that someone, Miranda

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Feminism past, and future?

explains, made not out of anger, but satisfaction (The Positive Hour,

p.84).

Feminism is represented in the play as having failed women in

its promise of a better life.

Having lived by the feminist creed, for ex-

ample, Emma ﬁnds herself getting increasingly angry with feminism

for the way in which her life has turned out: ‘Just do this and this and

all the good talented things inside you will come out. Abandon the life

of your mothers. Well, I did and now I’ve got nothing. No career, no

husband, no child. Nothing’s turned out the way it was supposed to’

(The Positive Hour,p.48). Disillusioned and angry with feminism she

begins to explore other (previously repressed) ways of living: experi-

menting with S&M, or earning money through commercial art work,

rather than living as a failed artist. Faced with Emma’s anger Miranda

is forced to admit that ‘perhaps things haven’t turned out the way we

wanted’, though she also recognises that that ‘[feminist] moment of

absolute certainty’ is what makes ‘you choose to go on acting on that

faith because you know it’s the best thing you’ve got’ (The Positive

Hour,p.48). De Angelis’s dark, bitter, though also funny, play involves

all of the women moving out of Miranda’s feminist orbit: the group

breaks up, as does Miranda’s marriage. The play ends on a note of un-

certainty, as suggested in De Angelis’s ﬁnal stage directions: ‘There is

a bright ﬂash of light, noise. Whether it is frightening, as in a thunder-

storm, or hopeful, as in a bright future, is ambiguous. Nicky stands

unsure.’ (The Positive Hour,p.86.)

That the two playwrights, whose theatre had earlier shared

points of materialist-feminist contact, should come to such very differ-

ent conclusions about feminism in the 1990s makes for an interesting

point of divergence. Both writers variously articulate, as do all of the

women playwrights in this study, the desire not to be constrained or

limited by the label of ‘woman writer’. Similarly, for those women,

like Wertenbaker and De Angelis, whose playwriting spans across

decades (rather than, for example, Kane’s exclusively 1990s canon),

the role of feminism necessarily changes in their work. De Angelis

describes feminism, for example, as an ‘umbrella’ that she needed to

get out from under, in order, as she explains it to ‘address the world

without those ideas, whilst somehow taking them with me’.

This

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point brings me back to what I earlier described as Wertenbaker’s crit-

ically misunderstood project in The Break of Day: of taking feminism

forward as a part of a bigger, epic political struggle.

Nevertheless, where I detect the root of the divergence is in the

writers’ attitudes towards the ‘energy’ that feminism may still have to

offer the world. Clearly, Wertenbaker views this more ‘positively’ than

De Angelis. The world may be a darker, more violent place, as so much

of women’s (and men’s) dramatic work from the 1990s suggests, and

feminism has not (could not) have delivered all the demands made of

it and by it as The Positive Hour dramatises. However, to understand,

rather than to blame a feminist past and to resist a ‘post-feminist’

present (and future) through an agency dependent upon cross-border

collaborations offers a way forward. Without this kind of feminist

collaboration, then the likelihood is, Wertenbaker’s theatre suggests,

that a future history will be an ‘adventure’ determined by gender, class

and race in which less able ‘sisters’ are unlikely to survive.

Adventures for the boys

After Darwin

In this part of this chapter, I return to where I began this study: with

representations of masculinity and the culture of the masculine in the

1990s. If feminism is to pursue a more enabling, less disabling, politics

as argued for in this and previous chapters, it must also counter accu-

sations that it is to ‘blame’ for the ‘crisis in masculinity’; must invite

a response to this ‘crisis’ that involves an understanding of how men’s

roles are changing in work and family, and must actively discourage

a colonialist legacy of white, masculinist ‘supremacy’. To pursue this

discussion, I turn to Wertenbaker’s After Darwin, staged the year fol-

lowing The Positive Hour at the Hampstead Theatre (1998).

Brieﬂy, and in stark contrast to Wertenbaker’s feminist belief

in the need for women to have adventures, After Darwin dramatises

the ‘boys-only’ 1831 adventure of Captain Robert FitzRoy, and the

clergyman–naturalist, Charles Darwin, on their voyage aboard The

Beagle to the Galapagos Islands. Unable to tolerate Darwin’s emer-

gent theory of evolution that unsettles spiritual belief in God the Cre-

ator, but also unable to persuade Darwin to desist from his views,

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friendship turns to enmity, and, ultimately, results in FitzRoy’s sui-

cide (staged as the opening scene to the play). Compositionally, After

Darwin emerges as a play about a play about the voyage, a device that

enables Wertenbaker to introduce a second set of contemporary the-

atre characters: the play’s director, Millie (a Turkish–Bulgarian dis-

sident); the writer, Lawrence (a black-American tutor of the ‘Meta-

physics of Cultural Genealogy’), and two actors: Tom (who is gay and

plays Darwin), and Ian (who is straight and divorced and plays Fitzroy).

After Darwin dramaturgically works to pursue the idea of the-

atre as a space in which ideas and self-knowledge might evolve. The

play’s two-act structure works through two different historical set-

tings: Act One is set on board The Beagle (at sea, where ideas are ﬂuid

and subject to change); Act Two is set in Darwin’s study (on land,

where new ideas are explored and shaped). These settings also work

metatheatrically as the ﬁctional spaces for Lawrence’s play. As a spec-

tator, I found that the metatheatricality of this jolted you backwards

and forwards between past and present, in a way that mirrored the

shifts in perception that the characters are forced to make about their

own lives and the lives of others.

In working through a dual timeframe, Wertenbaker establishes

a parallel between the breakdown of certainty in the nineteenth cen-

tury after the dawn of Darwin’s theory of evolution and the uncer-

tainty that colours the close of the twentieth century. Moreover, the

misappropriation of Darwin’s theory in the interests of supporting a

late twentieth-century view of competitive survival (ironically em-

bodied in the character of Darwin’s interpreter, Tom), come under

the dramatic microscope. The complex present/past relations between

Tom/Darwin and Ian/Fitzroy affords a dialectical staging of the selﬁsh

and selﬂess; of travelling light or being willing to take responsibility

for the luggage of the past,

all of which echoes Mihail’s plea in The

Break of Day for a way of re-visioning a contemporary world that has

‘no ideal but selﬁshness’.

Given the feminist debate that is dramatised in The Break of

Day and the foregrounding of the ‘three sisters’, I was initially sur-

prised in After Darwin by Wertenbaker’s male-dominated stage pic-

ture. On (post-production) reﬂection, however, I began to see certain

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kinds of connections between the two plays, though obviously from

very differently gendered perspectives. The historical framing of Af-

ter Darwin takes us back to a nineteenth-century (pre-First Women’s

Liberation Movement) moment of change when the ‘order of things’

shifts from a God-made to a man-made world. At no point, however,

does the ‘birth’ of man as self-creator/self-created involve ‘woman’.

As the only woman in the play, and as the director of Lawrence’s

play, Millie is temporally located in the ﬁctional present. The ‘past’

has no roles for women, except as middle-class domestic creatures

in English homes,

or as a colonised other in territories charted by

FitzRoy – ‘foreign’ countries, such as ‘Tierra del Fuego, where, so we

are told, women, once they have outlived their usefulness, get eaten

by their tribes in times of famine’ (After Darwin,p.134). In sum, as the

voyage of intellectual and geographical discovery was gendered, raced,

classed and nationed, Millie could have no part in it. As she states, ‘a

woman’s territory is already so insecure’ (After Darwin,p.132).

A question that the play poses, however, is whether Millie can

have a role in the future? As theatre director she has the task of shap-

ing the drama, events and ideas, but her role is constantly beset by the

difﬁculties of holding the production together, especially in the light

of Tom’s selﬁsh behaviour. In the ﬁnal scene Millie and Lawrence are

represented as tourists visiting Darwin’s house. Millie’s attention is

drawn to the ‘imaginary line of bookshelves’ (After Darwin,p.175),

and she browses the titles of man-made history, thought and creation,

that have brought her, as a displaced Eastern European woman, to

the point of extinction. Can that change? Fitzroy appeals to Lawrence

as the writer to bring him back and to make him a part of things: a

different cultural vision in the interests of progressive social change.

They all need to be included if there is to be a chance of a less selﬁsh,

more democratic future, one that allows Millie not just to survive but

also to ﬂourish.

Negotiating masculinities

Reviews of After Darwin, although mixed, were signiﬁcantly better

than those Wertenbaker received for The Break of Day.

It would

be oversimplistic and polemical of me to argue that this is an issue

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of straightforward prejudice: that a play about women is far less at-

tractive than a play that (appears to be) predominantly about men.

Moreover, to pursue this line of argument would be to elide an impor-

tant issue in both plays: the way in which re-ﬁguring masculinity is

represented as a part of Wertenbaker’s epic, feminist picture.

While Wertenbaker looked to feminism in the mid-1980sto

bring some energy into the world, it is clear, looking brieﬂy at the

representation of masculinity in Abel’s Sister, that men were not con-

tributing to this energisation. Neither Chris nor Howard are repre-

sented as particularly useful or inspiring to the idea of a better world.

Howard designs posters for alternative causes, but does not appear

to be active in or committed to any himself. Chris, the American, ex-

Vietnam ﬁghter and protestor, is physically and emotionally damaged.

Where there is energy in the play it comes, ultimately, from Sandra,

the least ‘abled’ ‘sister’, but the most capable of ‘seeing’ a more inclu-

sive way of imagining the world.

The dysfunctionality of Chris and Howard is one kind of rep-

resentation of the masculine in the 1980s. Three Birds Alighting,at

the beginning of the 1990s, showed another: the masculine ethos of a

materially driven culture. For masculinity to adopt a less selﬁsh, less

materialistic, creed in the 1990s then men have to be more reﬂective

than they have been about the lives they live. Traditionally, it has been

women who have found the space to reﬂect on their lives – most specif-

ically in the consciousness-raising, women-only groups in the 1970s,

as satirised in The Positive Hour.

When the women come together

in The Break of Day they are meeting to talk; the men are going to play

sport (tennis). Yet, as Act One illustrates, the men also have a need to

talk about and to reﬂect on their personal and professional lives.

(In

the end the game of tennis is never played.) Moreover, in After Darwin,

the complex paralleling of Ian and Tom, FitzRoy and Darwin centrally

stages the inability to communicate and to share the anxieties, feel-

ings and emotions that arise as history (in both centuries) shifts and

redeﬁnes systems of belief and social orders. Metatheatrically, as the

performers play actors preparing, through Stanislavski’s system of re-

hearsal, to play Darwin and FitzRoy, space is created for Tom and

Ian to reﬂect on the emotional states of their respective characters.

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Given the doubling of roles, this involves them talking about their

own lives, as well as the lives of their characters. As a device, the dual

role play also suggests the idea of a more ﬂuid concept of subjectivity:

one which might allow for the possibility of change.

In The Break of Day, Tess’s gardener, Paul, is someone who

has made a signiﬁcant change of lifestyle. Paul recollects the 1980sas

a materialistically driven decade, and, in consequence, in the 1990s

explains that he has turned his back on money, family, luxury home.

He earns a wage as a gardener, and while he knows he could make lots

of money as a landscape gardener, chooses not to go down that route in

order not to get caught up again in the ethos of greed. Paul’s recantation

of his 1980s lifestyle is not, however, expressed as a consequence of

feminism: he did not lose his job and status because of women, his

change in lifestyle is a choice he makes. This is in contradistinction

to the widely held belief in the 1990s of the feminist empowerment

of women necessitating the dispossession of men.

Wertenbaker, by contrast, shows that the issue is not one of men

falling victim to women’s success, but of the difﬁculty men experi-

ence in negotiating their roles and lives in relation to shifting social

structures. In The Break of Day it is not that the women are repre-

sented as simply doing ‘better’ than the men and at their expense, but

that political, social and economic change conditions lives, employ-

ment prospects or job satisfaction, for which feminism alone cannot

be held responsible, but for which it is frequently used as a scapegoat.

As Imelda Whelehan in Overloaded argues:

The logic of the backlash [against feminism] is maintained by

identifying social ills and foisting them onto the shoulders of

bad old feminists. But if we attempt to see past this, what we

assuredly ﬁnd is a highly technologised world and a shifting

economy with which people in their ordinary lives,

expectations and attitudes have trouble keeping up.

None of the men in The Break of Day are represented as victims of

women’s success. Rather, each has to give consideration to work in

what is represented as a volatile economy: where theatre is poorly

funded (Robert), hospitals are closing (Jamie) and contracts are lost

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(Hugh). Each, to borrow the argument from After Darwin, has to adapt

to survive. Moreover, just as the capitalist idea of man as ‘breadwin-

ner’, the main wage earner, is no longer as stable as it once was, then

neither, given the new reproductive technology, is patriarchy. A low

sperm count also has implications for paternity: a ‘father’ may no

longer be the biological father of ‘his’ child.

Both The Break of Day and After Darwin attempt to shift us out

of the familiar patterns of biological thinking and parenting, towards

the possibility of new, cross-border collaborations: to help the child

from Eastern Europe in The Break of Day, and the young woman,

Millie, in After Darwin. For this to happen, the impulse to stay inside

our own colonialist histories, to reproduce the ‘selfsame’, has to be

resisted.

Theatre: a space to imagine

While the shift towards Europe and questions of citizenship in Werten-

baker’s theatre in the 1990s may be due in part to what Billington and

others identify as her ‘outsider’ status, it is also a response, I would

argue, to social and political changes in Europe. In a roundtable discus-

sion broadcast on radio in December 1989, Timberlake Wertenbaker

and other theatre guests looked back on the 1980s and forward to the

1990s.

Looking back, the changes in Europe, particularly the coming

down of the Berlin Wall, were discussed as radically altering our per-

ception of the world. Looking to the future, Wertenbaker forecast the

writers in the West as the new dissidents of a theatre that while cul-

turally vital, struggles to survive. As testimony to that view, we can

contrast the energy, hope and sense of community that the convicts,

exiled from Britain to Australia, experience through the opportunity

offered to them of putting on a play in Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s

Good (1988), with the way in which the theatre is represented in The

Break of Day and After Darwin as still hopeful, but barely surviving.

As a feminist ‘dissident’ of the 1990s in a theatre struggling to

survive, Wertenbaker’s advocacy of theatre as one of the few arenas left

to us for shared discussion and public debate is undaunted. At the close

of The Break of Day as the characters group together in the dressing-

room of the theatre, Tess says ‘We only want to try and understand

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what’s happened’, and, in response, Robert delivers the last line of

the play: ‘you could even say that’s hopeful’ (The Break of Day,p.98).

Trying to ‘understand what’s happened’ is, therefore, metatheatrically

situated: theatre, Wertenbaker suggests, is a space that allows us to

understand, and (hopefully) to know more about ourselves (not just

personally, but socially, culturally, politically). In After Darwin, the

rehearsal room is represented not as a space for the ﬁxing and plotting

of dramatic events, but for different ways of creating characters, play-

ing scenes and exploring different emotional states.

Ideas need to be

embodied in feelings and emotions so as to be shared and understood

by others. In brief, while vulnerable (to cinema and to new technolo-

gies) theatre, Wertenbaker argues, is necessary and vital to culture. ‘It

is quite possible – that human beings have come to the end of their

evolution . . . but...wewillnevercometotheendofourimagina-

tion’ claims the writer, Lawrence, in After Darwin (p.160). Imagining

is also a form of evolving. ‘The idea of cultural evolution, separated

from biological evolution, is an interesting one’, argues Wertenbaker:

Ideas compete just as genes do. Ideas need to propagate to

survive. If they do not ﬁnd a suitable host and a friendly

environment they perish. But they also need to adapt to the

environment. Quite a good metaphor for feminism?

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