Aston Elaine. Feminist views on the English stage. Women playwrights, 1990-2000
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Notes to pages 15–19
50 Vita & Virginia,p.32.
51 Innes, Modern British Drama,p.449.
52 Subsequently, Andrzej Wajda based his film Danton on her 600-page
manuscript, and Gems also re-shaped it into a play for the RSC,
The Danton Affair (1986), before turning to her fascination with
the writer herself in The Snow Palace. For further details see Pam
Gems, introduction, The Snow Palace (London: Oberon Books, 1998),
pp.7–9.
53 Stated in interview, Writers Revealed, radio broadcast, BBC Radio 4,
20 June 1991.
54 Edgar, ed., State of Play,p.60. Prichard gives Kane’s Blasted and
Nagy’s The Sphinx as examples.
55 Michael Billington, Guardian, 27 December 1995,p.6. Billington
goes on, however, to use this observation to refute the idea that
women are being marginalised by the ‘boys’ plays’, a point of view
that, given my own observations and comments in this chapter, I
have to disagree with.
56 Cixous, ‘Excerpts from the Oxford Amnesty Lecture’, reproduced in
Black Sail/White Sail, programme, 1994.
57 H
´
el
`
ene Cixous, ‘Black Sail/White Sail’, trans. Donald Watson, un-
published manuscript from The Sphinx Theatre, p.78.
58 Faludi, Backlash,p.498.
2 telling feminist tales: caryl churchill
1 Caryl Churchill, interview in Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig,
eds., Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (New
York: Beech Tree Books, 1987), pp.75–84,p.78.
2 Martin Crimp, quoted in Caroline Egan, ‘The Playwright’s Play-
wright’, Guardian, 21 September 1998,p.13.
3 Sarah Daniels, interview, in Heidi Stephenson and Natasha
Langridge, eds., Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on Playwrit-
ing (London: Methuen, 1997), pp.1–8,p.6.
4 Churchill, quoted in Judith Thurman, ‘The Playwright Who Makes
You Laugh about Orgasm, Racism, Class Struggle, Homophobia,
Woman-Hating, the British Empire, and the Irrepressible Strangeness
of the Human Heart’, Ms.,May1982,pp.51–7,p.54.
179
Notes to pages 20–5
5 Mark Ravenhill, Guardian, 9 April 1997,p.14.
6 Michael Billington, Guardian, 3 September 1997,p.14.
7 Quoted in Egan, ‘The Playwright’s Playwright’, p.13.
8 See, for example, Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire.
9 See her interview in Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koeing, eds., Inter-
views with Contemporary Women Playwrights,p.78.
10 Clare Bayley, What’s On, reproduced in Theatre Record, 9–22 April
1991,p.460. See also my commentary on Sarah Daniels’s opening
scene to Beside Herself, Chapter 3,p.41.
11 Robert Cushman, Observer, reproduced in Theatre Record, 26
August–8 September 1982,p.469.
12 Mark Ravenhill, in David Edgar, ed., State of Play: Playwrights on
Playwriting (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p.50.
13 Caryl Churchill, Top Girls,inPlays Two (London: Methuen, 1990),
p.92.
14 The time of the play’s original production was also the time of the
Greenham Common peace protest by women, which opposed the
militarism of the base at which they camped out with a vigil by
women for peace. For a reading of Kit and Angie’s shelter scene as
evocative of the Greenham Camp, see Harry Lane, ‘Secrets as Strate-
gies for Protection and Oppression in Top Girls’, in Sheila Rabil-
lard, ed., Essays on Caryl Churchill: Contemporary Representations
(Blizzard: Winnipeg, 1998), pp.60–8.
15 For further details see Aston, Caryl Churchill (Plymouth: Northcote,
2nd edition 2001), pp.75–9.
16 James Christopher, Time Out, reproduced in Theatre Record, 9–22
April 1991,p.460.
17 Ros Asquith, City Limits, reproduced in Theatre Record, ibid.
18 Ravenhill, Guardian, 9 April 1997,p.14.
19 Joni Lovenduski and Vicky Randall, Contemporary Feminist Poli-
tics: Women and Power in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1993), p.41.
20 Natasha Walter, The New Feminism (London: Virago, 1999), p.174.
21 See Lesley Manville’s comments, quoted in Lizbeth Goodman in
‘Overlapping Dialogue in Overlapping Media: Behind the Scenes of
Top Girls’, in Rabillard, ed., Essays on Caryl Churchill,pp.77–8.
180
Notes to pages 25–8
22 Ian Dodd, Tribune, reproduced in Theatre Record, 9–22 April 1991,
p.462.
23 Like so many of Churchill’s plays, Top Girls has been performed
and published in slightly different arrangements: originally written
as three acts but performed as two. Churchill has stated her pref-
erence for the three-act version: ‘Act One, the dinner; Act Two,
Angie’s story; Act Three, the year before’, Top Girls, production note,
in Churchill, Plays Two,p.54. This arrangement highlights Angie’s
story; brings her disadvantaged position more clearly into view.
24 Churchill signals the possibility of Angie as a disturbing, disruptive
presence through the belief that Angie has in her possession super-
natural powers, in her dabbling in black magic, and her licking of
Kit’s menstrual blood. In other Churchill plays, belief in supernatu-
ral powers also accompanies oppressed, damaged and violent figures.
The Gestus for this in Top Girls is the moment in which Angie puts
on the dress that Marlene gave her, a dress that is now too small for
her, as she threatens to kill her mother. The misfit, adult–child body
erupts into violence.
25 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and
their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995), p.210.
26 I am thinking of the current Harry Potter vogue (an orphaned boy
with special magic powers), and the cinematic interpretation of
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings that has a very boyish-looking hob-
bit on a quest to save the world from total destruction. That said,
the 1990s also produced heroines on a mission to save the world, as
exemplified in American television series such as Buffy the Vampire
Slayer and Charmed, series that portray young women in constant
battle with the forces of evil (though significantly, never managing
completely to defeat them).
27 This concern also surfaces in other plays, most notably in her drama-
tisation of the Fenland community of women in Fen, 1983.
28 Caryl Churchill, The Skriker in Plays Three (London: Nick Hern
Books, 1998), p.243.
29 Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis (London: Routledge, 1997), p.93.
30 The temptation is always there, however, to ‘read’ from or to see
‘out’ from the ‘real’: to follow Churchill’s narrative of the two
181
Notes to pages 28–30
working-class girls. I know that I have done this myself. Print cul-
ture, the publication of Churchill’s words, as opposed to the move-
ment text of the spirit world for which we only have stage directions,
tends to pull us in that direction. The response of the critics shows
that it is easier to pick out the dramatic rather than the physical for
analysis and commentary.
31 Benedict Nightingale, The Times, reproduced in Theatre Record,
15–28 January 1994,p.93.
32 That said, it has typically been the case that Churchill’s more stylis-
tically experimental work – A Mouthful of Birds or Lives of the
Great Poisoners, for example – has been critically less well received.
Without wishing to make a one-sided case for Churchill’s theatre,
what this does point to is the unease that reviewers experience (and
sometimes confess to) when faced with reviewing cross-disciplinary
forms that tax their more conventional, dramatic backgrounds and
training.
33 Jann Parry, Observer, reproduced in Theatre Record, 15–28 January
1994,p.94.
34 Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, reproduced in Theatre Record,
15–28 January 1994,p.96.
35 See Irving Wardle, Independent on Sunday, reproduced in Theatre
Record, 15–28 January 1994,p.95.
36 Janelle Reinelt, ‘Caryl Churchill and the Politics of Style’, in Elaine
Aston and Janelle Reinelt, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Mod-
ern British Women Playwrights (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), pp.174–93,p.188.
37 Alice Rayner, ‘All Her Children: Caryl Churchill’s Furious Ghosts’
in Rabillard, ed., Essays on Caryl Churchill,pp.206–24,p.216.
38 See Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine,inPlays One (London: Methuen,
1985), p.308.
39 Rayner’s analysis of Cloud Nine brought back my own memory of
trying to play this scene in a late 1980s college production and in
a social climate quite different to that of the play’s first staging in
1979. The performers, like the characters in the scene, found it hard
to take the ritual seriously, and, after several attempts to find a way
of making the scene do serious work in the production, we actually
182
Notes to pages 30–5
agreed to cut it. The difficulty then was twofold: the danger of the
essentialist risks arising from the idea of Isis and a ‘maternal line’,
and the disjunction between the desire for a different, less oppressive
organisation of sexuality and the repressive climate of the 1980s. If
it was impossible to conjure a goddess that might offer an alternative
to the Christian and patriarchal idea of the Mother at the close of
the 1970s, the 1980s certainly was not, we felt, a moment in which
she had a greater chance of putting in an appearance.
40 Churchill also talked about the Skriker’s damaged language in terms
of a schizophrenic breakdown of language; a language that s/he is not
entirely in control of (Interview, Late Theatre,BBC2, January 1994).
41 E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Pop-
ular Culture and Melodrama (London: Routledge, 1992), p.51.
42 Programme notes to the production of The Skriker offered explana-
tions of the spirit figures, including for example, Jenny Greenteeth ‘A
water fairy who drowns children’; Nellie Longarms, ‘A water spirit
who drags children into ponds’, or Black Annis ‘A hag with a blue
face and only one eye, she devours lambs and young children’.
43 Mother–child separation is a recurrent feature in Churchill’s work.
A woman, starving and unable to feed her baby, leaves her child in a
church in Light Shining. Marion in Owners tries to ‘own’ Lisa’s baby
for her husband, Clegg. Val separates (temporarily) from her children
in Fen. See also later discussion on Blue Heart.
44 Marina Warner. From the Beast to the Blonde, p.xv.
45 ‘The Mother of Invention’, title of a review of Blue Heart by Benedict
Nightingale, The Times, 25 September 1997,p.36.
46 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (London: Victor Gollancz,
1963), p.32.
47 This was due to having a break from playwriting. For details see
Churchill’s interview with David Benedict, Arts section, Indepen-
dent, 19 April 1997,p.4.
48 Caryl Churchill, Blue Heart (London: Nick Hern Books, 1997), p.5.
49 The Times, 25 September 1997,p.36.
50 Paul Taylor, Features section, Independent, 25 September 1997,p.4.
51 John Peter, Culture section, The Sunday Times, 31 August 1997,
p.14.
183
Notes to pages 36–9
52 Having become accustomed over the years to Churchill’s technique
of adult-child playing, in the production of Far Away I was incredibly
struck by Churchill’s introduction of a young girl to play Joan and
by her use of children in the parade-of-the-prisoners scene.
53 Churchill, Far Away (London: Nick Hern Books, 2000), p.38.
3 saying no to daddy
1 Caryl Churchill, Far Away (London: Nick Hern Books, 2000),
p.14.
2 Sarah Daniels, Head-Rot Holiday,inPlays: Two (London: Methuen,
1994), p.244.
3 Subsequent to a 1981 conference organised by the Women Against
Violence Against Women network, women in Britain set up the or-
ganisation Incest Survivors, to arrange self-help groups around the
country. See Joni Lovenduski and Vicky Randall, eds., Contempo-
rary Feminist Politics: Women and Power in Britain (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993)p.260.
4 Louise Armstrong, Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics: What Hap-
pened when Women Said Incest [1994], first British edition (London:
Women’s Press, 1996), p.65.
5 See Rocking the Cradle, Chapter 7: ‘The Great Incest Massacre II’.
6 For an overview, see Gerrilyn Smith’s ‘Foreword’ to the British edi-
tion (1996)ofRocking the Cradle.
7 Presenter Esther Rantzen, working with the results of a survey into
abuse conducted by her consumer watchdog team from the popular
That’s Life series, instigated the programme. The survey revealed
that ‘the majority of those who responded were women and girls who
had been victims of sexual abuse’ (Jean La Fontaine, Child Sexual
Abuse, Oxford: Polity Press and Basil Blackwell, 1990,p.3).
8 Jean La Fontaine, Child Sexual Abuse,pp.10–11.
9 Beatrix Campbell, Unofficial Secrets: Child Sexual Abuse: The
Cleveland Case (London: Virago, 1988, fully revised, 1997),
p.63.
10 See Campbell’s poignant commentary on ‘the ghosts of dead chil-
dren’ tortured and killed by fathers in the 1980s, Unofficial Secrets,
p.121.
184
Notes to pages 39–42
11 Sarah Daniels, interview, in Heidi Stephenson and Natasha
Langridge, eds., Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on Playwrit-
ing (London: Methuen, 1997), p.2.
12 Sarah Daniels, Ripen Our Darkness and The Devil’s Gateway
(London: Methuen, 1986), p.33.
13 Daniels also has pursued a career in radio and television drama, in-
cluding the children’s series, Grange Hill. Her commitment to young
audiences is one that she shares with many of the women drama-
tists featured in this volume. Taking Breath, a play for young people
about environmental protest, is published in the Faber collection,
New Connections 99: New Plays for Young People (1999).
14 Stephenson and Langridge, Rage,p.3.
15 All three plays are published in Daniels, Plays: Two (London:
Methuen, 1994).
16 Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to
Political Terror (London: Pandora, 1992), p.7.
17 Ibid., p.110.
18 In My Father’s House: A Memoir of Incest and of Healing (London:
Virago, 1989), Sylvia Fraser explains how she ‘created a secret ac-
complice’, another self to cope with the sexual relationship with her
father (p.15). By splitting herself into two she was able to repress the
trauma of abuse.
19 Daniels also stages the idea of a reconciliation between Evelyn and
Eve, as first Eve then Evelyn enfolds her other ‘self’ in a large bath
towel, wiping clean her hands, face and neck. See Beside Herself,
Plays: Two,p.186.
20 Herman, Trauma and Recovery,p.112. Herman further explains: ‘It
is not uncommon to find adult survivors who continue to minister
to the wishes and needs of those who once abused them and who
continue to permit major intrusions without boundaries or limits.
Adult survivors may nurse their abusers in illness, defend them in
adversity, and even, in extreme cases, continue to submit to their
sexual demands.’ (p.112.)
21 Reading Daniels’s play and accounts of the Cleveland case, I was
struck by the way in which the fun that Daniels pokes at the Rev-
erend Teddy Kegwin in Beside Herself, works as a kind of antidote
185
Notes to pages 42–4
to the antifeminist campaigning of the Reverend Michael Wright in
the Cleveland case. See Campbell, Unofficial Secrets,p.49.
22 Louise Armstrong explains how in some cases, memories of abuse
can remain buried and dormant, and then can be triggered by ‘some-
thing apparently neutral’ (Kiss Daddy Goodnight: Ten Years Later,
New York: Hawthorn Books, 1987,p.27).
23 Campbell, Unofficial Secrets,p.70.
24 How to ‘stage’ abuse is clearly an issue that playwrights have to
consider. In Paper Walls (1994), Scarlet Theatre’s physical theatre
piece about women and domestic violence, for example, abuse was
recreated through dolls, thereby imitating the way in which children
are invited to narrate what has happened to them through puppetry.
A less convincing technique is to be found in Claire Macintyre’s
abstract personification of an abused figure in My Heart’s a Suitcase
(1990), where the figure ‘luggage’ carries the burden of abuse, and
advises resignation, rather than protest.
25 Controversially in the Cleveland case, anal dilation in children was
taken to be a sign of sexual abuse.
26 Lynda Hart, Fatal Women (London: Routledge, 1994), p.95.
27 Unofficial Secrets,p.65.
28 Sheridan Morley, Herald Tribune, reproduced in Theatre Record, 26
March–8 April 1990,p.468.
29 That said, the women’s physical theatre company, Spin/Stir, whose
first show about abuse survivors, Naming, played the Oval House in
1994, did look to a target audience of survivors’ support groups. For
details see Barbara Egervary, ‘Profile of a Company: Spin/Stir’, Glint
Journal,Vol.2, no.2, 1994,pp.16–17.
30 The WPT production costs were estimated by Jules Wright as
£86,000, with £28,000 from the Court. Jules Wright, ‘In Her Wright
Mind’, Plays and Players, April 1990,pp.14–16,p.16.
31 In the 1980s, Daniels went so far as to state that she would never
allow men to direct her work. See Sarah Daniels, ‘There are 52%of
Us’, Drama, 152, 1984, pp.23–4,p.24. She since has modified this
view: ‘I’ve since learnt to use the “would never” more sparingly. It
is rather a luxury now. There often isn’t the choice and although it
186
Notes to pages 44–8
would perhaps serve the feminist argument to leave it there, it would
be untruthful’ (Interview, Rage and Reason,p.8).
32 See also Daniels’s radio play, Purple Side Coasters (1995)thatex-
amines two mothers who, suffering from puerperal psychosis, are
separated from their children. Published in Lizbeth Goodman, ed.,
MythicWomen/Real Women (London: Faber, 2000), pp.197–239.
33 See reviews reproduced in Theatre Record, 12–25 February 1994,
pp.186–8.
34 Benedict Nightingale, The Times, reproduced in Theatre Record,
12–25 February 1994,p.187.
35 Neil Smith, What’s On, reproduced in Theatre Record, 12–25 Febru-
ary 1994,p.188.
36 See Michelene Wandor, Post-War British Drama: Looking Back in
Gender (London: Routledge, 2001), p.216.
37 This is especially true in the context of child abuse. Consider, for
example, the consequences of Lil’s failure to believe Nicola (Beside
Herself), or, worse still, the cycle of violence and selfharm that fol-
lows in the wake of Helen’s refusal to believe her stepdaughter Ruth
(Head-Rot Holiday).
38 Daniels, interview, Rage and Reason,p.4.
39 My anger prompted me to write ‘Daniels in the Lion’s Den: Sarah
Daniels and the British Backlash’, Theatre Journal, October 1995,
pp.393–403.
40 Claire Armistead, ‘Nostalgia for the Future’, Guardian, 22 February
1994,p.6.
41 Sylvia Fraser, My Father’s House,p.252.
42 In Armstrong’s Kiss Daddy Goodnight: Ten Years Later, women who
have suffered abuse show different ways of dealing, or not dealing
with abuse; of getting over, or not getting over the trauma. That
said the life stories of these women are generally characterised by
a difficulty of forming relations as adults. In one case this leads to
a mother giving away her children (see Maggie’s story, ‘Forgive and
Forget’, pp.95–11). Another woman describes her violent thoughts
towards children and babies, and her actual cruelty towards a girl-
child whose female body she wanted to destroy because her own body
187
Notes to pages 48–51
had been abused by her step-father (see June’s story, ‘The Psychic
Center Violated’, pp.117–31).
43 Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Cul-
ture (London: Picador, 1997), p.40.
44 Unofficial Secrets,p.9.
45 Dora was a patient of Freud’s who resisted and walked out of anal-
ysis, which explains the feminist interest in her case. Cixous, for
example, has written extensively about Dora. Dora’s case is also rel-
evant to the discussion of this chapter in so far as she was another
victim of Freud’s insistence that her experience of unwanted sex-
ual attentions (from the husband of her father’s lover) was fantasy
rather than reality. For further details of Dora’s case and of femi-
nist dramatic treatments of Dora see Elaine Showalter’s Hystories,
pp.42–3 and p.107.
46 Furse was appointed director in 1990 and remained in post until
1994.
47 For further details see Anna Furse, ‘Written on My Body’, The Open
Page, no.2, March 1997,pp.38–43, pp.42–3.
48 Anna Furse, Augustine (Big Hysteria) (Amsterdam: Harwood Aca-
demic Publishers, 1997), p.36.
49 Ibid., p.41.
50 Hysterical fitting is often characteristic of the abused child. See
Sylvia Fraser’s account, My Father’s House,p.222.
51 Drugs, most notably sodium amytal, are still, somewhat controver-
sially, used by therapists to help patients release their traumatic
memories.
52 Furse’s line is an echo of Cixous: ‘You only have to look at the
Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful
and she’s laughing’, in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Elaine Marks and
Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms (Brighton: The
Harvester Press, 1981), pp.245–64,p.255. Augustine’s final speech is
written in the style of Cixous’s manifesto and other points in the play
also index French feminist writing, most notably the reference to
the ‘theatre for forgotten scenes’ (p.31), which is Cl
´
ement’s descrip-
tion of the hysteric’s body in The Newly Born Woman (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1987), p.5.
188