When boys and girls
come out to play, chances are at some point end up fighting. Which
may have something to do with why the two winners of this year's
Platform 18 theatre-making award at the Arches in Glasgow have kept
to their own, gender-wise. While Peter McMaster offers up an all-male
adaptation of Emily Bronte's windswept romance, Wuthering Heights,
Amanda Monfrooe looks to classical Greek forms for POKE in which the
last two women in the world explore notions of male violence against
women, and how they reached the state they're in. While such
exercises in what looks like separatist sexual politics sound like
the sort of thing that came out of a 1970s, the-personal-is-political
line of inquiry, the younger generation of theatre-makers who
McMaster and Monfrooe are part of are tackling their subjects with a
refreshingly contemporary seriousness.
“We're finding ways
to understand modes of expression of men,” says McMaster. “I've
fixated on the character of Heathcliff. He's an orphan, and as a
reader you don't know why he's so aggressive. Then there's this weird
mysterious part of the book when he disappears, and comes back with
all this money. By asking questions about that, we might be able to
fill the gaps, but we're also finding out what are the important
questions we should be asking about ourselves as men.”
Given that, besides
Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights' main character is Cathy, much of this
has involved McMaster and co putting on dresses in the rehearsal
room, and exploring how that makes them feel. McMaster is all too
aware that having men playing women in serious drama is something
that fates back to Shakespeare's day, when boy players would take on
the lead female roles. This tradition was rebooted too by Edward
Hall's all-male Shakespeare company, Propeller. One thinks too of
comedian Eddie Izzard and artist Grayson Perry, both of whom enjoy
wearing women's clothes without recourse to dragging it up.
“It's perhaps
different for us than it was with Shakespeare,” McMaster observes,
“because then you had a man playing a woman, and everyone knew it
was a man, so it was the actor's job to convince you otherwise. What
we're doing isn't drag, and we're not trying to be women, so we don't
know what it is. We're inhabiting a grey area of what's already a
grey area, and we're enjoying the sensation of wearing a dress just
for how it makes us feel. It's fun to put a dress on, and it's fun to
enjoy the melodrama of the story, and get to be emotional in a way
men might not normally be, but we're not trying to address the
problems of feminism here, but the problems of masculinism, which is
a word you won't find in the dictionary.”
Wuthering Heights is
the public side of a process in which McMaster and his company have
been going on retreats and spending other time together beyond the
rehearsal room in a way that sounds like a men's group. Given that
McMaster himself is part of several men's groups, this is an
observation he's more than happy to accept.
“It's about seeing
what happens when as a group of men you go to vulnerable places,”
he says, “and to find spaces for reflection on things that might be
important in our lives. There are no easy answers, but I like going
to raw places, and if people don't want to go there, I like to try
and get them to go there with me.”
McMaster's previous
work at the Arches and on the Forest Fringe includes House, in which
the audience smashed up discarded furniture and made something new
from it, several solo works, and
The Fire Burns and
Burns, a collaboration with Nic Green. Monfrooe's back catalogue
includes How Keanu Reeves Saved The World, some cabaret styler pierce
at her devised performance event, Love Club, and a stint on placement
with the National Theatre of Scotland to develop her practice.
With POKE, Monfrooe
goes beyond the likes of McMaster's personal meditations to expose
how the whole notion of something that might be called the sex wars
goes way beyond metaphor. She wasn't short of material.
“It writes itself,”
she says. “Every time I look at the news, there's a barrage of
stories regarding the violation of women's freedom in every country,
and it's getting worse. Things have gotten out of control, and
there's no rhyme or reason for that. There's a sexual apocalypse,
whereby anybody's game. A little girl was raped, but her best friend
says, well, you shouldn't have worn that. If the female body is game,
then it's the male body next. Then it's bestiality and paedophilia.
There's this feeling that we're on a slippery slope. Peter feels the
need to ask questions of himself as a man, whereas, as a woman, I'm
angry. We need to take a frank look at sex, our bodies, and what our
bodies have been reduced to.”
While this may sound
extreme for some, it is in keeping with a practice and an aesthetic
which Monfrooe has developed over the last half decade.
“All of my work has
been about asking big questions,” she says. “but this isn't an
issue-based play, and it isn't polemic, because we don't solve the
problem of sexual violence, and that's because it can't be solved.
There's something fundamental that says men and women can't live
together in harmony, and that's to do with the little dangly bit
between a man's legs.”
Monfrooe laughs when
she says this, but, while there is levity in the play, she's deadly
serious.
“The phallus was
prized in Greek culture,” she says. “and women were slaves,
although they were valued for their beauty and their intelligence.
What I'm interested in is playing with form, and the Greek structure
of inevitability, where everything always comes to a violent end.
POKE starts like that, but then goes somewhere else. I wanted to talk
about something that's really difficult, then take a sideways glance
at it. Our role is to ask, not to answer, and to leave the ellipses
for the audience to answer. I can't occupy an ideological position
with any commitment, but someone like Peter is asking a very
different set of questions to the ones I am, and that's brave.”
Wuthering Heights and
POKE, The Arches, Glasgow, April 23-27; Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh,
May 1-3
The Herald, April 16th 2013
ends
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