The Royal Court’s Big Idea Q&A, Why Write a Feminist Play?, featuring Abi Morgan, Vicky Featherstone, and Nick Payne, is available on YouTube until the end of March, so you can watch most of it without my commentary being of importance. But the front bit of it is chopped off. Good thing some of us turned up and made notes, huh?
The discussion took place on the set of The Mistress Contract (redacted by Morgan, directed by Featherstone), meaning that the speakers sit on plastic chairs in front of microphones inside a glassy high greenhouse in front of a barren wasteland of desert and somewhat phallic cactuses.
The first question posed by Featherstone to the two writers is a warm-up: let alone what you write, why do you write? So easy questions first. (My favourite answer to this comes from Robert McKee, who says that writers all write for the same reason, “they’ve got a demon inside them that eats pages”.)
Payne tells us that what he got ‘hooked on’ was watching a play change by the process of rehearsal. That he’d write to get back in that room. Morgan starts with the throwaway ‘otherwise I’d go nutty’ but clarifies it by saying that in a family of performers she found writing was the way to get attention paid to her, to express herself – that when you took time to write something, people would take notice.
Next Featherstone asks ‘Have you written a feminist play?’ first to Morgan, who is primarily concerned with how people responded to the play than whether it is or could be feminist qua text or production. The Mistress Contract is clearly a play about feminism, that has made people think about their attitude towards feminism, even insofar as it is a play about blowjobs, and has made several audience members think about their attitude towards blowjobs – that itself can hold value. The feminism possible in the activity of writing Morgan locates instead by talking about narrative choices specifically in her screenwriting work – ‘Does this movie need another rape, just because it’s powerful, just because it’s dramatic?’
Payne quotes himself from various interviews about Blurred Lines, and talks about a negative review of Wanderlust which accused him of ‘retrograde gender stereotyping’ (actually the modifier Sam Marlowe used in her Time Out review was ‘reactionary’, but neither is really necessarily). “Horrified” by the accusation of sexism, Payne began “furtively” reading feminist books (“like other people use porn,” says Featherstone, “That’s what Kindles are for”). He was particularly impressed by The Equality Illusion. This is around when the camera kicks in.
I must have started reading feminist books around the same time – I certainly remember Kat Banyard’s The Equality Illusion knocking me for six, in the same way it did Payne. It’s a polemic, statistic-suffused work that calmly looks at what feels like every aspect of the society you’re familiar with and tells you just how fucked up it actually is. So I find it completely honest, if not exactly inspiring, when Payne replies to ‘Have you written a feminist play?’, not by picking at the terms of the question as Morgan does, but by saying ‘I hope so’. In the shadow of Banyard’s book, you want to put any mark in the plus column. He’s rightly proud of writing a play that put eight female actors onstage at the National, and doing it in conversation with their experiences as female actors playing female roles.
All three are at their most interesting when they talk about ‘why now’, (and by implication ‘why not the last twenty or so years’): Payne thinks that high-speed internet has changed the nature and he availability of the porn that boys are exposed to growing up. That sometimes the only thing that can be done is “name it, name the issue” (several critics, he admits, criticised Blurred Lines for doing no more than this).
Morgan admits she’d have grimaced at being called or calling herself a feminist playwright two years ago. But she says “it’s a western privilege to say ‘I’m sort of a feminist but not really'” and that it’s a mistake to think of feminism as “zeitgeisty – it will always going in circles”. That’s why it’s so important “to keep having the conversation, keep discussing the endeavour”.
Featherstone laughs, remembering leaving Uni in the eighties ‘a post-Dworkin separatist – we all pretended we didn’t have boyfriends’. And now (it’s a bit of a boast, but a fair boast) she thinks that women feel more secure in their jobs, and of their potential, in companies and buildings she has run. But in the interim, as a young female director, she hasn’t felt able to speak openly about feminist issues in the theatre.
(Aside: That nod to Dworkin is the only pre-2000 feminist referred to during the course of the evening – apart from the unattributed Judith Butler quote “gender is a construct” from Morgan. This may not be important at all, but my overwhelming thought is that of the three to get drunk with and talk about Germaine Greer, Featherstone’s the obvious choice.)
(Another Aside: My comic-nerd heart won’t let this detail go: Featherstone does reference the Bechdel Test, but incorrectly calls it ‘Scandinavian’, when the American comic artist’s 1985 threefold female representation metric was only semi-officially adopted in Sweden cinemas and Scandinavian networks last year. It’s the first Payne has heard of the Bechdel test. He wants to know how his plays score.)
So at this point all three speakers have ineloquently arrived at vague positions defending their more eloquent and effervescent art. The Mistress Contract says overtly ‘the only thing that keeps us equal”¦keeps us vigilant is this discourse. That when we stop talking that is when we’re lost’, which is more beautifully expressed through that desert blooming as a well-kept garden by the end of the play. Blurred Lines enacts the ‘naming’ of (and – I think – some really exciting complicating of) gender issues as they intersect with the entertainment industry. And the Royal Court is talking more feminism that I can remember. They all three walk the walk better than they talk the talk. And as the short session is opened up to questions from the floor, I am reminded how gracious the three panellists have been to hold back – their work is the thing. There is no subtlety that can be brought to a Q&A but small opinion and even less expression.
You’ve been to a post-show talk. You don’t need my commentary from the moment the roving mike comes out. Watch the video if you must. Blurred Lines‘ theatrical joy – the post-show talk parody – doesn’t come close to the true horror of Q&As, for audience or artist. They are loathsome beasts, that make fawns of fans and salaried theatre staff alike, filibusters of well-spoken fiftysomethings and neurotic students, and textbooks out of works of art. Worst of all, the Q&A reduces the complex web of opinions, hunches and experiment that comes from the rehearsal process to shrugs, hedges and stammers, instead of elevating it in performance to be examined in its own regalia. Blurred Lines should have been the postmodern prompt for the end of the post-show talk. It can still hope to be the last memorable example. This one still needed a play after it to make the desert bloom.
Payne does answer well about feminist criticism – that art about things which we do not see a lot of art about falls under impossibly harsh judgement. It’s worth bearing in mind. Like the anger levelled against Jared Leto’s portrayal of Rayon in Dallas Buyers Club – when we are “starved of” a particular kind of representation, theme or argument, we can find ourselves demanding the first examples above the parapet be all things to all. We are already enjoying a cornucopia of new feminist plays and more are to come. We should be sure to judge them on their own terms as well as against the Platonic form of feminist art that exists in our heads.
We are not, however, starved of Q&As. I am going to have to stop going to them. They make me uncommonly grouchy.
Why Write a Feminist Play? was part of the Big Idea series at the Royal Court and took place on 13th March 2014.
