'Gender in Australian
Theatre'
Writer: Kate Herbert
The Melbourne Times. Published around March
1992
My first article ever for The Melbourne Times
Arts Editor: Robin
Usher
The gender landscape
approaching the 21st century is changing at such a breathtaking rate
it is a wonder men and women recognise each other when they crawl into bed at
night. Perhaps somewhere in unrecorded history, men and women negotiated shopping,
work, child-care, sensitivity, sex and fidelity. Who can tell?
What the new men’s movement seems to be saying is that men
are confused about traditional roles but have nothing with which to replace
them. Men don’t know how they are supposed to act any more. Are they blokes or
SNAGS? On the other side of the gender fence the role models that the Women’s
Movement created in the 60s and 70s are no longer relevant in the lifestyle of
women in the 90s.
The arts will always intersect withe the prevailing social
and inter-personal patterns. Playwright, particularly, have the opportunity to
explore human relationships in a way unavailable to any other art form,
creating three-dimensional forms of the
complex lives of modern, urban people.
There has been a spate of local plays dealing with these
issues. Liz Jones from La mama says she has been receiving an increasing number
of such scripts, predominantly by women, about personal relationships.
Three plays recently i production in Melbourne, and all
written by young women,, Wolf (being
staged at Playbox) and Mistress by
Tobsha Learner, and Ridge’s Lovers by
Joann Murray-Smith. All three are depicting what is commonly and cryptically
dubbed post-feminism. Each raises issues of relationships and gender confusion.
The irksome personal problems between men and women are not
new fodder for the playwright. Look at Medea,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Nor and
Torvald in A Doll’s House. Australian
contemporary theatre has followed this noble heritage.
Summer of the
Seventeenth Doll in the 50s looked at the working class and the long-term,
long-distance relationships between two cane-cutters and their girlfriends. The
Removalists penetrated the violence of the domestic home in the 70s and put
it under th microscope, while Don’s Party
stripped off the veneer of the middle-class lefties and revealed their
inconsistencies.
In the early 80s, Hannie Rayson’s Room To Move shifted the focus to the emerging new relationships of
the time. Men were cooking, housekeeping and emoting. Women were working and
asserting themselves. Love affairs were no longer just being ignored or simply
tolerated, they were being negotiated, for goodness’ sake!
The women created by Murray-Smith and Learner epitomise the
more recent struggle to integrate feminism with the New Conservatism of the
80s. In Ridge’s Lovers, Elle is an
attractive, cool and decorative bitch who uses her lover for sex and adoration
and shuns a domestic relationship. She defies most feminist principles except
independence of spirit. Stephanie dreams about a career as an actor but
fantasises about marriage and domestic bliss. Julia is simple but inarticulate.
They speak aloud some of the embarrassing fantasies and
secret scripts of modern women. They dream of being stick-insect thin, being
able to toss on any old thing and look fabulous, wearing lacy underwear
(presumably without feeling foolish or guilty), and about the Latin lover who
whisks tem off to an Italian villa.
The compromise continues. In Mistress Diana Cunningham subjugates her own career to her husband’s.
His mistress, Helen, waits in the wings for him to leave is wife. The young
Aphrodite treats her boyfriend like a demi-god. I Wolf, Damien Lupus’ wife, Deirdre, may be a successful politician
but she suffers from Daniel’s continual affairs. Toni is constantly in love
with unavailable men and the art school student uses Daniel to advance her
career and has absolutely no sense of sisterhood. It’s enough to make die-hard
feminists give up and wear frilly blouses.
These characters are still looking toward the old male
models to rescue them. In the plays, a man representing a very traditional role
is central to the plot and the women are like Russian satellites revolving
around him. The pattern of women identifying themselves through men is ubiquitous.
It is heartening that, at the end of Mistress,
all three women try to extricate themselves from their dilemma.
The poor men do not fare so well. They remain unresolved and unredeemed. Ridge
searches for this ideal women in a composite of all three lovers, although he
is interested in marrying the only one who does not want him. Familiar? Daniel
Lupus is a Casanova, a ‘root rat’, a compulsive seducer who does not even have
the imagination to think up new lines of seduction for each new conquest. Familiar? Richard Cunningham is an
unattractive example of the lapsed hippy-socialist that was breeding unchecked
on university campuses in the 70s his politics lapsing conveniently with his
Catholicism when he became a wealthy celebrity journalist.
All three men have an uncontrollable desire to possess
squillions of women. Don Juan had nothing on these guys. In the end, though,
they are more to be pitied than admired.
According to Rose Rothfield, a psychoanalyst, the Don Juan
is a common male psychological phenomenon. “Don Juan is trying terribly hard to
be a man and, to prove it, he sleeps with a lot of women. It’s not enough proof.
He has to do it again and again.” He is a wolf. Learner says that women, too,
may be wolves, but very few women make a lifelong vocation of it.
Yes, we all recognise the Don Juan, and the females in these
plays may be vocalising he deep and dark secrets of women out there. Audiences
may recognise themselves in the stereotypes on the stage. But do these
stereotypes challenge our ideas or broaden our thinking, or do they simply
confirm what we believe to be the truth? Does it matter?
Write and lecturer in Women’s Studies, Phillippa Rothfield,
suggests that theatre can deal with issues and concerns, or it can merely
depict. She questions whether it is sufficient simply to portray these
gender-role confusions.
Here we stumble upon the glaringly obvious question: should
theatre written by women be feminist in perspective and political in intention?
Must it be emancipatory? Indeed, is theatre written by women the same thing as
Women’s Theatre?
Whether theatre can affect the very fabric of society is a
moot point. It may simply reflect previous change through a warped mirror.
Is it unreasonable to expect theatre written by women in
Australia in the 90s to have some impact on the gender debate? Phillippa
Rothfield says that women’s theatre is not just one thing any more. It is no
longer just Agit-Prop political statements of liberation.
But she also says, “There is a responsibility to bring
issues to bear in as open as possible a manner,” She dos, however, have
concerns about feminist authoritarianism and policing tendencies. Writing by
women is policed in a way men’s writing is not. Women will just not let up on
each other.
If we take these three plays as examples, women will not let
up on men either. The images of the 90s are disheartening. Is it possible or
appropriate for women to write characters representing the modern man? Much f
the dialogue about gender in society has emanated from the feminist writers. We
have a great deal of information to act as signposts for women but men have,
until recently, left each other out in the cold.
Peter McMillan, writer of Men, Sex and Other Secrets, says, “Men are angry at women saying
over and over again that men are this and men are that.”
He thinks it is pointless for men to complain about what
women are saying if they refuse to participate in the dialogue between genders.
“If they don’t like what’s being written or said they need to give a positive
model and a rational response.” If women playwrights are not writing accurate
representations of the 90s man, then men need to write them themselves.
This is not to suggest we need fewer plays from women. We have
not seen enough new works from women yet. Fidelius Morgan, in Female Wits (Virago 1980), write that on the London stage from
1920-980, fewer plays by women were performed than were played by the two major
theatre companies from 1660-1720. It would seem those figures have been
replicated during the same period in Australia and little has changed.
More women writers are emerging now who warrant support from
th local theatre community. To state the obvious, women and men are different
and we need as many and as varied voices as possible writing bout them for the
theatre.
In this post-feminist era, it is not clear if playwrights
have a responsibility in relation to gender issues. Art has always reflected
life but it has not necessarily mirrored positive images. People are finding it
difficult enough to keep up with the heady rate of change in both societal and
personal arenas, let alone trying to create art which accurately represents the
complexity of gender roles.
Theatre may choose to comment on th gender conflict. It mat
also continue simply to entertain us. There is nothing wrong with
entertainment. The label ‘post-feminism’ may mean that feminism’ has finally
passed us by. It may simply mean that we should expect to receive the
occasional holiday postcard from it!
By Kate Herbert April-May 1992
First article for The Melbourne Times
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