Elaine Aston

The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights

Notes on contributors Chronology 1. A century in view: from suffrage to the 1990s Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt 2. Women playwrights of the 1920s and 1930s Maggie B. Gale 3. New plays and womens voices in the 1950s Susan Bennett 4. Women playwrights and the challenge of feminism in the 1970s Michelene Wandor 5. The politics of location Susan Bassnett 6. Contemporary Welsh women playwrights Anna-Marie Taylor 7. Contemporary Scottish women playwrights Adrienne Scullion 8. Women playwrights in Northern Ireland Mary Trotter 9. Language and identity in Timberlake Wertenbakers plays Susan Carlson 10. Pam Gems: body politics and biography Elaine Aston 11. Caryl Churchill and the politics of style Janelle Reinelt 12. Violence, abuse and gender relations in the plays by Sarah Daniels Gabriele Griffin 13. Small island people: black British women playwrights Meenakshi Ponnuswami 14. Writing outside the mainstream Claire MacDonald 15. Lesbian performance Sue-Ellen Case.

The ‘Trouble’ with Gender

Abstract ‘The “Trouble” with Gender’ makes the case for a gender-aware theatre practice which has tended to he overlooked by other fields of study concerned with theories of gender. In particular the article takes issue with the ‘trouble’ which Judith Butlers idea of the ‘choosing subject’ and her consequent rejection of performance causes theatre scholars and practitioners. By way of a counterargument, the article explores the possibilities of a body-thinking approach to theatre practice, looking at the ways in which this may highlight or expose the citational practice (à la Butler) which keeps ‘gender norms’ in place and may work to challenge and to disturb systems of gender representation.

Male Impersonation in the Music Hall: the Case of Vesta Tilley

Music hall has only recently been treated to ‘serious’ as distinct from anecdotal study, and the ‘turns’ of its leading performers remain largely unexplored. Particularly revealing, perhaps, are the acts of the male impersonators – whose ancestry in ‘legit’ performance had been a long one, yet whose particular approach to cross-dressing had a special social and sexual significance during the ascendancy of music hall, with its curious mixture of working-class directness, commercial knowingness, and ‘pre-Freudian innocence’. The most successful of the male impersonators was Vesta Tilley, whose various disguises, the nature of their hidden appeal, and the ‘messages’ they delivered are here analyzed by Elaine Aston.

Women playwrights of the 1920s and 1930s

The play-going public suddenly … picked on a new type of comedy … predominantly female. It is completely undramatic … ran interminably … About? The ditherings of ordinary people seen through the magnifying glass of an observant sentimental humour. It is the vindication of the woman playwright, for it is usually written by a woman … the delight of mainly feminine audiences. It is with us still in 1945. In histories of British theatre, the 1920s and 1930s are traditionally presented as being unfruitful for women playwrights. However, the critical framing of their work by their own contemporaries leads us to see them as more prolific and significant than at first assumed - interwar women playwrights were clearly breaking into the male-dominated market. Rare acknowledgements of women writing for the theatre of the time, made by our own contemporaries, are often underpinned by comment on their seeming lack of a feminist perspective or innovative strategy: they were largely middle-class, writing for a commercially oriented theatre and so the assumption is that their work does not warrant serious examination. Women writing for the variety of theatres which produced plays during the 1920s and 1930s have in common their gender and more of a general leaning towards the conservative than modern feminist scholars would perhaps like.

Competing Femininities: A ‘Girl’ for Eurovision

In the days after the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest, the internationally acclaimed feminist Germaine Greer wrote in the Guardian about ‘Molitva’ (‘Prayer’), Serbia’s contest entry, sung by Marija Serifovic (Figure 8.1): It was wonderful enough that a solid plain girl in glasses won [Eurovision] for Serbia with an old fashioned torch-song; that she should have sung it in passionate earnest as a lover of her own sex is what made this viewer switch off the iron and start praying that the gods might let her win. (Greer, 2007: 28)

Swimming in Histories of Gender Oppression: Grupo XIX de Teatro's Hysteria

Hysteria, first performed in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2001, was assembled from oral histories, medical cases, records, and remnants documenting the lives of Brazilian women from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who were incarcerated in Rio de Janeiros Pedro II Institute. Its UK premiere in 2008, performed by the all-female cast of the Brazilian Grupo XIX de Teatro, included a setting of the show in the old Victoria Baths in Manchester. In this article Elaine Aston identifies ways in which Hysteria keeps open or re-opens the question of feminist liberation. Exploring the shows critique of Western feminisms claims to independence and liberation, her analysis moves towards a mode of interdependent feminist thinking through which liberation might be realized. Elaine Aston is Professor of Contemporary Performance at Lancaster University and editor of Theatre Research International. Her most recent publications include Feminist Views on the English Stage (2003); Feminist Futures: Theatre, Performance, Theory (edited with Geraldine Harris, 2006); Staging International Feminisms (edited with Sue-Ellen Case, 2007); and Performance Practice and Process: Contemporary, (Women) Practitioners (with Geraldine Harris, 2008).

A fair trade?: Staging female sex tourism in 'Sugar Mummies' and 'Trade'

Abstract This article offers an examination of the subject of female sex tourism on the British stage, as dramatised in two recent sex-tourism plays: Trade (2004–05) by new black British dramatist debbie tucker green and Sugar Mummies (2006) by Asian British playwright Tanika Gupta. tucker greens Trade and Guptas Sugar Mummies each take a Caribbean setting to look at the recent wave of female sex tourism. Both plays examine the ways in which women who come from different class backgrounds, ethnicities, and age groups, but all of whom are economically privileged relative to the countries in which they holiday, play out that privilege in the sex trade with young black boys. Two feminist concerns are core to a discussion of these plays: firstly, consideration of the ways in which sex tourism points back to some unresolved, highly contentious issues for Western feminism concerning womens sexual pleasure, and, secondly, how the international mobility of the female sex tourist necessarily situates any such re-consideration of sexual pleasure within a transnational framework, which in turn has important implications for (re)-thinking liberal white Western feminism in immediate and future contexts. In brief, the article argues that taken together, these two plays interrogate female sex tourism as a ‘fair trade’; invite a feminist reconsideration of the feminine and womens sexual pleasure, at the same time as they signal the need for a feminism to be at work nationally and internationally.

Building Bridges: Life on Dunbar's Arbor, Past and Present

Rita, Sue and Bob Too by Andrea Dunbar and A State Affair, by Robin Soans. Co-production Out of Joint, Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, and Soho Theatre Company. Double bill first performed at Liverpool Everyman on 19 October 2000 and Soho Theatre, London on 5 December 2000.

Geographies of oppression : the cross-border politics of (m)othering: 'The break of day' and 'A yearning'.

In the autumn of 1995 the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester, UK, staged two plays which offer a dramatic treatment of the politics of motherhood: Timberlake Wertenbakers The Break of Day (Haymarket Mainhouse, first performance 26 October 1995) and Ruth Carters A Yearning (Haymarket Studio, 31 October to 4 November 1995). Neither play had significant box-office success, and The Break of Day received poor and hostile reviews from (male) critics, many of whom, like Paul Taylor for The Independent, commented on the play as a dramatization of ‘how the maternal drive can cause women to betray orthodox feminism’. My counter argument is that by addressing infertility as a feminist issue for the 1990s, both plays index the need to re-conceive a politics of motherhood in an international arena, highlighting the ways in which the biological contours of womens lives are globally mapped with the specificities of social, material and cultural geographies.

Royal Court: International

This is the first ever full-length study of the Royal Court Theatre’s International Department. It charts the engagement of the UK’s premiere theatre for new writing with an internationalist agenda and takes readers inside the process developed by the Court for the workshop projects it has undertaken in different parts of the world since the late 1990s. Covering the theatre’s unique programming of international plays and seasons, it highlights new writing from different parts of the globe, including France, Spain, Germany, Russia, Eastern Europe, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Columbia, Iran, the Near East, North Africa, Nigeria and India. First-hand accounts of the work appear in contributions from Stephen Daldry, Elyse Dodgson and Vicky Featherstone, and in interviews with Marcus Barbosa (Brazil), Anupama Chandrasekhar (India), Dominic Cooke, Sasha Dugdale, Marius von Mayenburg (Germany), Mark Ravenhill and Indhu Rubasingham.