Sarah Daniels’s feminist 1982 play is full of the righteous anger of a text that’s saying what was then-unsayable: it explores the taboo topic of hardcore pornography, and the even more taboo topic of women’s reactions to it.
It hasn’t been staged for 35 years, and Melissa Dunne’s production is a bold attempt to resurrect a vital slice of feminist theatre history. But it’s not bold enough. She muffles its radicalism by staging it as a period piece, with stilted performances and endless fiddly scene changes soundtracked with ‘80s-by-numbers pop hits.
Three couples meet for dinner: the men crack a formidably nasty series of rape jokes, and belittle their wives’ attempts to talk about their own experiences. In the aftermath of the night, Rowena, a social worker, becomes fixated on the evils of pornography, setting off on a path that leads her to murder a stranger.
Daniels’s dialogue is closely observed, showing how these men treat their wives as situations to be managed, not humans. And all three women have some fascinating moments of rebellion: Rowena’s mother-in-law describes crashing a flower show with a display of ferns grown on sanitary towels.
But Rowena’s furious trajectory sits a little oddly in 2018, when the retro porn mags which paper the Finborough’s walls look quaint, not a life-ruining scourge.
Daniels’s play doesn't allow for the possibility that women might enjoy sex (let alone ‘marital aids’ or pornographic images). Its three men are mono-dimensional cads of varying levels of poshness, and their enjoyment of porn is equated with enacting rape and sexual violence. In short, it’s a polemic that’s best understood in the context of a specific wave of feminism. It’s taken decades more thought and research to reach the uneasy twenty-first-century consensus that yes, sexual objectification can feed into rape culture, but no, the two aren’t synonymous.
It’s nigh-on impossible to craft a nuanced play with believable characters when you’re also trying, hard, to draw attention to a seldom talked about systemic injustice – and criticising Daniels’s pioneering play for not doing so would be wrong. But in a world in which porn videos are a comic anachronism, not a terrifying new problem, a revival of her work needs to do more than rewind the clock.
It hasn’t been staged for 35 years, and Melissa Dunne’s production is a bold attempt to resurrect a vital slice of feminist theatre history. But it’s not bold enough. She muffles its radicalism by staging it as a period piece, with stilted performances and endless fiddly scene changes soundtracked with ‘80s-by-numbers pop hits.
Three couples meet for dinner: the men crack a formidably nasty series of rape jokes, and belittle their wives’ attempts to talk about their own experiences. In the aftermath of the night, Rowena, a social worker, becomes fixated on the evils of pornography, setting off on a path that leads her to murder a stranger.
Daniels’s dialogue is closely observed, showing how these men treat their wives as situations to be managed, not humans. And all three women have some fascinating moments of rebellion: Rowena’s mother-in-law describes crashing a flower show with a display of ferns grown on sanitary towels.
But Rowena’s furious trajectory sits a little oddly in 2018, when the retro porn mags which paper the Finborough’s walls look quaint, not a life-ruining scourge.
Daniels’s play doesn't allow for the possibility that women might enjoy sex (let alone ‘marital aids’ or pornographic images). Its three men are mono-dimensional cads of varying levels of poshness, and their enjoyment of porn is equated with enacting rape and sexual violence. In short, it’s a polemic that’s best understood in the context of a specific wave of feminism. It’s taken decades more thought and research to reach the uneasy twenty-first-century consensus that yes, sexual objectification can feed into rape culture, but no, the two aren’t synonymous.
It’s nigh-on impossible to craft a nuanced play with believable characters when you’re also trying, hard, to draw attention to a seldom talked about systemic injustice – and criticising Daniels’s pioneering play for not doing so would be wrong. But in a world in which porn videos are a comic anachronism, not a terrifying new problem, a revival of her work needs to do more than rewind the clock.