A Good Night Out for the Girls

Popular Feminisms in Contemporary Theatre and Performance

E. Aston, G. Harris

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137300140
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Moving across the boundaries of mainstream and experimental circuits, from the affective pleasures of commercially successful shows such as Calendar Girls and Mamma Mia! to the feminist possibilities of new burlesque and stand-up, this book offers a lucid and accessible account of popular feminisms in contemporary theatre and performance.

1

Introduction: A Good Night Out for the Girls

Elaine & Gerry

We are always travelling to the theatre: by train down to London, up to Edinburgh and Glasgow, and across to our closest regional cities of Manchester, Liverpool or Leeds; by car to nearby Preston, or to Kendal in neighbouring Cumbria; and on foot to local venues in Lancaster where we live. Over the last six or seven years we have become increasingly conscious of being, quite literally, part of a larger ‘movement’ of women across the country making similar journeys for the same purpose. Such theatregoers range from pairs like us to massive coach parties on excursions organised through work, community groups (like local Women’s Institutes), or theatre clubs (such as that attended by Elaine’s mother, June).¹ Other groups might consist of intergenerational, female family members, middle-aged women friends celebrating significant birthdays, or women clubbing together for a hen party theatre-weekend package.² While like us, some of these parties may be going to see a wide variety of productions, many of them are going to a style of show designed specifically with them in mind: the-good-night-out-for-the-girls show.

The rise of the girls’ night out

Theatre in the UK has long enjoyed a proportionally stronger female ‘fan’ base, even while, paradoxically, this has been at odds with a lack of equal ‘representation’ in the work staged, and within the theatre profession. While, of course, there always have been shows specifically aimed at women, the mid-nineties saw signs of producers and production companies across the country increasingly beginning to capitalise on this demographic by staging unmistakably women-centred shows.³ Harbingers of this growing trend include: Dave Simpson’s hen-party themed Girls’ Night Out (1996); Catherine Johnson’s forty-something trio of girl friends on a bay-city-roller-tribute night out in Shang-a-Lang (1998); Johnson’s book for the chick megamusical, Mamma Mia! (1999); and North American Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues (London premiere, 1999). Expanding exponentially in number over the next decade, shows targeting women’s audiences account for what, in 2010, arts correspondent for the Telegraph Sarah Crompton described as ‘The Rise of the Girls’ Night Out’. On the same theme, writing in the Independent, Kate Youde accompanied her headline, ‘It’s one big girls’ night out at the theatre’, with a list of women-friendly West End shows: Bridget Jones: The Musical (in preparation); Grease; Ghost: The Musical; Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; Calendar Girls; Legally Blonde; Flashdance: The Musical; Girls’ Night Out, Mamma Mia! and Dirty Dancing (Youde, 2010).

Crompton pinpoints this ‘rise’ through contrasting her many years of going to the theatre with a female friend, seeing an eclectic range of shows, looking out for some of the male stars, and weaving after-show personal ‘gossip’ around talk about the production, with her discovery of ‘the rise of a brand of entertainment that seems to be designed just for us when we want to have a good time, let our hair down and feel purely happy at the end of the evening’ (Crompton, 2010). Both Youde and Crompton have noticed that as a result women are going to the theatre in ‘droves’ and we can affirm that this is happening not just in the West End but across the regions.⁴ As we observe above, women are also frequently doing so together in single gendered groups as part of social networking, celebrating special occasions or simply to enjoy the pleasures of sociability within friendship and/or kinship groups: a good night out for the girls.

As theatregoers, this phenomenon aroused our curiosity. As academics engaged with theatre/performance and feminism, we felt we might have been missing something of significance. This is not surprising given that for some time theatre studies, feminist or otherwise, has tended to overlook the mainstream. As Susan Bennett observes, despite the way in which theatre studies has become ‘a much more inclusive discipline’ in the twenty-first century, ‘we have not yet provided a properly inclusive account of contemporary work insofar as we have neglected, almost entirely, a significant segment of the market. This is the segment we might simply identify as commercial theatre’ (2005: 407). Bennett urges that ‘we need always to reflect on what account of contemporary theatrical experience we are entering into historical record’ (ibid). From our feminist perspective it seems to us that an ‘historical record’ that overlooks the ‘the rise of the girls’ night out’ (the very use of term ‘girls’ in discussing this genre already signifying a certain dismissiveness) will mean that a significant element of the history of women in theatre and at the theatre may be lost or forgotten (yet again).

We belong to a generation of feminist-theatre scholars who in the eighties were influenced by and identified with second-wave feminism, and who worked between feminist politics, theory and theatre from the critical viewing point of the ‘feminist spectator as critic’ (Dolan, 1988). At this time, to pay attention to feminism and theatre meant looking ‘outside’ mainstream theatre to the alternative, experimental and counter-cultural margins, where works directly informed by this politics were being staged. This focus of attention remained (more or less) a constant throughout the nineties and the early noughties, even while the socio-historical and political context, including that of feminism, shifted and changed.

More recently, there have been some signs of a turn to the mainstream in feminist theatre and performance scholarship. For instance, in her eloquent reappraisal of the late Wendy Wasserstein, one of the most successful women playwrights on America’s Broadway, Jill Dolan revisits her former ‘disparagement of the mainstream-oriented, liberal feminist playwriting [Wasserstein] represented’ (2008: 433). Noting the critical turn of a certain style of third-wave feminism to ‘a place admittedly within capitalism (and within dominant ideology) [that] could be advantageous’, Dolan considers letting go of ‘what might finally be an idealist belief that feminist practice can remain outside capitalism’s reach’. ‘Perhaps it is now time’, she writes, ‘to acknowledge the potential of looking inside as well [as outside], and to address feminism as a critique or value circulating within our most commercial theatres’ (ibid: 434–5).

Although this current study encompasses theatre and performance works ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the mainstream, Dolan’s remark articulates one of our key aims. We are particularly interested in the phenomenon of the mainstream good-night-out-for-the-girls show in and of itself. However, it also functions for us as a starting point for exploring the permeability of the boundary between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ in terms of the circulation of ‘feminism[s] as a critique or value’, identifying and pursuing certain themes, tropes, and ideas across the mainstream and the commercial fringe to the fields of experimental performance and (self-consciously) political theatre, letting go of the idea that any practice remains ‘outside capitalism’s reach’. This approach acknowledges that over the last fifty-odd years, due to the dominance of the mass media and to Web 2.0 information technology, that in practice these ‘boundaries’ have become increasingly blurred. All the shows we discuss are highly ‘mediatised’, albeit in differing ways. For example, Calendar Girls (Chapter 2) is the stage adaptation of a film, and to an extent this also partly applies to Nic Green’s ‘experimental’ show Trilogy (2009) explored in Chapter 5, which ‘recreates’ parts of the documentary film Bloody Town Hall (1979). Similarly, Dave Simpson’s The Naked Truth (2007) analysed in Chapter 3 shows strong influences from soap opera, while Grumpy Old Women Live (Chapter 4) began as a television show. Equally, many of the artists discussed work across ‘boundaries’ so that some of the burlesque performers who are the focus of Chapter 7 appear in both mainstream and also performance art contexts, while before writing the stage and film versions of Mamma Mia! (Chapter 6), Catherine Johnson had edgy drama performed in venues committed to new playwriting but also scripted episodes for television series like Casualty.

In short, while we recognise the necessity of defining our key terms and concepts (see below), we are less concerned with delineating and upholding categories and genre boundaries than with exploring the sorts of concerns which appear to speak to a large number (in the case of certain shows studied, millions) of women nationally and internationally, across fields, genres, mediums, audiences and generations. We recognise, however, that in regard to the permeable boundaries between theories and practices within feminisms and theatre, this ‘speaking’ might sometimes takes the form of dialogue and other times that of heated debate.

Third wave and postfeminism

As (we hope) all this underlines, it is not our aim to arrive at a definition of feminist ‘popular theatre’. Rather this study is conceptualised around the notion of ‘popular feminisms’ in contemporary theatre and performance. This concept is borrowed from feminist media and cultural studies, drawing on works by scholars such as Joanne Hollows and Rachel Moseley (2006) and Megan Le Masurier (2011).⁵ We adopt and adapt this for our own field of theatre enquiry, keeping in mind the ‘mediatised’ nature of all the shows we study and the fact that the rise of the good-night-out-for-the-girls theatre phenomenon parallels that of developments in other media. Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, published in 1996, signalled the advent of ‘chick lit’ in the novel, just in advance of ‘girls night in’ television series like Ally McBeal (1997–2002) and Sex and the City (1998–2004). Meanwhile the cinema had already seen a significant resurgence of the ‘woman’s film’, the ‘rom com’, or ‘chick film’ including movies like My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), up to films such as Bridesmaids (2011). All of these works have been used as examples to identify, define and debate the concept of postfeminism and/or as used by Dolan above, third-wave feminism.

However, as Hollows and Moseley point out, the meanings of both terms are ‘problematic’, being interpreted in a range of different ways according to historical, national and disciplinary location (2006: 7–8). Moreover, they also note that the concept of third-wave feminism ‘has more currency in the US and in some parts of continental Europe than it appears to have in the UK’ (ibid: 13). Speaking specifically about the US, Amanda Lotz describes postfeminism as one of three subsets of third-wave feminism (Lotz, 2001: 117) arguably resonant of the way in which second-wave feminism often was summarised in terms of three ‘main dynamics’ (bourgeois/liberal; radical/cultural; and socialist/materialist). The first subset she dubs as ‘reactionary’ and identifies it through figures such as Katie Roiphe and Naomi Wolf who, in the early 1990s, published high profile popular mainstream books in which they defined their politics against the second wave depicted, as Astrid Henry puts it, as ‘a puritanical, regulating force’ (2004: 1). As noted by Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake these ‘conservative feminists’ gained prominence partly because they were ‘regularly called upon by the media as spokepersons for the “next generation”’ (1997: 1). Lotz’s second subset refers to a feminism developed by ‘women of colour’ to define themselves and their activism against their experience of racial exclusion in second-wave women’s organisations and is often termed either as third-wave or third-world feminism. Due to national differences in the UK, Lotz’s second subset is still more likely to be referred to as ‘black British feminism’ with the term black (sometimes) used to signify an inclusive political identification that embraces diaspora subjects with roots in Asia, the Caribbean and sub Saharan Africa. From Lotz’s US perspective, her second subset also influenced the third which, borrowing from Anne Brooks, is the one she designates as postfeminism. She defines this as the ‘intersection of feminism with postmodernism, post-structuralism and postcolonialism . . . challenging modernist, patriarchal and imperialist frameworks’ (cited in Lotz, 2001: 113).

Yet in both the UK and the US, the term postfeminism is used variously to indicate an anti-feminist backlash that saw its appropriation, inoculation and depoliticisation by a hostile mass media, or to indicate that feminism has done its job and is no longer needed by ‘today’s young women’, or a revision ‘within’ feminism that addresses vital ‘blind spots’ and flaws of ‘older’ feminist thinking. Whatever their ‘currency’, both ‘third wave’ and postfeminism tend to be identified as starting somewhere around 1990; are defined ‘against’ or in opposition to the second wave of the 1960s and 1970s, and are stated in ‘generational’ terms. This risks constructing both ‘waves’ as if they were singular monolithic categories, whereas evidence suggests that feminism always has been, as Lotz puts it, subject to ‘contested and even oppositional’ meanings (ibid: 106).⁶ It also glosses over the fact that there are numerous thinkers and activists whose works either span or emerge in between these ‘generations’ or ‘waves’, and who simply name themselves as feminists.⁷

Lotz is speaking from within the academy but some of the fiercest debates over the ‘posting’ of feminism were initiated by mainstream journalists and carried out in public fora. A prominent example appeared in Time magazine June 1998: the cover featured Ally McBeal star Calista Flockhart alongside those of celebrated US feminists Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, captioned with the headline ‘Is Feminism Dead?’ Inside the magazine, writer and critic Ginia Bellafante offered a swingeing critique of postfeminism as obsessively focused on the sexual and as selfish and self-absorbed individualism. Significantly, she argued that if this kind of ‘feminism’ was ‘divorced from matters of public purpose’ this was partly the fault of the feminist academy which had come to focus more on ‘symbols of the body and less on social action and change’ (1998: 56). In the UK similar complaints were made by Natasha Walter who perceived ‘academic feminism’ as having retreated into high theory and, as a consequence, lost touch with the interests and aspirations of ‘ordinary women’ (1999: 6). Their respective remarks suggest they are referring to the same intersection of feminism with postmodernism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism which, ironically, Lotz perceives in positive terms as ‘underlying’ certain elements of shows like Ally McBeal (2001: 114–15).

Since feminists first began to make their presence felt in the academy in the 1970s, there has been concern about potential disconnections between theories and women’s everyday lives. In other words, many feminists working within the academic sphere have been troubled by this issue. For some this became even more pressing in the 1980s when feminism became a significant strand in what eminent US, black literary critic Barbara Christian termed ‘The Race for Theory’ (1987).⁸ Similarly in 1992, UK sociologist Michèle Barrett described ‘the new “deconstructive” emphasis on fluidity and contingency’ as seemingly having the effect of ‘dispensing with “things”’ – ‘things’ such as ‘low pay, rape or female foeticide’, ‘things’ that make up the materiality of women’s lives (1992: 201–2). Shortly after this, Susan Bordo posed the question of how far the thinking she characterises as postmodern feminism, exemplified by Jane Flax, Donna Haraway and Judith Butler, serves ‘the empowerment of diverse cultural voices and styles’ or ‘the academic hegemony (particularly in philosophy and literary studies) of detached, metatheoretical discourse’ (1993: 225).

Perhaps because as feminists we came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s and so apparently fall ‘in-between’ the second and third waves, feminism and postfeminism, we often find ourselves wavering between positions in these debates, or rather, as Ann Snitow puts it, as gendered subjects ‘[w]hatever our habitual position on [these] divide[s], in daily life we travel back and forth’ (1990: 34). We frequently find ourselves strongly in accord with analyses offered by figures like Angela McRobbie, Imelda Whelehan and Diane Negra, who critique aspects of mainstream postfeminist culture as part of a neo-liberal dismantling and ‘undoing’ of feminism. Yet we are equally in sympathy with Shelagh Young’s questioning of the right of middle-class, intellectual feminists (including ourselves) to define ‘what is, and is not a feminist representation, or who is, and who is not a feminist’ (1988: 174, 181). Further, while intellectually over the years our theorising has come to be (and remains) fundamentally shaped by the intersection of second-wave feminism with postmodernism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism, we do agree that these paradigms can sometimes lose sight of the ‘things’ that strongly affect ‘the materiality of [a large number of] women’s lives’; the very point of feminism. All of this is of particular concern when, even in privileged Euro-American culture, historical feminist gains on issues such as abortion, equal pay and opportunity at work, rape and violence against women, provision of nurseries, child support, the treatment of women in the criminal justice system (like women’s studies in the academy), either seem to have come to a standstill or are being constantly rolled back. It seems to us that remarking a ‘divide’ between feminism ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the academy, like notions of generations, ‘waves’ and/or the prefix ‘post’, might have a usefulness in roughly indicating different ‘locations’ or historical ‘moments’ in feminist thought and activism. Nevertheless, this move, and these terms, tend not only to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: A Good Night Out for the Girls
• 2 Jam and Jerusalem/Sentimentality and Feminism: Calendar Girls
• 3 Roaring Women and Class Acts: The Naked Truth and the Chippendales’ Ultimate Girls Night Out
• 4 Age Liberation: Susan Boyle, ‘Grumpy Old Women’ and Virginia Ironside’s Monologues
• 5 Once More with Feeling: Joanna Murray-Smith’s The Female of the Species and Nic Green’s Trilogy
• 6 Work, Family, Romance and the Utopian Sensibilities of the Chick Megamusical Mamma Mia!
• 7 The Ghosts of New Burlesque
• 8 Entertaining Others: Shappi Khorsandi and Andi Osho
• 9 ‘Are We There Yet?’ – Final Reflections and Marisa Carnesky’s Ghost Train
• Bibliography
• Index