Abstract
Having explored the sounds of Scottish voices in the wake of devolution, the negotiation of norms by black voices as they were included in mainstream space, and the pressures on young voices to participate under New Labour’s empathetic regime, this final chapter turns to the theme of betrayal, a climate that began to pervade public discourse in the latter years of Tony Blair’s period as Prime Minster. It does so by attending to the representation in theatre of women who have killed children — or been accused of this — and thus violated what society perceives as a fundamental human relationship based on intimacy and trust. I argue that in the construction of the voice of the female child killer in the voicescapes of theatre in this period we can hear ‘cultural evidence’ for the shift from an empathic inclusive context for otherwise stigmatised individuals to a climate of betrayal in response to the perceived lack of transparency in the political representative process. This betrayal was articulated in the deceitful voice of the murdering mother, whose seductive or transparent language traditionally disguises evil intent.
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Notes
E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 3.
Jennifer Jones, Medea’s Daughters: Forming and Performing the Woman Who Kills (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2003), pp. ix–xii; Kaplan, Motherhood, p. 109;
Julia Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 160–86 (p. 161).
Anne Worrall’s Offending Women: Female Lawbreakers and the Criminal Law System (London: Routledge, 1990);
See also Meda Chesney-Lind, ‘Girls’ Crime and Woman’s Place: Toward a Feminist Model of Female Delinquency’, Crime and Delinquency 35 (1989), 5–29.
From 1994, juries have had the right to ‘draw inferences’ from a suspect’s silence, and as Janet Coterill states it is perhaps an ‘inevitable consequence of human reasoning’ that silence is interpreted as guilt. Janet Coterill, ‘“You Do Not Have the Right to Say Anything”: Instructing the Jury on the Defendant’s Right to Silence in the English Justice System’, Multilingua — Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, 24 (2008), 7–24 (22).
Margaret R Higonnet, The Representation of Women in Fiction, edited by Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) pp. ix–xxii (p. xx).
Performance of Medea, Queens Theatre London, 13 February 2001. In both James Morwood’s and Diane Arnson Svarlian’s translations, Medea’s verbalisation of her situation is accompanied by cries such as ‘Aiai’ and ‘Aaaah!’. This is reduced to a ‘primal cry’ in Liz Lochhead’s version. Euripides, Medea: Hippolytus: Electra: Helen, translated and edited by James Morwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 4;
Euripides, Euripides: Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, trans. by Diane Arnson Svarlian (Indianopolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2007), p. 66; Lochhead, Theatre Babel’s Medea, p. 6.
Simon Goldhill, How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 21; John Dillon, ‘Medea: From Witch to Intellectual’, Medea Program, Abbey Theatre, 2000;
Peter Arnott, Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 87.
Dolores O’Higgins, ‘Medea as Muse: Pindar’s Pythian’, in Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy and Art, edited by James J. Clauss and Sarah Iles Johnston (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 103–26.
Elin Diamond, ‘Realism’s Hysteria: Disruption in the Theatre of Knowledge’, in Unmaking Mimesis: Essays in Feminism and Theatre, ed. by Elin Diamond (London and New York: 1997), p. 27.
Fiona Shaw, ‘The Irony of Passionate Chaos: Modernity and Performing Medea’, New Theatre Quarterly, 20 (2004), 237–44 (p. 242).
Aoife Monks, ‘“The Souvenir From Foreign Parts”: Foreign Femininity in Deborah Warner’s Medea’, Australasian Drama Studies, edited by Brian Singleton and Anna McMullan, 4 (2003), 32–45 (p. 40).
Merry Morash, Understanding Gender, Crime and Justice (London: Sage, 2006), p. 238.
Lesley M. McLaughlin, Media Representations of Myra Hindley (Lesley M. McLaughlin, 2007), p. 9.
Duncan Staff, The Lost Boy: The Definitive Story of the Moors Murders and the Search for the Final Victim (London: Bantam Press, 2007), p. 9.
Beatrix Campbell and Judith Jones, And All the Children Cried (London: Oberon, 2002), p. 41. Further references are in text.
J. L Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
Janelle Reinelt, ‘Toward a Poetics of Theatre and Public Events: In the Case of Stephen Lawrence’, The Drama Review, 50 (2006), 69–87 (pp. 72–4).
Terry Eagleton has discussed the ethical implications of the link that exists between ‘pity’ and ‘intimacy’. Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: A Study of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 161.
Robin Soans, Verbatim Verbatim: Contemporary Documentary Theatre, edited by Will Hammond and Dan Steward (London: Oberon, 2008), p. 32.
Stephen Bottoms, ‘Putting the Document into Documentary: An Unwelcome Corrective’, The Drama Review, 50 (2006), 56–68 (p. 58).
Dan Rebellato, ‘New Theatre Writing: Dennis Kelly’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 17 (2007), 603–8 (p. 604).
Stuart Young, ‘Playing with Documentary Theatre: Aalst and Taking Care of Baby’, New Theatre Quarterly, 25 (2009), 72–87 (p. 81).
Dennis Kelly, Taking Care of Baby (London: Oberon, 2007), p. 15. Further references are given in the text.
A special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review is devoted to a discussion of the provocations of Crouch’s work. Stephen Bottoms, ‘Forum Introduction: Tim Crouch, The Author, and the Audience’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 21 (2011), 390–3 (p. 391).
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© 2015 Margaret Inchley
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Inchley, M. (2015). Women Who Kill Children: Mistrusting Mothers in the Work of Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw, Beatrix Campbell and Judith Jones, and Dennis Kelly. In: Voice and New Writing, 1997–2007. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137432339_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137432339_7
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