Age of Arousal Read online

  Age of Arousal

  by Linda Griffiths

  Wildly inspired by

  George Gissing’s The Odd Women

  copyright © Linda Griffiths, 2007

  first edition

  This epub edition published in 2010. Electronic ISBN 978 1 77056 007 9.

  For production enquiries, please contact Michael Petrasek, Kensington Literary Representation, [email protected] or 416 979 0187.

  Published with the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books is also grateful for the support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Griffiths, Linda, date

  Age of arousal / Linda Griffiths.

  A play.

  ISBN 978-1-55245-190-8

  1. Suffrage—Great Britain—Drama. I. Title.

  PS8563.R536A68 2007 C812'.54 C2007-907044-2

  Dedicated to my mother,

  Pauline Maclean Griffiths

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Layne Coleman

  Playwright’s Note

  Wildly Inspired

  Fabulism and Reality

  Production

  Performance Style

  Thoughtspeak and Performance

  Kinds of Thoughtspeak

  Set

  Lights

  Transitions

  Costuming Arousal

  The Great Corset Debate

  Accents and Class

  Production History

  Age of Arousal

  A Flagrantly Weird Age

  Time Travel

  Research and Time

  The Victorians

  Pre-suffrage Beliefs, Victorian Style

  Womanly Graces

  Sex War

  Marriage

  Spinsters

  Sapphic Victorians

  Doctors and Sexuality

  Suffrage, Suffragettes and the Vote

  Pre-Militancy

  Class and the Cause

  Contagious Diseases

  Suffragettes

  Peace and War

  Men and the Cause

  Organization and Escalation

  The Split over Militancy

  From Suffrage to the F Word

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  FOREWORD

  by Layne Coleman

  I don’t know anyone who works harder than Linda Griffiths at getting it right. I don’t know anyone with her kind of will. I simply don’t. I see Linda, sparking intelligence, hurling her head back and laughing, shrieking with delight about a friend of hers who posseses boundless energy, ‘We should all be drinking her blood.’ You could do a lot worse than to drink Linda’s blood if you wanted to learn the art and craft of playwriting. It’s a cliché to say the theatre is a demanding mistress, but it’s true – it sucks your blood and spits you out confused and broken. And there’s always more work to do. There’s always another rewrite, another hill off in the distance.

  Linda has managed her talent well. She has written eight full-length plays and four shorter works. Considering that a play may take from three to five years, this is quite an accomplishment. And Linda doesn’t just bang them off. This woman worries them down to the bone. She does her homework and she does the tough slog. And the public loves her work, adores her – she’s box-office gold. Sometimes I think Linda is embarassed by this, as if the public’s affection were something to apologize for. Linda has achieved the kind of success in Canadian theatre that sets her apart. Linda’s success did not come through luck or not suffering dark periods. It’s a blessing that, when it’s good, it’s very very good. And it’s never not good with Linda. Sometimes it’s just more good than ever before. Age of Arousal is the best of the good. This is her finest wine, her deepest work, aged and honed and singing every breath along the path, every idea a challenge, an invitation to greatness. This play leads the audience inside the genius of Victorian women. Linda has chosen the Victorian age as the ship that will carry her richest cargo, and she has chosen well. This age is the one that Linda would be most comfortable in. But this is not a look back in time. This play is a cry to race towards the present.

  Age of Arousal is a real feast of the theatre. You sit down, you enter another world, you lose yourself in another age – but inside it is an age remarkably like your own, an age when women have to fight for everything: dignity, love, equality. It is a fever dream, but you don’t turn off your intelligence, you turn it on. The play is a set of Chinese boxes, opening one after another, each box leading to the next, each one lit with an inner fire of the glorious, suffering horror of sensuality, extraordinary intelligence and centuries of injustice, yet alive to the smells and thrills that life has to offer. Rattling and breaking their chains, these women in her play lift us into a domain we haven’t inhabited before in Canadian theatre. These are Victorian tigers let loose in the mall, Victorian tigers who smack us upside the face with delight, with the force of their vitality and struggle. They can hurt you, but you’re going on an unforgettable ride, one where you are going to be laughing hard with everyone in the theatre, and you will be moved. Moved by humanity and by the long march.

  Layne Coleman, a former Artistic Director of Theatre Passe Muraille, continues to act in and direct Canadian plays while writing and living on a farm outside of Kingston.

  PLAYWRIGHT’S NOTE

  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women fought in confusion and clarity, wisely and stupidly, for liberation. The ideals were high and complex – they included a world view of what women and men could each offer society if only a balance between the sexes were allowed. They fought for equality but for more than equality – they fought, as Germaine Greer says, ‘to allow our differences dignity and prestige.’ These are my philosophical ancestors. I always wanted to know more about them but was too lazy to find out until seven years ago, when I found a battered paperback in a second-hand bookstore and bought it for a dollar. It was a little-known Victorian novel by George Gissing called The Odd Women. As I’ve worked on this play, which I knew would never be an ‘adaptation’, I’ve sometimes felt Gissing standing at my shoulder, staring at my screen, wondering what appalling liberties I was going to take with his book. I have taken liberties. I’ve taken his basic characters and situation and leapt off a cliff I was dying to leap off. I like to think that he would say, ‘You go, girl.’ But maybe not. Maybe he’ll haunt me. I take the chance because the themes and characters of that age came bursting out of the keyboard, not as dry historical figures, but sexual and lubricious, explosive and contradictory. They beat down any idea of a buttoned-up age, they wept and fought, they made no sense, they made too much sense, they stretched my brain and encouraged the most delicious time travel. And so the dance of thievery and creativity has been danced with Gissing floating above, patron saint or appalled spectre.

  WILDLY INSPIRED

  George Gissing (1857–1903) lived only forty-seven years, but in that time he wrote twenty-three novels. Gissing’s first books, published in the 1880s, were grimly realistic studies of life in London slums. His best-known is New Grub Street, about the financial and marital difficulties of a group of struggling authors. Some readers are repelled by his gloom, others find his subject matter courageous. Most critics agree that his work offers unique insights into his time, including what it meant to be a not quite successful writer at the close of the nineteenth century. The details of his private life, which for much of his time was miserable, have fascinated readers for generations. He had two disastrous marriages, but at the end of his life some believe
he finally found a happy relationship.

  At first I read The Odd Women assiduously, using lots of coloured stickies. Just the way you would if you were writing an adaptation. Except Virginia went to Berlin. Mary became an ex-militant suffragette with guilt feelings over leaving the tough stuff. There were many turns away, but still the first draft was reasonably close to the novel. Months later I looked at the script and was totally bored. I was sick of subtext – the whole point of the Victorians was that there was so much underneath, but why should it be eternally underneath? I started thinking of a previous play, The Darling Family, where the subtext was so vital and in such contrast to the external text that it was spoken. I started to experiment with what I began to call thoughtspeak, and everything kicked into high gear. I dropped characters, altered characters, deleted threads of plot. The thing started galloping, and I could barely keep up. My own research on the women’s suffrage movement and the Victorian age took precedence over the novel. I deliberately avoided the book, refusing to read it again. But the basis was all there and a few scenes are still fairly close to Gissing’s. There is now a subtitle, ‘Wildly Inspired by George Gissing’s The Odd Women’. ‘Wild,’ not only because of the pace and style, but because of the liberties I took. ‘Inspired,’ because without Gissing’s inspiration there would be no play.

  But I knew I would have to be merciless with George Gissing. I would have to offend him and ignore him and make him squirm. I wanted to take the basic situation and basic characters and move them in my own direction without caring about George. But of course I did.

  Dear George,

  It’s not that I don’t care – I do. But I have taken your idea. I used your character names because I wanted that to be clear. They ask me how the play is different from the book and I want to say completely but that’s not true. I know you had a hard life, that you married a prostitute, that you really tried to understand women, to break the class barrier, to be kind. But I have to say that there’s a lot of what I would call misogyny in The Odd Women, even though the basic situation is so ahead of its time. Sometimes the things you have the characters say about women made me writhe. But in other places it is so powerful. Even Shaw never put that many women together in the same work. I found it dark, George. I know you saw many dark things and that your age was so filled with the contrast of light and dark. I added the element of sex and I don’t think that’s inappropriate, given your first marriage. You couldn’t write about it, but I can. When I’ve felt you over my shoulder, I’ve never been able to tell if it was a benevolent presence. You reached and yearned, George, I know that. And now this woman has reached into what you did and has done what she wanted. There is a George Gissing Society and I’m afraid they’ll want to tar and feather me. What you did is a flawed, brilliant thing – how bad is that? How bad am I to build on it? You found love in the end and I’m so glad. And people know your work and care about it even now. I’m one of them.

  Love, Linda.

  FABULISM AND REALITY

  Age of Arousal’s relationship to theatrical realism is something like its relationship to Gissing. A little dyslexic. Maybe dysfunctional. My theatrical style has always been hard to describe. At some point in every rehearsal I end up waving my arms, pacing up and down and blurting out, ‘But it’s not real!’ This is usually an illuminating moment born of pain and irritation on all sides. I probably should say, ‘But it’s not naturalism,’ but that doesn’t seem to fit either. Finally I thought of calling myself a fabulist – without really knowing what it meant. I looked it up. It turned out that science-fiction writers were once called fabulists. Fantasy writers are fabulists too. I imagined fabulists sitting around Paris in the twenties, their minds filled with Rousseau’s leaves, Freud’s cigars, Grimm’s fairy tales – also zeppelins, motor cars and telephones. The surrealists about to take off. But this was too fable. What about the turn of communism, of Hitler rising? I like to thread fantasy through a political eye. The problem with the fabulist definition is that the work is often inspired by something very specific, a person or an issue, often both. Then comes the unreal. Fantasists are escapists and so am I, but that’s not the whole story. When I started my company, Duchess Productions, I tried to articulate a sense of this work.

  Duchess Productions: Mandate

  Duchess attempts to dance between the personal, the political and the fantastic.

  Work about politics, illness, native/white relations, abortion, royalty and baseball does have a common thread. Duchess is called Duchess as a bit of fantasy, but also to evoke mythology and political absurdity.

  Duchess is dedicated to a sense of the fantastic in theatre, both in terms of a celebration of language and theatrical image. It creates work that deals with the heightened word that is sometimes evolved through a combination of improvisational work and traditional methods of playwriting. The process of creation changes with each project. The goal is to create theatre that is highly literate, physically imaginative and emotionally connected. A theatre where an exploration of the surreal does not exclude a love of language. Add to this an awareness of the topical, of political or social issues explored without reverting to polemic. While Duchess learns from a minimalist school, its roots are fabulist and populist, bridging the audience gap between the avant-garde and the popular without compromising what has come to be known as edge.

  Age of Arousal doesn’t take place in historical reality but in a fabulist construct – an idea, a dream of Victorian England. It is stuffed with historical facts and modern/Victorian issues, but the world created is unreal. The leaping-off point is the thoughtspeak, which is a tangible way to reveal the unreality as well as an expressionistic excess. If you go too far toward the dream, you lose the politics. If you ignore the dream, the thoughtspeak won’t work. Always there should be a tension between the genuine struggle of each character to evolve and the dance of fantasy as the play unfolds. Who knows what day it is, how many months have passed? You can track through this detail in the script and hopefully it will all add up, but it will never be key in how to approach the play.

  PRODUCTION

  PERFORMANCE STYLE

  In discussions before the first production, the main questions were ‘How big?,’ ‘What is the style?,’ ‘How big do you play it?’ It was impossible to answer then and still is. The play is crammed with ideas, but that’s not really what’s going on. Each actor must struggle to find a visceral connection to those ideas. Brain and gut, mind and quim, must unite to find the level of performance. No idea, no fact, is separate from these characters’ emotions. This translates into its own performance style. Age of Arousal is highly theatrical. On one hand, characters are bumping into each other on streets, fainting on cue, but on the other, real pain and sorrow are experienced. Navigating between these poles is like navigating all the other contradictions in this play. Lose the exuberance and you lose the vitality and essential weirdness of the piece, go too far into a performative style and you lose the genuine emotions that drive the characters. Caricature is to be avoided. These characters are real and must be played for real.

  THOUGHTSPEAK AND PERFORMANCE

  These characters speak their thoughts in wild uncensored outpourings. The invented term is ‘thoughtspeak’. Italics indicate a character is speaking thoughts. The italicized thoughtspeak lines are interspersed through regular spoken dialogue. Sometimes dialogue overlaps. The slashes (/) indicate an overlap of voices. The next actor begins speaking at the slash and continues speaking over the previous actor.

  Thoughtspeak is a verbal eruption from the depths of self. As if Freud were sitting to the side, demanding that the characters say everything. Naturally, they don’t. They don’t even say everything in thoughtspeak. But, with regularity, thoughts come to the surface, they are whispered, shouted, quickly tossed off – they happen in a breath. To the characters, mere dialogue is not enough to contain the enormity of their emotional/intellectual struggle with the world.

  The challenge for act
ors is to find a way to play the difference between thoughtspeak and regular dialogue. An interior voice must be found which necessitates a change in pace and intensity – a double rhythm. The thoughtspeak is verbose and quick, it should spill out like diamonds from a velvet box. The overall pace must be dynamic. The mantra for the whole play is ‘the text should be acted on the lines, not between the lines’. Pauses should be carefully considered.

  Thoughtspeak sections are never asides to the audience – they’re part of the scenes themselves. Sometimes they can even be spoken directly to the other actor, who holds the emotion and intention of the previous dialogue. Thoughtspeak can be played out but never to the audience.

  On the page, thoughtspeak is the thing that will either get people excited or turn them off. It’s different in performance. I hate to call it a device or a technique, since having characters expectorate their inner feelings has often been part of my work. In Maggie & Pierre, the Pierre Trudeau character bursts out with the unspoken at regular intervals, as does Maggie. In The Darling Family, I first used italics to annotate the difference between spoken dialogue and unspoken, inspired by Caryl Churchill. The Darling Family also included what I came to call arias, in which two characters speak thoughts in long sections of overlapping text. But in Age of Arousal I took the idea farther and with more characters. Throughout the process of development I fiercely maintained that thoughtspeak would not only work like crazy for the audience, but ultimately would be actor-friendly – even joyful to play. This theory was tested in rehearsals where an early stumble-through revealed a horrible cacophony – it was impossible to tell thoughtspeak from regular dialogue and everyone seemed to be screaming.