Dirty Butterfly; Born Bad; Trade; Stoning Mary; Generations; Random
‘One of the most assured and extraordinary new voices we’ve heard in a long while’; ‘A distinctive talent’; ‘Undoubtedly one of British theatre’s most exciting new talents’.1 So wrote several of the London theatre critics in the wake of debbie tucker green’s debuts with Dirty Butterfly (Soho Theatre, 2003) and Born Bad (Hampstead Theatre, 2003) – tributes that were endorsed as Born Bad won her the Olivier Award for Most Promising Newcomer. What makes green’s work ‘extraordinary’, ‘exciting’ and ‘distinctive’ is her métissage, her mix, of black cultural and white theatrical influences and resonances.2 Think ‘Mamet welded with Ntozake Shange’ writes one critic; ‘Black Pinter on speed’ says another, while echoes of the late Sarah Kane are claimed by many others.3 Her theatre is a black urban voicing of the experimental and the experiential; a scratching and mixing of elliptical strains and cruel sensations. Although she is seen by some as heir to the ‘Cruel Britannia’ lineage of Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill, it is also important, as Lynette Goddard argues, critically to situate her theatre as a black woman writer within black cultural contexts, influences and traditions where green locates her main inspirations as coming from black music, poetry and performance, particularly by women such as Jamaican poet Louise Bennett, African American poet-playwright Ntozake Shange, and rapper/singers such as Lauryn Hill, Beverly Knight and Jill Scott.4
In the role of black British griotte (female storyteller), green narrates her angry political objections to contemporary island mentalities; seeks to dis-ease her spectators into viewing the dehumanising effects of an inability to care for ‘others’, locally and globally.5 In this regard, she shares common ground with Caryl Churchill, whom green acknowledges as an important influence on her work.6 At the Royal Court in 2008, directing a reading of her favourite Churchill play, No More Sleepless Nights, for the older playwright’s seventieth birthday celebrations, green’s aural choreographing of Churchill’s elliptical lines gestured to the canvas of her own carefully crafted compositions. Where Churchill is the acknowledged doyenne of theatrical invention, green rapidly has earned critical praise for her ‘linguistic invention’.7
Another similarity with Churchill is that green is an intensely private person, wanting critical interest to focus on her work and not on herself or her family. Akin to a character in one of her plays, her biographical backstory is, therefore, decidedly elliptical. Personally, little is known about the writer other than her British Jamaican roots, and her dislike of interviews.8 Professionally, she is known to have had a ten-year career in stage management before turning to writing.9 In addition to her playwriting, which includes Trade (RSC, 2004), Stoning Mary (Royal Court, 2005), Generations (Young Vic, 2005) and Random (Royal Court, 2008), green has also produced work for BBC radio – Freefall (2002), To Swallow (2003), Handprint (2006), Truth (2009) – television – Spoil (Channel 4, 2007) – and film: Heat (Hillbilly, Film London and UK Film Council, 2009).
green’s Dirty Butterfly opened at the Soho Theatre on 26 February 2003 (it was revived at the Young Vic in February 2008). The play, as its title suggests, is characteristic of the beautiful but brutal poetics depicting human frailty as it flutters to survive a soiled, abject contemporary world that green’s theatre has come to represent. In this particular instance, three (butterfly) lives are scarred by an inability to transform the respective circumstances of their daily, ‘dirty’ living into something more hopeful. Jo (white and female) suffers domestic abuse at the hands of a routinely violent husband who figures as an absent but threatening presence. Living either side of her are Amelia and Jason, both of whom are black, and appear previously to have been in some kind of relationship, but are now estranged by the triangulated dynamics of the abuse situation. Unable to cope with the nightly ritual of abuse that she can hear through the paper-thin walls, Amelia has decamped downstairs and taken to sleeping in her living room. On the other hand, Jason is as much addicted to listening to, perhaps even getting sexually off on, the ‘audio version’ of abuse (p. 32), as Jo is enthralled by the abuser she finds impossible to leave. All three lives are poised in a precarious abusive balancing act: Jo with her husband, Jason listening to the marital mistreatment of Jo, and Amelia fortifying herself against the loss of Jason’s affection and the sounds of cruelty coming from Jo’s bedroom. All of this influenced the set design for the original production: a ‘steeply sloping’ arrangement that meant ‘the characters [lay] like pinned butterflies or sprawled murder victims’.10
The abuse of Jo evidently is having a contagious, contaminating effect; the ‘dirt’ rubs off on and sticks to the other two. While abuse is the subject the characters converse into a dominant theme of the play, green eschews any kind of issue-based drama. Rather, the rhythms and repetitions of her spare, sparse, fragmented lines are core to her meaning-making tactics by which, as spectators, we come to feel the isolation, suffering and hardship of these abject lives. The ‘incompleteness’ of the dialogue makes for ambiguity rather than clarity; for a partial rather than complete knowledge of the ‘bad butterflies going ballistic’ (p. 23) inside each of the characters. This is further underscored by the way in which green instructs that the dialogue move at all times between the characters but never outwards to the audience, positioning her spectators as voyeuristic eavesdroppers. Equally, ambiguity is heightened by her explanation of how in the main part of the play ‘options can be taken regarding who is talking to who and when, with varying implications for the characters. The form of the piece has been left open for these choices to be made’ (p. 2).
There is, however, a compositional shift from the main part of the play to the epilogue that presses the visceral buttons of seeing the effects of abuse. Here Jo seeks out Amelia in the public space of the café that she is employed to keep ‘extremely shiny, clinically clean’ for the owners (p. 38). As a ‘defiant’ Jo, ‘weak’, ‘damaged’, ‘bleeding’ and ‘wet’, trespasses into the newly cleaned space (p. 38), ‘sparklin and ready for them to start their day’ (p. 42), Amelia refuses the safe-making, woman-to-woman comforting that Jo craves. Her response is practical rather than loving. She offers Jo sanitary towels to keep her from further dirtying the space; hands her ‘a clean glass of crisp water’ (p. 50) rather than making her the hot, milky comfort drink she would prefer. As Jo dirties Amelia’s clean space, so Amelia unwittingly treads in the traces of Jo’s filth (blood), leaving a bloody trail of footprints that figure her body as contaminated by Jo’s and damaged by an inability to reach out of her ‘well of loneliness’ to another woman.
While Dirty Butterfly tackles domestic abuse through its trio of isolated, dysfunctional characters, Born Bad, which opened at the Hampstead Theatre on 29 April 2003, picks up the abuse narrative, but threads it through a family-based story of incest. Instead of neighbours living in close proximity to each other, Born Bad presents a ‘blood-related black family’ (p. 2) – a Mum, a Dad, a Dawta, Sister 1, Sister 2 and Brother – whose closeness as a family unit is challenged by Dawta’s desire to out the dark secrets of familial kinship.
The dramatic revelation of a dark and dangerous family secret has a significant ancestry in Western theatre. green’s contribution to this, however, plays with the dramatic conventions of crisis revelation and aftermath restoration in ways that leave spectators with a feeling for rather than full knowledge of events from the past, for memories are represented variously as unreliable, faulty, repressed or contradictory. Sister 1 has ‘bits’ of bad memories that support the idea that both Dawta and Brother were sexually abused by their father. Sister 2, who counts on a rosier view of the past, counters that ‘bits don’t count’; ‘the bits don’t make the bulk and | the bulk don’t mek the whole and the all a your bits | together don’t make your versions true and never will’ (p. 39). If there is a moment in which the ‘bits’ appear to confirm the truth, it is signed visually rather than verbally towards the close of the play: Dawta, who previously refused to sit down with the family group, is seen sitting with her family, not on a chair but on the floor between her father’s legs (p. 48). As Dawta sings and hums the prayer ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’ (a reversal of the opening moments where the singing of the same prayer is assigned to Mum), Brother appears also to have revealed his story of abuse to their mother who ‘cries oddly, silently. Awkward. It’s been a while’ (p. 49).
For green the ‘question at its [the play’s] heart is: what did mother know? You sometimes hear in trials of abusers that the mother said she didn’t know. And you ask yourself: “How come?”’11 ‘How come you played me like wifey when I shoulda stayed playin dawta?’ is the question Dawta asks her mother (p. 32). Bad mouthing her first-born as the daughter who ‘was born bad right from the beginning’ (p. 33), Mum’s slippery and cruel admission is that if it is true that she ‘did mek a choice’ about which of her daughters to make a sexual sacrifice of, then Dawta ‘made it easy’ (p. 34). Reversing the cultural-feminist heritage of plays that offer the primacy of mother–daughter relationships as an antidote to patriarchal oppression, Born Bad gestures to the cruelty of intra-sexual betrayal: to the maternal ‘bitch’, that Dawta cannot bring herself to call ‘mum’ (Scene Two), and the mother’s image of Dawta as the ‘bitch of the family’ (Scene Seven).
The verbal lashings of abuse dished out to each other by the family members (with the exception of Dad, who for the most part remains a silent, presumed guilty presence) constitute the affective means by which spectators are drawn experientially into the drama as they are made to feel the familial trauma of ‘growing up on eggshells’ (p. 16). In the original production directed by Kathy Burke, the edgy feeling of being drawn into the darker side of family life was reinforced by the aural choreography of chair slamming (chairs being the only furniture to signify the domestic in an otherwise bare, white-screened space) and the sequences of silent, often confrontational, looking between different family members. Such silent gazing routines served to punctuate the volley of verbal exchanges in which the need to know the truth was as complicated and complex as the perverse sibling rivalries to be confirmed as the special, the chosen one.
A different set of all-female rivalries is explored in Trade and its treatment of the topical subject of female sex tourism. A version of the script was developed for the RSC’s New Work Festival in 2004 (The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon), which transferred to the Soho Theatre in March 2005. A subsequent (the published) version of the script was performed at the RSC’s New Work Festival at the Swan Theatre, opening on 25 October 2005.
The play is written to be performed by three black actresses. Initially, the actresses appear in character as women ‘local’ to an exotic, Caribbean holiday destination. One performer remains in the role of the Local – she plays a black woman who earns a living on the beach, braiding the hair of Western women holidaymakers. The other two actresses assume the roles of white women tourists: Regular, who is an old hand at the holiday-sex-tourist business, and Novice who is entirely new to the game. To have black performers play black women playing white tourist women and all of the other characters cast in green’s sex tourism narrative, including Bumster, the Local’s man who sex ‘trades’ with Regular and Novice, serves to signify the sexual and racial inequalities of female sex tourism in which Local is revealed as the most exploited.
Female sex tourism is a controversial issue on account of the complex layers of (s)exploitation it involves.12 On the one hand it is argued by sex travellers like Jeannette Belliveau (Romance on the Road) that it is an opportunity for women to make good the disappointments and deficiencies of sex and romance in their regular, Western lives. In the play, despite the post-feminist protestations of the younger white woman Novice, her sexually liberated voicing of ‘we don’t get bossed it no more’ (p. 25), it is clear that successful (hetero)sexual relations, pleasures, or romance are missing from life back home. As Local challenges both Novice and Regular: ‘What – yu noh able to be the women yu | wanna be over your “there” or what? | That why you come over to our “here” is it?’ (p. 30). On the other hand, the female sex tourist is also seen as someone who uses her white Western privilege to exploit economically disadvantaged men from tourist destinations; as someone who deludes herself into believing she is paid romantic compliments as opposed to paying for (sex) compliments. Or, as Local insists, when her man Bumster buys a white Western woman a drink this is not a romantic gesture but rather a ‘high balled glass a flattery’ (p. 17); it is not a signifier of romance but of an ‘economic-transaction’ (p. 21).
All three women are divided from each other by geographies of difference: of economics, class, culture and race. green ‘trades’ on these differences to fuel angry exchanges about ‘who is fuckin who?’ and ‘who’s been fucked (over) –?’ (p. 59) in ways that are both highly comic, given how the women constantly rival each other on the bitch-o-meter, and politically hard-hitting as these build into the play’s overriding call for women to be ‘equal righted’ not nationally, but transnationally. In the words of Local who contests the white Western gaze of the tourist women:
Yu there lookin the kinda man you lookin
to like / like to like / like likin our man’s
dem… right.
Thass your… human right. Right?
Where’s mine. (p. 27)
Human rights are at the heart of Stoning Mary, the play that saw green making her professional Royal Court Theatre mainstage debut on 1 April 2005. The play has three story strands: about a couple who fight over a prescription to treat AIDS; about a boy soldier coming home to his parents, and the stoning of Mary. Initially, each story appears as though in isolation from the others. However, as the scenes unfold so too do the connections. In a revenge-styled chain of reactions, as the boy soldier kills the AIDS couple, it is their daughter, Mary, who kills the boy soldier, whose mother, as the play closes, is imaged as the person who ‘picks up her first stone’ (p. 73) to kill Mary.
green’s directions instruct that ‘the play is set in the country it is performed in’ (p. 2). Yet as this synopsis suggests, limited access to life-saving medicines, the stoning of women and boys trained to be soldiers are not the kinds of atrocities associated with living in the UK. However, green’s invitation to her audiences is to think: What if it were like this? What if we did not have enough medicine and had to fight to survive? How would we behave? What might we do? As the play’s director Marianne Elliott explained, Stoning Mary is about our Western inability to imagine what it is like for people on another continent, in the poorest parts of Africa for instance, and
about a malaise that might be happening within this country, about helping each other. All the characters in Stoning Mary are trying to fight to survive, they are living in much more extreme conditions than the way that we normally live our lives, but nevertheless we are able to see, because it is much more extreme, we are able to see quite how bad things are. They have to be pushed that far. How would we behave? What would the extreme version of how we behave now be, if we had to survive?13
Brechtian-styled titles present each scene, opening with the title ‘The AIDS Genocide. The Prescription’ (p. 3), as the Husband and Wife, each accompanied by an Ego, fight over the prescription, ‘that one prescription for life’ (p. 13) when what they need is two. The scene works like a duel – like a western-styled stand-off where the question is who will be the first to draw the gun and kill the other; be the first to get to the prescription and be saved? This stand-off is partly realised through the motif of ‘lookin’; through a choreography of looking and looking away, turning ‘eyes to the skies’. Not that there is to be salvation from on high. There is no benign presence looking down and looking on. ‘God got bored before we did,’ claims the Husband (p. 17).
Meanwhile, in this godless, loveless world, the Mum and Dad of the boy soldier attempt to recollect the child they have lost to soldiering. The mother thinks of kissing, touching and holding her son in affection. But then, to ‘hold’, to ‘touch’, Dad reflects, is also to be held down, pinned down, to ‘play hard, play dead’ (p. 20). So the child is lost to his parents – lost to them or taken from them as the boy turns soldier and turns his machete on Mary’s parents. The time for family talk or talking of family is well and truly past as the son no longer talks but ‘barks his demands and shouts his | curses –’ at Mum and Dad (p. 51).
An idea of the family undone by violence, killing and hatred, surfaces in the ‘Stoning Mary’ scenes that begin mid-way through the play. Scene Eight features Mary locked up for avenging the killing of her parents, and visited by her Older Sister. Sisterly love and concern is in short supply, however, as Older Sister’s conversation turns on her own worries, her own self-centred interests. For instance, Mary is now wearing glasses having had her eyes tested and her sight corrected. How unfair, Older Sister comments, when her eyesight might in fact be worse than her sister’s. And how unfair of Mary, she observes, to have given up smoking when it was she who got her Older Sister started on cigarettes. Feeling that she is under no obligation to see Mary but that Mary should be concerned for her Older Sister’s welfare, she declares:
I didn’t have to come did I? Did I. Did I?
– No I did not – and I’m fine thanks –
I’m fucking fine – I’m doin alright –
Thanks. Thanks for askin. (p. 48)
As in Born Bad, sibling rivalry is laced through the lines which are delivered with lashings of brutal humour, slicing into selfish behaviours of a white Western world that fails to care for others. Ultimately, Older Sister fails Mary as she gives away her ticket for the stoning (a sold-out spectacle of cruelty) to the correction officer. And as Older Sister and her Boyfriend begin to mirror the selfish actions of the murdered parents, so the marital and familial cycles of empty promises begin all over again.
The need to think beyond national borders in terms of our responsibility for and care of others is movingly represented in Generations, which takes the form of a lamentation for those dying of AIDS in Africa. Premiered at the National Theatre as a Platform performance (30 June 2005), it was revived at the Young Vic on 22 February 2007. For the revival, the Young Vic’s studio space was given a Cape Town-styled South African makeover (brightly coloured walls stencilled or dotted over with township images, and a red sand coated floor) designed to transport its audience to another world. The space resonated with the gospel singing and chanting of a South African choir who occupied the perimeter of the studio, surrounding the audience who were seated on plastic stools or wooden crates set in the sand. The spectators in turn circled the central playing space, set as a functioning kitchen (food was cooked, dished out and eaten), where the actors acted out the cooking and romancing ritual passed down through the generations of a black South African family.
This domestic family scene is played out five times, though each repeat is shorter than the one that went before it because one more member of the family is gone, lost to poverty or AIDS. Not that AIDS is ever mentioned explicitly in the text. Only in the final sequence between the surviving Grandad and Grandma do you hear these lines from Grandad: ‘This thing. This dying thing… This | unease. This dis-ease’ (p. 89). Rather, the inference of disease and poverty throughout the play comes from the cooking and romancing ritual where from generation to generation, the mouth that eats and kisses also receives the kiss of death.
What makes the fabric of this play a powerful and moving experience in performance is the weaving between the personal and the epic; the domestic family scene and the choir. The names of the dead are lamented in the prologue, and as individual family members die they are called out of the central playing space to swell the ranks of the choir. The humming and chanting underscores the spoken text signifying death as a daily presence. Instead of a family tree branching out and growing, the family is cut back and cut down. Dying before their time, the youngest generations are among the first to leave the space.
Like Stoning Mary, Generations is a play that challenges an island mentality; it moves audiences to think beyond the borders of white, Western privilege. Both plays made timely interventions into the global, political debates on Africa, as reflected in this comment taken from the Royal Court’s Education Resources on Stoning Mary, an observation that is equally applicable to Generations:
In January of this year Tony Blair made a statement that resonates strongly with the central theme of Debbie Tucker Green’s play[s]: ‘If what was happening in Africa today was happening in any other part of the world, there would be such a scandal and clamour that governments would be falling over themselves to act in response.’ (World Economic Forum, Davos, January 2005)14
In contrast to either the cyclical ritual of Generations or the three stories composition of Stoning Mary, Random takes the form of a single, linear narrative; it is a monologue to be performed by a solo black actress. Written in the summer of 2007, it was trialled in a Rough Cuts (works-in-progress) event at the Royal Court and given a full production in the Theatre Downstairs, opening on 7 March 2008. Performed as a solo piece on a stage without a set, sound or lighting design it was, as the show’s director Sacha Wares explains, a bold decision to opt for a mainstage production, instead of a staging in the relative intimacy of the Theatre Upstairs studio. It was a decision, however, that reflected the Court’s belief that the subject of Random, knife crime among teenagers, warranted reaching a larger audience.15 The play since has reached an even larger audience after being broadcast on BBC Radio 3 (13 March 2010), while the Royal Court has revived the show for its new Theatre Local project, conceived with the aim of taking work out of the theatre and into alternative spaces.16
Around the time of Random’s premiere, British newspapers were headlining the dramatic increase in the number of under-eighteen-year-olds convicted of carrying knives and the escalation of teenage knife crime casualties and fatalities, many of them from black families. To promote an anti-knife message, in May 2009 the Home Office launched its billboard and social networking campaign It Doesn’t Have to Happen.17 The campaign’s name sums up the feeling of Random as it dramatises the effects of knife crime on the family whose son is the victim of a random stabbing during a school lunch break. Written in a form and style accessible to young audiences, Random offers its own kind of anti-knife campaigning.18
Random begins with an ordinary school and work day in the life of a black family. The solo actress (Nadine Marshall in the original production) is charged with the task of playing all of the characters, shifting across the roles, emotions and linguistic registers. She appears first as Sister, whose voice is pivotal to the telling of the tragic events and of the play’s overwhelming sense of the ‘shit’ that just ‘ent fair’ (p. 50). As the play starts, Sister is heard complaining she would far sooner dive back under her duvet than get up for work. There’s just the tiniest hint of ‘somethin in the air – | in the room – | in this day – | mekin mi shiver –’ (pp. 3–4), that is niggling Sister, but nothing that prepares her, or Mum and Dad, for the tragic loss that this ordinary day brings. ‘Normal situations that become dark’ are the kinds of situations that green finds ‘intriguing’ as a dramatist, and in Random what begins as ‘normal’ turns ‘dark’ with the random killing of Brother.19 Hence, the ordinary everyday goodbyes – a ‘Laters Mum’ (p. 11) or a ‘stink message’ (p. 13) sent to Sister because her phone’s switched off – are tragically transformed into words of final leave-taking. The comic observational humour of family life, or Sister criticising her work colleagues for the way they ‘chat [their] shit’ (p. 14), in the opening part gives way to grief-stricken tones of bewilderment.
Away from the street scene of the crime that is rapidly transforming into a public site of mourning, the trauma of Brother’s fatal wounding plays out in the family’s front room. For West Indian families, the front room historically has figured as a special space, as a childfree room for best: ‘my visitor room –’, explains Mum, ‘my room fe best – | fe formal – | not even fe fambily’ (p. 26).20 The front room sanctuary is violated by the death of the child and the presence of the police officers who wear their ‘outside shoes inside’ (p. 32), breaking Dad’s ‘first law’ of ‘no Polices to my door’ (p. 25). Seeking sanctuary from the grief in the front room, Sister retreats to the ‘stink’ of Brother’s bedroom, drinking in what’s left of the smell of him, and asking the all-important personal, and at the same time socially relevant and pressing question, ‘How come | “random” haveta happen to him?’ (p. 49).
As Random exemplifies, green’s language is distinctive for its black British expressions, rhythms and slang. These vary according to the characters and contexts of particular plays. For instance, the familial voices of Random are individualised by notes of Jamaican generational ancestry (Mum), in contrast to the street registers of the young and talking-it-tough (Brother). In Stoning Mary the black-sounding white characters linguistically register the alienation between First World affluence and Third World poverty, whereas there is a black linguistic kinship to the blood-related family in Born Bad.
It is through language that green forms an experientially styled aural critique; a poetics of the beautiful but brutal lines of urban-speak that variously depict violent, domestic alienation; the vicious, senseless acts of ‘random’ street crime, or a contemporary world ‘coloured’ by social injustices and inequalities. Her lines are economical and elliptical. They often can consist of a single word and are frequently punctuated by silences during which meaning-making transfers to visual communication between the performers – the choreographies of gazing, or the beats and pauses in which characters physically convey their feelings for or attitudes towards each other. On the page, green has devised a convention for marking what she defines as ‘active silences’, whereby she sets out the names of characters without accompanying dialogue, as in this example from Dirty Butterfly:
Jason … I’m not goin nowhere
Amelia
Jason
Jo Heard you the other side still, still trying not to be heard… (p. 17)
As these moments cue silences as punctuating the verbal interactions, they produce a halting yet intensifying effect. By contrast, green frequently deploys the convention of overlapping dialogue (pioneered by Churchill) in ways that up the tempo of an emotional overspill.21 Equally, it is the rhythms, resonances and repetitions of the lines that drive the emotional patterning and texturing of her scripts. Repetition is key to
‘How people speak,’ she says. ‘Listen to a group of kids – just repeat and repeat and repeat.’ She demonstrates with a little improvised exchange: ‘It’s hot outside… it’s really hot, innit? I bet it’s really hot.’ Suddenly, ‘you’ve got half a page of dialogue’.22
Her dialogue is not written to flesh out events, dramatic details or to offer audiences fully rehearsed backstories to the characters cast more often than not as unnamed daughters and sons, brothers and sisters, or mothers and fathers. Instead, minimal and elliptical, the lines have designs on the audiences’ ability to navigate their way through the emotional undercurrents of abuse, (s)exploitation, AIDS or knife crime.
Equally, from a practical point of view, director Sacha Wares explains how working on a green script is akin to working on a musical score. The director of three of her plays – Trade, Generations and Random – Wares describes the rehearsal process as concentrating very much on an analysis of the language on the page. Commenting, for example, on the rehearsal process for Random she explains:
Debbie writes with an extremely pointed sense of two things: page layout and punctuation. And really it is like a musical score. The rhythm of the dialogue is really, really communicated to you through the page layout and the punctuation. So a huge amount of the rehearsal time was spent literally on analysing that punctuation and on accuracy.23
For Wares, the detailed attention to language that green’s scripts require is part of the appeal of the writer’s work.24 This also holds for performer Nadine Marshall who, in addition to Random, has appeared as Sister 2 in Born Bad and Novice in Trade. Wares explains how Marshall’s ‘hugely emotional’ style in performance may belie the fact that her rehearsal process is ‘very, very technical and extremely accurate’.25 This attention to linguistic precision and accuracy is something actress and director have learnt to work on together through a process that also involves green as writer: ‘She’s very present in the rehearsal room and she asks a lot of everybody,’ Wares explains. ‘For me as a director that’s just a joy.’26
As musical scores, green’s scripts also represent a challenge for theatre critics. More specifically, the primacy of language in her work, her attention to how the word looks on the page and is to be heard in performance, has attracted critical doubts as to whether her plays generically meet the criteria to count as drama or in fact better qualify as poetry. Dirty Butterfly has been described as a ‘voice poem’ and there was critical speculation as to whether it ‘should be a radio play’.27 Despite an otherwise positive review of Born Bad, Ian Johns for The Times cautioned that a ‘play defined by its linguistic invention can go only so far’.28 Subsequently, on a more critical note, Johns objected to the ‘writing’ of Stoning Mary as being ‘more like brutal tone poems than conversation’, while Quentin Letts for the Daily Mail wrote of Random: ‘This short event is not a play but it is certainly powerful theatre.’29 Similarly, as a writer green attracts hybrid labelling such as ‘poetic playwright’ or ‘theatrical poet’.
It is arguable that some critical anxieties stem, at least in part, from green’s retreat from realism, from denying critics the comfort zone of social realism. In this regard, her theatre contrasts with that of Roy Williams and Kwame Kwei-Armah – two writers with whom she is frequently grouped to evidence a more optimistic outlook for black theatre, writers who show a preference for populating a familiar style of gritty, hard-times realism with black characters. This observation is not made to be critical of dramatic strategies that explore ways of black belonging from within a realist form and stage tradition, but to understand green’s rejection of realism as fundamental to her presentational rather than representational style where, minimally rather than realistically set, the domestic transforms into the epic. For instance, instead of a domestic interior for Born Bad, she specifies ‘a solitary chair’ (p. 3), to prop up the familial setting, to transform it into a dangerous child’s game of musical chairs. Or, in Stoning Mary the rules of realism are undone through her instruction that the atrocities that ‘belong’ elsewhere relocate to the country the play is performed in.
Equally, her plays eschew the familiar dramatic conventions of exposition, crisis and resolution in favour of here and now reflections; the articulation of states of feeling bad about the futures lost to a monumental past of ‘growin up on eggshells’ (Born Bad, p. 16), of lives ending before their time of beginning (Generations, Random), or, alternatively, of lives ‘fucked’ through the ‘mornin’ that seemingly refuses to be the morning to end the cycle of all bad mornings (Dirty Butterfly, p. 50). Rather than plays soaked in lengthy dialogic exchange, the emotional truth of a moment is condensed into the linguistic lobbing of a single word, phrase or line – the ‘eyes to the skies’ in Stoning Mary, for example, that tell of the fatally selfish behaviours of the Husband and Wife. In Dirty Butterfly, mood setting does not take the form of detailed exposition but is captured in the alliterative phrasing of ‘butterflies gone ballistic’ (p. 4). Or in Random, a sense of a bad day dawning, of a comic-to-tragic world out of joint, registers in the ‘birds bitchin their birdsong outside’ (p. 3).
Rather than worry over or try to fix on generic categories, more critically progressive and productive lines of enquiry engage in looking to the politicising possibilities that arise from the generic and stylistic mix of a theatre between art forms. Ultimately, as a métissage at the crossroads of poetry and theatre, green mixes experimental, experiential and elliptical registers with black expressivity, in ways that can be claimed to effect a racial queering of the linguistic and cultural hegemony of English/ness. Moreover, it is also important to note the centrality of the female rather than the male characters to this métissage. For instance, as Jo drips menstrual (possibly foetal) blood on Amelia’s floor in Dirty Butterfly, the figuring of a female experiential registers as core to the greenesque landscape of lives damaged by a self-harming inability to connect to others. This, along with other moments of a damaged feminine, argues for a feminist perspective to her work. In contrast to second-wave feminist theatre that often focused on the ‘anti-man, anti-fam., lyin sentiment’ that Sister 2 refuses to hear in Born Bad (p. 19), green offers a feminist scrutiny of women’s intra-sexual behaviour, of their inability to be supportive of each other. Specifically, her work engages in criticism of post-feminism: it contests the idea that Western women are ‘equal-righted’ and no longer in need of a women’s movement; it critiques the ‘us and them’ apartheid of a so-called emancipated, privileged West that ignores the struggles in ‘other’ parts of the world to be ‘human-righted’. The sex ‘trade’ between the white women tourists, Regular and Novice, at the expense of the Local black woman is one clear example of this. Another is presented in Stoning Mary where a lack of affection between women is personalised in the story of Mary and her Older Sister, and politicised in Mary’s solo outpouring as she discovers only twelve women have signed her protest petition:
So what happened to the womanist
bitches?
… The feminist bitches?
… The professional bitches.
What happened to them? (p. 61)
The refrain of ‘bitches’ spills and distils into an angry lament over the lack of solidarity between women. If women are behaving like ‘bitches’ then they cannot be ‘sisters’. Or, ‘if yu lookin like a bitch’ as Born Bad’s Dawta accuses, you do not deserve to be called ‘mum’ (pp. 4, 7).
The challenge of green’s theatre comes from the challenge she sets herself to be formally and linguistically inventive. Hers is a theatre voice that renews with each play. It speaks to and through urban cultures of black British dispossession, historically marginalised, illegitimised, by traditions of white, middle-class theatre, and argues a transnational feminist political theatre that insists on the rights of all women, here and there, local and global, to be ‘equal-righted’.
Born Bad (London: Nick Hern, 2003).
Dirty Butterfly (London: Nick Hern, 2003).
Stoning Mary (London: Nick Hern, 2005).
Trade and Generations (London: Nick Hern, 2005).
Random (London: Nick Hern, 2008).
Aston, Elaine, ‘A Fair Trade? Staging Female Sex Tourism in Sugar Mummies and Trade’, Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 18, No. 2 (2008), pp. 180–92.
Edwardes, Jane, ‘Generations at the Young Vic’, Time Out, 26 February 2007 <http://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/features/2650/-Generations_at_the_Young_Vic.html>
Goddard, Lynette, Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
—, ‘“Death Never Used to be for the Young”: Grieving Teenage Murder in debbie tucker green’s Random’, Women: A Cultural Review, Vol. 20, No. 3 (2009), pp. 299–309.
Ifekwunigwe, Jayne O., ‘Diaspora’s Daughters, Africa’s Orphans? On Lineage, Authenticity and “Mixed Race” Identity’, in Heidi Safia Mirza (ed.), Black British Feminism (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 127–52.
McMillan, Michael, The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2009).
Royal Court, Young Writers Programme, debbie tucker green, Education Resources, Stoning Mary < http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/files/downloads/StoningMary.pdf>
—, Young Writers Programme, debbie tucker green, Education Resources, ‘Random Background Pack’,<http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/files/edufiles/Random%20 Background%20Pack%20FINAL.pdf>
Sierz, Aleks, ‘debbie tucker green: “If You Hate the Show, At Least You Have Passion”’, Independent, 27 April 2003 <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/debbie-tucker-green-if-you-hate-the-show-at-least-you-have-passion-596009.html>
—, ‘Interview with Sacha Wares’, Theatrevoice website, 20 March 2008 <http://www.theatrevoice.com/listen_now/player/?audioID=556>
—, ‘Random, Royal Court Theatre at Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre’, 11 March 2010 <http://www.theartsdesk.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id= 1161:random-royal-court-theatre-review&Itemid=25>
Urban, Ken, ‘Cruel Britannia’, in Rebecca D’Monté and Graham Saunders (eds), Cool Britannia: British Political Drama in the 1990s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 38–55.
1. Reviews of Born Bad in Theatre Record, Vol. XXIII, No. 9 (2003), pp. 548–9.
2. I borrow métissage from Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, ‘Diaspora’s Daughters, Africa’s Orphans?’, pp. 130–2.
3. Reviews of Dirty Butterfly in Theatre Record, Vol. XXIII, No. 5 (2003), pp. 251–2.
4. See Ken Urban, ‘Cruel Britannia’; Lynette Goddard, Staging Black Feminisms, p. 185.
5. Ifekwunigwe, ‘Diaspora’s Daughters’, pp. 135–6.
6. See interview in Royal Court Education Resources, Stoning Mary.
7. Jenny Topper, artistic director of the Hampstead Theatre, is quoted as saying, ‘She [debbie tucker green] has the three essential elements of a new voice: she is concerned with ideas, she is concerned with form, and she has the courage to stay true to her intuition and let her own linguistic invention come through’ (quoted in Aleks Sierz, ‘debbie tucker green’).
8. See Jane Edwardes, ‘Generations at the Young Vic’.
9. Sierz, ‘debbie tucker green’.
10. Kate Bassett, Independent on Sunday, Theatre Record, Vol. XXIII, No. 5 (2003), p. 251.
11. Sierz, ‘debbie tucker green’.
12. For a discussion of female sex tourism in respect of Trade and Tanika Gupta’s Sugar Mummies, see Elaine Aston, ‘A Fair Trade?’
13. Royal Court Education Resources, Stoning Mary.
14. Ibid.
15. Aleks Sierz, ‘Interview with Sacha Wares’.
16. The play was performed in a vacant shop unit at the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre in March 2010, followed by a national tour. For details see Aleks Sierz, ‘Random, Royal Court Theatre at Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre’.
17. See <http://www.bebo.com/itdoesnthavetohappen>.
18. For another contemporaneous example of a teenage knife crime drama, see Tanika Gupta’s White Boy (National Youth Theatre, 2007–08).
19. green quoted in Sierz, ‘debbie tucker green’.
20. For further details see Lynette Goddard, ‘“Death Never Used to be for the Young”’, pp. 301–2; Michael McMillan, The Front Room; and the BBC 4 documentary, Tales from the Front Room (2007).
21. It is interesting to note green’s direction of Churchill’s Three More Sleepless Nights in 2008 because this was the play in which Churchill first experimented with the overlapping dialogue technique.
22. green quoted in Sierz, ‘debbie tucker green’.
23. Sierz, ‘Interview with Sacha Wares’. See also Wares on punctuation and layout in the Royal Court’s Background Pack on Random.
24. Ibid. She also talks of the challenge of green’s scripts and of how she appreciates having enough rehearsal time, given the brevity of the plays, to explore the depth and the precise detail of the work.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. See reviews in Theatre Record, Vol. XXIII, No. 5 (2003), pp. 251–2.
28. Theatre Record, Vol. XXIII, No. 9 (2003), p. 548.
29. Theatre Record, Vol. XXV, No. 7 (2005), p. 424; Theatre Record, Vol. XXVIII, No. 6 (2008), p. 284.