Queer Mythologies: The Original Stageplays of Pam Gems (review)

Queer Mythologies is the first full-length study of contemporary British playwright Pam Gems. Gems has hitherto received far less critical attention compared, for example, to her theatre contemporary Caryl Churchill, with whom she most frequently figures as a "pioneer" of women's playwriting and performance in the wake of 1970s feminism. Godiwala has a particular thesis to propose in respect of Gems: "Pam Gems, in contesting the logos and mythos of male reason, creates a mythology of the O/other to contest the white male dramaturgical hold on centuries of British drama" (12). To this end, Godiwala works through an attachment to Alan Sinfield's queer theorizing of "subcultural spaces" into which she claims "Gems writes" (12-13).

Within her queer framework, Godiwala organizes her material into four chapters. The opening chapter affords some all too tantalizingly brief insights into early work by Gems and some helpful biographical sketches for the student reader who is not familiar with the playwright and the profile of her theatre. A second more substantial chapter, one which, in fact, accounts for approximately half of the monograph (with some material from Godiwala's earlier, Breaking the Bounds: British Feminist Dramatists Writing in the Mainstream Since 1980 (2003), is presented in two parts: the first brings together Gems's plays about "historical women"; the second presents those plays in which Gems dramatizes "icons and whores." In the latter section, Godiwala puts up a spirited defence of Camille, a play that others (including myself) have argued only partially succeeds in its de-romanticization, de-mythologization of Dumas' Marguerite and her many descendants in theatre, film, and opera, despite the best of political intentions and dramaturgical choices. Godiwala is on firmer ground with her analysis of Piaf and Piaf's "unsettling mix of heady glamour and backstreet crudity" (56). A third chapter moves on to an interesting examination of a selection of plays theorized through and focused on Gems's attentions to masculinities, both queer and straight. Specifically, these are Aunt Mary, Franz into April, Stanley, and Garibaldi, Si!. The final chapter examines the idea of "negotiating a space for 'the other,' " paying attention to the uses that Gems makes of "the cultural Other" in Ebba, Go West, Young Woman, and Deborah's Daughter (101).

In all chapters, Godiwala foregrounds her claim for Gems's ability to prefigure those "cultural moments" that are "later institutionalized and reified by prolific academic theorising on the subject/s" (11). So, for example, Godiwala seeks to persuade her reader that Aunt Mary (1982) anticipates the queer theorizing of gay theorists such as Sinfield and others in the 1990s, or that "Queen Christina (produced in 1977) was written before Hélène Cixous plausibly and philosophically theorized about bisexuality" (11). I am not sure to what extent, however, getting a head of steam on Cixous is helpful to Gems (or, for that matter, Cixous), nor what the "working-class, part-gypsy Pam Gems" (113) might make of this as a way of framing her theatre. On the other hand, the monograph has a very helpful appendix compiled by Jonathan Gems that lists productions and production information, and the reader generally benefits from details of plays that have not been published.

There is a danger in academic theatre publishing that, where there is a first monograph on a playwright, it is also the last. I sincerely hope that this will not be the case with Gems, and that other scholars will pick up some of the loose threads of this first endeavour. In particular, more attention might be paid to the theatrical and feminist contexts and generations that Gems's theatre spans. There is much more teasing out to be done, for example, of the somewhat erroneous view that Gems "founded the Women's Theatre Group in 1971" (16), and a good deal more to be researched and said about Gems in those exciting feminist theatre times. There is a fascinating article waiting to be written about the...