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Brechtian Gestus and the Politics of Tea in Christina Reid's Tea in a China Cup JOANNA LUFT As the title of Christina Reid's play suggests, tea and its rituals provide key moments of insight into the dynamics of the narrative and characters of Tea in a China Cup.' Reid constructs in rea a female order around the phenomena of tea and china, the authority of which she emphasizes by equating it with the public, masculine, and what is usually considered more politically fraught, league of the Orange Order. She demonstrates that the domestic sphere of the female characters parallels that of the Orange Order and is steeped in as much of the Irish Protestant politics of the day as is the official organization. In rea Reid investigates the gendered aspect of Northern Irish socializing processes and reveals how the perpetuation of social and political systems arises and is maintained in the private, traditionally female sphere of the house. While very little critical attention has been paid to her work - as Maria DiCenzo remarks, in his survey of Northern Irish political drama D.E.S. Maxwell's extremely narrow definition of "political" relegates Reid's undiscussed play to a "subsidiary list'" - rea directly engages with political issues in Northern Ireland. Diderik Roll-Hansen's treatment of the play suggests its political agenda by arguing the anti-naturalism of Reid's work, its difference from social realism.3 I would like to continue this discussion by exploring the political commentary that Reid conducts when she constructs tea - the drinking of it and discourse that surrounds it - as a Brechtian gestus. Through the female characters' custom of tea-drinking Reid both exemplifies and critiques the social relationships of the women themselves and the traditional values that they eternalize. Furthering the significance of tea as a political construct, I would like to discuss how it partakes in Elin Diamond's theory of a gestic feminist criticism, whereby the gestus enacts a social commentary on gender through an engagement among women specifically.4 Throughout the play, whenever the female characters gather for a cup of Modern Drama, 42 (1999) 214 Gesrus and the Politics of Tea 2 15 tea, or whenever tea accentuates the activities and situations of the characters, its primary function in the scene is to operate as a gestus, to show and comment on the social relationships between characters. Tea functions as gestus both, as Brecht stipulates, by "convey[ing] particular attitudes adopted by the speaker towards other men" and by "allow[ing] conclusions to be drawn about the social circumstances."s While a physical or spoken indicator embodies the gestus - in Tea it is the occasion of tea and its china rituals - the power of the gesrus arises from its capacity, as Margaret Eddershaw states, to enable "the audience to perceive and understand the sociopolitical implications of the events on stage...6 The realm of the Brechtian gesrus is social, and the tea-time discourse of the female characters that the play scrutinizes revolves around relationships that are distinctly social, as opposed to private. Sarah and Beth are primarily social rather than individual characters, are more a Protestant mother and daughter than two psychologically complex personalities. The friendship between Beth and Theresa revolves around issues of religion and economics, and the question of Beth's marriage hinges on conventions of female sexuality and its commodification. Although the space in which the ges/us is acted is physically private, the discourse that surrounds it is an entirely social and political one. By insisting on a confonnity to traditional values in a language characterized by hostile oppositionality, the discourse of tea and china works to secure the solidarity of Ulster's Protestant faction. As Patrice Pavis tenns it, gestus operates as a "meaning detector."7 Instances of tea drinking or talk of china alert us to a critique embedded in these gestures. The gesrus "exists at the level of prosodic and textual signifieds.'" It is not the intricacies of tea-drinking or china cups in which the text is interested, but the attitudes that comprise, and the implications of, this femini zed activity. Tea and its rituals signal to the audience...

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