Mother Clap's Molly House (review)

Mother Clap's Molly House. By Mark Ravenhill, music by Matthew Scott. Royal National Theatre, Lyttelton Theatre, London. 24 September 2001.

Mark Ravenhill's new play is in many respects fun and impressive. This may sound like ample achievement for a play that many--including Ravenhill--present as camp and playful. Ravenhill bills Mother Clap as a "play with songs" and sets it largely in a Molly house--or prototypical gay club--in eighteenth-century London and at a gay men's underwear party in twenty-first century London. The National Theatre's publicity posters (pictured) show a heaving-bosomed woman dressed in be-jeweled period costume looking knowingly at the camera as she tightens the corset on an otherwise naked, muscular young man with his backside to the camera. But, as with Shopping and Fucking (1996), Ravenhill intends the apparent glibness of his title and superficiality of his situations to be just that--apparent. In both plays, he aims to present not just titillating action, but also cultural critique, particularly of the relationships between sex and power: the commodification of sex, the relationships between economic, sexual and gender oppression, and the hegemonic disciplining of genders [Begin Page 165] and sexualities. It is in fulfilling this critical ambition that Mother Clap's Molly House--both as a play text and in this world premiere professional production--is, for me, least successful. While it goes some way toward developing a critique of sexual and economic exploitation, it simultaneously exploits its own sexualities with inadequate self-reflection, parading pretty young men half-dressed in period costumes in a jolly romp revue apparently aimed not at building critique but at separating the grateful viewer from his supposedly superfluous pink pounds.

To return to my opening comment, however, Mother Clap is indeed fun and impressive. The central narrative revolves around Mrs. Tull, an eighteenth-century widow who turns her dress hire shop for prostitutes into a more lucrative Molly house for cross-dressing Mollies and is herself transformed into the Mollies' Mother Clap. Deborah Findlay as Mrs. Tull/Mother Clap is moving and comic in her transition from economic naiveté to shrewdness, and from a woman oppressed by gendered social limits to a woman liberated by her exploitation and transgression of those limits. There is comedy too in Ravenhill's quick dialogue, the songs, the antics of the Molly house, and the farce of act 2. There is also celebration, particularly of queer sexualities' deep modern history, the open expression of sexual desire, the variety of sexual and gender difference, the act of choosing one's alternative family, and the realization of fantasy that is otherwise proscribed by dominant cultures. In the heaven and earth of this production, for example, not only are God and Eros beautiful and young, they are both also black. To credit the play for its critical achievements, it begins to historicize different sexualities, sexual practices, and sexual economies and to link inequalities of gender and sexuality with capitalism, both nascent and advanced.

The critical effects of the play are, however, compromised by clutter, superficiality, and self-indulgence in some of the practices it would otherwise critique. The clutter is mostly structural, as the play labors to encompass too many stories and moves awkwardly between the past and the present. Mrs. Tull's stories alone are many, following her gendered exclusion from knowledge and capitalism and subsequent entry into them, her moral dilemmas over observing and breaking social protocols, her desire for a family, and her ensuing confused economy of choosing and partially buying one. This character is complex and is played by Findlay with wit and subtlety. Mrs. Tull's stories are, however, surrounded by too many others. Role-doubling across the past and present sets up comparisons which are not always helpfully suggestive. The eighteenth-century whore's botched abortion almost kills her, as does the botched labia pierce of the twenty-first century drug dealer's bored girlfriend. Both instances...