Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights, 1990-2000 (review)

Elaine Aston's latest book demonstrates yet again her ability to capture multiple perspectives on contemporary women's theatre work. This useful and articulate text focuses on women playwrights, the English theatre, and the last decade of the twentieth century. The nine chapters chart an impressively wide range of work while simultaneously providing context and literary and dramatic analysis.

The introductory chapter, entitled "A feminist view on the 1990s," serves a double purpose. First citing various cultural critics (such as Susan Faludi), Aston provides a clear and succinct reading of the decade, one that is both specific and personal. From feminist backlash, to the crisis of masculinity, to the girl power of the Spice Girls, she catches the social and cultural pulse of this heady decade. Secondly, Aston presents a brief theatrical context infused with references to key feminist scholarship. And she points out her own limitations: the necessity of being selective instead of all inclusive; her focus on England and not Britain; and her attention to venues and companies dedicated to new writing.

The second chapter highlights the plays of Caryl Churchill, the writer in Aston's volume with the longest career. Churchill's prolific work spans the seventies through the present day and, unlike other writers in the book, "Churchill is someone whose playwriting career and political outlook have consciously been shaped by a continuing commitment to feminism" (18). Aston begins with a reading of the 1991 revival of Top Girls, first produced in 1982 at the Royal Court Theatre. This play, so enormously influential to theatre artists of the 1980s, serves as a touchstone for understanding and coming to terms with the wanton destructiveness of the Thatcher era. As playwright Mark Ravenhill states, "Nobody else got it quite so right, that epic struggle between two different value systems" (23). Aston continues with examinations of The Skriker (1994), Blue Heart (1997), and a brief look at Churchill's first play of this century, Far Away.

"Saying no to Daddy: child sexual abuse, the 'big hysteria'," the third chapter, continues the serious reflection on the betrayal of children that is also central to much of Churchill's work. Here the plays of Sarah Daniels from the early 1990s, such as Beside Herself (1990), with its split subject—the adult Evelyn and her abused childhood self, Eve—are examined. The play stages our culture's unwillingness to believe the victim. Other works considered here are Anna Furse's Augustine (Big Hysteria) (1991), Claire Dowie's Easy Access (for the Boys) (1998); and Byrony Lavery's Frozen (1998). The chapter ends with the 1999 London production of Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues, a piece which Aston recognizes for its high-profile politics and popularity among women, but warns that it "risks an essentialist reduction of women to Woman/vagina" (57).

The fourth chapter, "Girl power, the new feminism?," features the work of two playwrights little known outside of the United Kingdom: Rebecca Prichard and Judy Upton, whose respective plays Yard Gal (1998) and Ashes and Sands (1994) explore girl-gang violence and the troubling, yet empowering way it gives agency to young women. The violence and anger that are central to these works surface with a vengeance in the plays of Sarah Kane, the writer examined in the fifth chapter. Kane, known by the British press as "the bad girl of our stage," is Aston's most controversial subject, and Kane's plays are a challenging and difficult topic to tackle. To do so, Aston cannot merely consider the plays in isolation; the sensationalist news coverage that accompanied their productions is crucial to her reading of Kane. Aston treats three of Kane's plays—Blasted (1995), Cleansed (1998), and Crave (1998)—as a cycle of interconnected work that "variously treats and critiques the damaging and brutalising force of the masculine . . ." (97). Aston's detailed, in-depth consideration of these maddening and often impenetrable texts makes chilling sense in...