The
Devil’s Gateway by Sarah Daniels
“Second
floor flat in Bethnal Green, and the world is looming large over the lives of
Betty and her neighbours. If it's not Social Services, then it's Social
Security; if not's unemployment, then it's the bomb. Betty and her old friend
Enid, who is trapped in an abusive marriage, are mirrored across town by Enid's
daughter Linda, and Linda's lover Fiona, while Betty's daughter Carol tries and
fails to duck in and around the whims of her bullying husband.
And
all the while on Greenham Common, women are taking action. Against the bomb;
and against the patriarchal system that would drop it. We're used, Daniels
writes, to seeing men go off to war but we should get used to women going off
for peace.
The
Devil's Gateway was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, Upstairs,
London, in 1983.”
Cloud
Nine by Caryl Churchill
“Churchill’s
wickedly comic and compassionate study of sexual politics glimpses the
relationships of a family and their lovers, with an interval of twenty-five
years of their lives, and around a hundred years of history.
Highlighting
the parallels of sexual and colonial oppression, the first act is set in a
British colony in Africa in Victorian times. Clive is the traditional colonial
patriarch, proud of his perfectly domesticated wife and black servant (‘played
by a man’ and ‘played by a white’ respectively), and striving conscientiously
to ensure his son and daughter play with gender appropriate toys. But furtive
adultery and secret homosexuality threaten to subvert the moral order of the
household.
The
second act finds some of the same characters living in 1979, twenty-five years
older and played by different actors, finding new liberations in bisexuality
and polyamory, but finding new anxieties about gender and fulfilment. The
intricacies of these relationships and the play’s doubling create a complex and
moving account of the multiplicity of individual sexualities.
Cloud
Nine was first performed in 1979 at the Dartington College of Arts, before
touring and transferring to London.”
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