Queer Mythologies

Dimple Godiwala

Description

This book on Gems has a thesis or a 'backbone' which elicits the title Queer Mythologies. Pam Gems has written over 25 plays, and has not had adequate detailed analysis of her plays to date. She is a popular playwright produced often at the West End and has a widespread appeal by being on the pulse of cultural iconology. Gems writes strong central characters for both male and female actors, and often writes almost cinematically, with time shifts in a non-linear narrativization. Her characters are metaphors for contemporary women and men and she often herstoricizes, thus righting the balance of dramatic history by creating parts for women in British drama. Her dramaturgy brings to the mainstream theatre the identities and subcultures of class, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality making her plays queer mythologies.

Sujets

• Theater
• Performing Arts
• Idioma inglés
• Idioma galés
• Theatre
• General officer
• Irish
• English
• General
• Cultural Studies
• European
• Welsh
• Scottish
• Musique irlandaise
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841509464
• Langue: English

Extrait

Queer Mythologies The Original Stageplays of Pam Gems
By Dimple Godiwala
Pam Gems: I have such reverence for writers who are true explorers, who break form and content, who have that generosity which breeds vitality.
Queer Mythologies The Original Stageplays of Pam Gems
By Dimple Godiwala
This book is for Rohan, Natasha, Taira and Gina to help them appreciate a part of their cultural heritage
-
With love
First Published in the UK in 2006 by Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
First Published in the USA in 2006 by Intellect Books, ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, Oregon 97213-3786, USA
Copyright 2006 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Image of Pam Gems Clive Barda Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone]
Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons Copy Editor: Holly Spradling Typesetting: Mac Style, Nafferton, E. Yorkshire
Electronic ISBN 1-84150-946-9 / ISBN 1-84150-135-2
Printed and bound in Great Britain by 4edge Ltd.
C ONTENTS
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1.
Beginnings

Betty s Wonderful Christmas, After Birthday, My Warren, The Treat, Ladybird, Ladybird, Up in Sweden
2.
White women s mythologies

The Historical women

Identity Politics: Queen Christina

The Binary Machine and the Liberation of Woman: Arthur and Guinevere

Theatre as polemic: La Pasionaria



Icons and Whores

The Tragedy of Camille

The Legend of Edith Piaf

Woman as Controlling Subject: Blue Angel

Aspects of Woman: Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi

The Split Gestus of Woman: Loving Women
3.
Masculinities in crisis: Of straight and gay men

The Dialectics of Desire: Aunt Mary

Freudian Counter-discourse: Franz into April

Masculinity in Crisis: Stanley

Masculinity as Myth: Garibaldi
4.
Creating a space for the racialized Other

Being and Non-Being: Ebba

A Discourse of Gender, Power and the Other: Go West, Young Woman and Deborah s Daughter
Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendix
F OREWORD BY P ROFESSOR T IM P RENTKI
Tim Prentki is Professor of Theatre for Development at University College Winchester and co-author of Popular Theatre in Political Culture (Intellect 2000). He is presently preparing a monograph on the Fool as agent of social transformation in European theatre.
Dr. Dimple Godiwala has expertly undertaken the first comprehensive appraisal of the theatrical oeuvre of Pam Gems at a moment when her profound influence on the development of English drama is in danger of being seriously underestimated through critical neglect. Besides offering vital insights to the individual plays, Dr. Godiwala has succeeded in linking them to a coherent internal development within the life and work of Pam Gems. She is assisted in this task by access to Ms Gems and her son for insights into the contexts in which much of the work was created. Most importantly, she never loses sight of a particular play as a performance text and so is able to capture the theatrical essence in ways that transcend any literary achievement. This capacity is especially important in any analysis of Pam Gems achievement since it is predicated upon a fierce desire to work against the grain of the theatrical establishment. Godiwala captures this anti-establishment motif that runs through the plays through her own development of a definition of queer theory which is used ingeniously and effectively to forge connections and to demonstrate the gradual unfolding of Gems preoccupation with the outsider and the misrepresented. Yet at the heart of Gems strategy of defiance lurks a paradoxical desire to be let into the limelight which many of the protagonists exhibit. This desire is implicitly linked to Gems own situation: at once a scathing critic of the mainstream, yet simultaneously penetrating it to effect irrevocable changes to it. Central characters like Queen Christina and Edith Piaf who make their worlds on their own terms are nevertheless depicted as being at the mercy or rather the agency of those by whose permission they are allowed to appear in their starring roles. Though hungry for performance, they still cling tenaciously to an identity which defies the expectations of their audiences, even as Gems in her handling of their characters lures the audience towards a love/hate relationship to them. Godiwala reveals with clarity and penetrating insight, the ways in which this paradox is indicative of the attitudes that Pam Gems herself experienced in relation to the English theatrical establishment; at times enjoying the spotlight of the main stage and critical acclaim but more often suffering the consequences of a refusal to compromise her artistic vision.
This volume marks a significant contribution to the rehabilitation of Pam Gems reputation, and Dr. Godiwala reveals herself as a major critical voice on the contemporary literary and theatrical scene. This monograph is an absolute necessity for any students of Gems work and an important extension of applied critical theory in performance.
Tim Prentki University College Winchester 2005
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For a semester s sabbatical which enabled me to complete this book, I thank the School of Arts at York St John College. For commissioning the book and funding the writing, a big thank-you to Jonathan Gems. I am also immensely grateful to Jonathan Gems for providing appendix and other material, acknowledgements are elsewhere in this text. I am grateful to Pam Gems for making many of the still unpublished playscripts available. I owe gratitude to Professor Vincent Gillespie (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford), Jonathan Gems, Emeritus Professor Peter Thomson (University of Exeter), the anonymous reader at Intellect and most especially Professor Tim Prentki (University College, Winchester) and Stephen Michael McGowan who gave generously of their time to read the manuscript and advise.
I am grateful to Alan Sinfield for his original and stimulating point of view and Jon Stallworthy for being always challenging and inspiring.
I would also like to acknowledge my colleagues for the many discussions which have helped with my writing over the years, particularly Suzanne Stern-Gillet, Bill Luckin, Makiko Minow-Pinkney, David Rudd, Brid Andrews, Harold Robinson and David Richmond.
For the help they extended, my thanks to all the librarians and staff at York St John College Fountains Learning Centre, in particular, Lottie Alexander, Anthony Chalcraft, Claire McCluskey, Adriana Lombari, Fiona Ware and Linda West. I am also grateful to Grant Saker at York St John for typing the appendix.
My thanks to all at Intellect Books who helped make this book possible, especially my editor May Yao and, for her careful copy-editing and helpful comments on the text, Holly Spradling.
For her regular long-distance support and constant good cheer I would like to voice my appreciative thanks to my sister Falguni Mather, and for the sumptuous meals out whenever they are in town, my thanks to her husband David. I am ever in the debt of my husband Stephen Michael McGowan for his support, encouragement, appreciation, abundant love and understanding.
I am grateful to Heidi Burns at Peter Lang, New York, for granting me permission to use the material on Pam Gems from my previous book, Breaking the Bounds: British Feminist Dramatists Writing in the Mainstream since c. 1980 (New York: 2003).
A revised version of the section on Aunt Mary was published in Gender Queeries (Gender Forum), Number 8, 2004. This article was first read as a paper at the July 2004 University of Manchester Conference Queer Politics and Cultural Production which was dedicated to the work of Professor Alan Sinfield.
I NTRODUCTION
A dramatist as prolific and talented as Pam Gems ought not to need an introduction. Her plays have been celebrated feminist additions to English drama in the Long
Twentieth Century. 1 In Breaking the Bounds: British Feminist Dramatists Writing in the Mainstream since c. 1980, I briefly introduced the work of Pam Gems. Cannily on the pulse of the cultural moment, she proves it time and again in her work. It was once said of Marina Warner that she was able to spot cultural pre-occupations before they became part of the cultural zeitgeist. Gems dramaturgy anticipates many such cultural moments, later institutionalized and reified by prolific academic theorizing on the subject/s. It is important to note the time of writing of many of the plays: Queen Christina (produced in 1977) was written before H l ne Cixous plausibly and philosophically theorized about bisexuality, and can be said to be Gems prefigurative dramaturgical answer to Cixous lament about theatre in 1977:
It is always necessary for a woman to die in order for the play to begin. Only when she has disappeared can the curtain go up; she is relegated to repression, to the grave, to the asylum, oblivion and silence. When she does make an appearance, she is doomed, ostracized or in the waiting room. She is loved only when absent or abused, a phantom or a fascinating abyss. [ ] That is why I stopped going to the theatre; it was going to my own funeral, and it does not produce a living woman or (and this is no accident) her body or even her unconscious. 2
Aunt Mary, first produced in 1982, prefigures by more than a decade the prolific output on queer theorizing in the Anglophone world. The triad seems to be an appropriate answer to the destructive potential of the nuclear family as theorized by Deleuze in the 1970s (Anti-Oedipus).
Oedipus is the figurehead of imperialism, colonization pursued by other means, it is the interior colony, and we shall see that even at home it is our intimate colonial education. [ ] Oedipus is everyw