Maryland

A couple of weeks ago, the wonderful writer, Lucy Kirkwood, enraged and horrified by the revelations in the Sarah Everard case and the murder of Sabina Nessa wrote a short, twenty-minute play, Maryland. She emailed it to the Royal Court who quickly saw what this was: an urgent, funny, brutal, challenging rallying cry from one of our most important writers, capturing a structure of feeling about one of the most appalling stories of the year that points to the underlying horror of hundreds of years of men brutally assaulting and murdering women. And so they immediately put it on, in a semi-staged, script-in-hand production in the Theatre Upstairs. (The Court has a good history of doing this. I remember Iranian Nights by Howard Brenton & Tariq Ali in 1989, a rapid response to the Rushdie Affair. Then there was Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children in 2009, a response to Operation Cast Lead, a sustained Israeli attack on Gaza. This is in that remarkable tradition.)

This is not a review. To review such a cultural intervention would be absurd. The performance is a cry of pain and you don’t review a cry of pain; you listen, you respond, you try to empathise, you search yourself for the source of that pain, and you bear witness.

The stage arrangement was six chairs facing the central bank of audience (who were on three sides), with another chair at right-angles to the rest at stage right facing stage left. There’s a microphone on a stand and two speakers. There’s a potted plant. There are some white tape markings on the floor that divide the stage into an upstage and downstage area. As the cast appear some of the cast write in chalk that the upstage is the POLICE STATION and downstage in THE STREET. On the back wall, they write ‘Furies’. Most of the cast sit in the chairs; they are, I guess, themselves Furies, certainly Furious women.

The play has a loose narrative. Two women have been assaulted within a few hours of each other and are brought to the police station where they are given photos to look at, but the photos hide the most distinguishing figure of the assailant and they are unable to identify him. The two police officers - one male, one female - are ineptly insensitive in their handling of the women and there is a twist.

All the women characters we meet are called ‘Mary’, hence the title, though also the policeman recalls that his mother (Mary) would go into reveries and his father would dismissively remark that she was off in Maryland. I wondered if we might think of this play as the mother’s reverie, a moment where she forgets everyday coping strategies and faces the true scale of the horror: that men are constantly assaulting and killing women.

The word Mary of course is resonant. Mary, the woman forcibly impregnated against her will in the Bible. Mary the prostitute. Mary the saint. Mother Mary,

Interspersing these scenes are some sections in which the cast, sometimes severally, sometimes chorally, address the audience, often asking playful questions that fence around the ways in which women feel exposed to male violence at home, in their neighbourhood, on the streets, and, of course, at the hands of the police. Some of these questions seem to be posed for the audience to respond (it wasn’t quite clear to me whether we were actually supposed to answer). That these are the experiences of all women, isn one way or another, is simply demonstrated by the broad and diverse cast and moments in the script when one young black woman notes that, because black women don’t bruise like caucasians, the physical evidence they present of assaults is often missed or ignored.

The momentum builds. It starts darkly funny; the male policeman’s ineptness is wittily shown. But the humour slowly fades out at the performance goes on and at the end the women of the cast chorally challenge us (and by ‘us’ I think I mean the men in the audience) asking when will we be as angry about what is happening to women as women are.

It’s rough, of course. It’s written at speed - though but a ferociously good writer so it’s beautifully turned. The play throws fragment after fragment to build a picture and a pattern. It addresses, through humour and anger, questions about police procedure, about the dull insistence that ‘not all men’ assault women (there’s an excellent analogy with a box of Maltesers that I will not spoil here), and it asks why women shouldn’t walk home at night despite the threats. It’s landscape is epic and finally casts a long line back through history. Although it is often very funny, there’s a brittleness to the laughter, because it’s a play that knows laughter can be a survival mechanism and maybe this is a moment not to try to survive but to change things.

There’s a particular device that I found powerful and unbearable. I feel bad mentioning the word, because the play doesn’t. But whenever any reference to ‘rape’ approaches in the script, the word is replaced by a sound, a horrible, ear-splitting sound, a mixture of screams and machinery and pneumatic drilling: a sound that forces its way into your head and knocks out all other thoughts. It’s a sound that is a kind of assault. It tears through the Theatre Upstairs whenever they mention is, more and more unbearable each time, and at one point the sound is extended to breaking point. It’s a very powerful idea, the neatness of the r-word, so freighted with pictorial and narrative baggage (Sabine Women, Nordic Noir, alarms, kits, accusations, etc.) replaced by a sound that represents the chaos in the cultural mind, the aggressive horror of that threat forever lurking.

The cast of nine are terrific. The direction is unfancy and to the point. It’s a grim, exhilarating, shaming twenty minutes and it’s a remarkable sign of our theatre stepping up to a cultural moment and challenging us all to care, to not let dead women be priced into the way we live our lives.

It’s on till Saturday 16 October. Do please go.