Birthday

Ridley Scott’s original Alien movie is, on one level, a brutal reflection of masculine fears of women’s bodies, specifically of impregnation and childbirth. The Alien perpetuates itself through a kind of grotesque insemination; a phallic organ penetrates the body through the mouth and down the throat, planting an embyro in the stomach where it incubates until mature, eventually bursting out through the stomach wall, in a nightmarish parody of parturition. This initiates a pattern of sexualised imagery that runs through the movie, from the Alien itself, a phallic mother, producing eggs but also unsheathing a long toothed phallus with which it kills. The murderous penis is echoed in the cyborg Ash’s attack on Ripley, pushing a rolled-up pornographic magazine down her throat, a sexualised form of attack that echoes the Alien’s own rape-attack.

Joe Penhall’s new play, Birthday, is in the same territory. We are in a counterfactual world in which men can bear children. The play takes place in hospital, where Ed has come to be induced and have a caesarian section. His partner, Lisa, seems unable to have children after complications associated with the birth of their first child. We watch them through the day, their middle-class sense of entitlement losing them patience with the nursing staff, Ed enduring a series of humiliating procedures to ensure the baby is in the right position. The baby is delivered but is running a temperature requiring urgent treatment, which tips Ed into bleak post-natal depression. But eventually the baby’s condition stabilises and the couple prepare to go home. Six of the play’s seven scenes take place over around 30 hours from late afternoon on Friday to Saturday evening. The final scene takes place a few days later.

It’s a good, simple idea, well realised and thought out in some detail. The medical procedures seem to me plausibly thought through and Ed’s sense of righteous indignation and righteous indignity are really well written. The interplay with the hospital staff - Joyce and Natasha - is both very funny and very recognisable; the polite submissiveness of the nurse and registrar a clear mask over their officious power.

The play’s a bit fuzzy, I think. The gender-swap thought experiment seems to want to have it both ways. At times, we’re enjoying the incongruity of a man saying and doing things we might usually associate with women: the first minute has him complaining that Lisa hasn’t bought him his raspberry leaf tea. At these moments, the play is in the comic territory of George Kaufman’s If Men Played Cards As Women Do which draws its comic energy on the preposterousness of men behaving like women. Wittily, the registrar has a tendency to defer to Lisa over Ed’s head, in a reversal of the standard sexist tendency of so many professional’s to tacitly assume that the husband really makes the decisions in a relationship. But at other times, the play’s asking how men would behave if they could give birth. Would we put up with the kinds of things we expect women to put up with? How would we mythologise male birth pain? How would we expect hospital staff to behave towards us?

The first of these, in a sense, relies on the stability of gender roles, the thought experiment only confirming the security of who we currently think we are in gender terms. The second is much subtler, opening up and interrogating gender behaviour and asking how far the world is built around particular attitudes to sex and identity. The play’s at its best when it pushes at this second question. It doesn’t push very far at it, particularly because I think it gets distracted by a satire on the NHS, in particular the strange mixture of care and neglect you find in a ward, the maddening lack of information, the seemingly arbitrary decisions beings taken on your behalf. This is well captured, very recognisable, wittily done, but it has a cost in the incisiveness of the play. Ultimately, it doesn’t seem as if anything much would be different if men could get pregnant. Of course, had he really followed the thought through and created the wholly counterfactual world, perhaps one in which pregnancy is suddenly seen as noble and masculine rather than bovine and feminine, and the health system had comprehensively changed as a result, we’d be even more in the realms of science fiction with perhaps a consequent lack of engagement and recognition.

The ambiguity is crucial though, because if it’s the first sort of play, it’s basically a rather conservative piece of work; if it’s the second, it has the capacity to be much more questioning and thoughtful. So politically, the play remains a curate’s egg: radical in parts.

Put another way, the play doesn’t know whether it wants to be sexist. I’m not the first person to say that Joe Penhall seems much more interested in women than men; his early plays are built beautifully around male-male friendships; his most successful play, the brilliant Blue/Orange, is all-male. Landscape with Weapon is set in a very male world, its single woman character passing as male very convincingly. In Dumb Show, the woman journalist uses her gender as a weapon, but remains herself something of a cypher. In last year’s Haunted Child, we’re watching a marriage in deep spiritual and emotional crisis, but it’s Douglas who makes all the moves and has all the best lines, while Julie is left to do little more than cope. Here, despite a witty and honest performance by the wonderful Lisa Dillon, Lisa is much less vividly realised than Ed. We know what Lisa says; we know how Ed feels.

But what Ed feels is fiercely interesting. The strongest bit of writing in the play is Ed’s horrified recollection of watching Lisa give birth to their first child:

You didn’t have to stand there listening to the ear-splitting screams while one congenital fuckwit after another came in, rummages around inside you and then fucked off for a smoke. No epidural. No doctors. You didn’t see them at the end, stitching you back together, legs akimbo, marinating in your own blood and shit, great strings of blood like drool. I don’t know why they invited me to watch - why do they do that? They kept showing me your vagina as if it were a holy relic. (Staring into space) men are visually stimulated. It’s our worst nightmare. Suddenly this blissful, heavenly organ, this ravishing jewel you’ve been obsessively petting and tending and eyeing with rapture all those years becomes the most alarming, harrowing thing you’ve ever seen in your life [...] I’m telling you, as a man, once you’ve had a child, once you’ve watched a live human emerge from your wife’s vagina, by God you need a change of scenery. (p. 36)

It’s strong because it has the stink of honesty, without adornment, without apology. It’s made dramatically possible by Ed’s depleted, agonised state, and it expresses the Alien feeling; that childbirth is a kind of body horror, an individual, separate human being, with its own will, comes out of another human. It’s the normal uncanny.

At one level, I don’t think Joe Penhall quite decided what play he wanted to write. Certain key choices were kind of fudged. Because what he’s really interested in exploring is the psychology of men in all of its horrors, irrationalities, prejudices and contradictions. This picture only appears in glimmers, but those glimmers alone make Birthday worth seeing.