Gender Bending
Monday night's State Theatre forum speaks to a long theatrical tradition
In the wake of its presentation of a thoroughly impudent Trophy Boys, State Theatre is to host a forum titled Performing Gender: Why is it so Hot Right Now?
The company is following Trophy Boys in March and April with The Importance of being Earnest in May, another play where genders can easily be reversed, so there is plenty of ammunition to fight over.
Trophy Boys by Emmanuelle Mattana is a busload of gendered laughs, although by the time this hugely successful nationally touring 2022 production arrived at The Space last month it was starting to show its age. Memes are like that.
The cast are female or non-binary, playing privileged private school boys out to beat their privileged private sister school’s girls in the annual intercollegiate debate.
The subject: “Feminism has failed women.” They have the affirmative.
Most of the fun is about year 12 school boys learning to deal with sex, gender and sexuality. It first plays up to all the stereotypes, the nerds, the prudes and the males trying to be alpha, throwing everything into the mix in a melee of physical comedy and playing up to the inklings of homosexuality among them.
By messing with the actors’ genders Mattana has given cast and audience full licence to enjoy the gross behaviours that might be found among 16-year-olds in the privacy of their own single sex classroom. Certainly the cast zealously push every boundary.
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde’s play is famous for its twisted gender roles, starting with its ambiguous title. There is also a tradition of males playing Lady Bracknell. Even the idea of the nearly two-metre-tall Stephen Fry in the role is funny. Gender, as hinted for the forthcoming production, can be fluid or reversed or even straight, but the comedy and subtext of the play always come out on top.
It does mean there is some life left in the idea of playing against stereotype, whether female schoolboys or male Lady Bracknells. That may be politically incorrect but reassuring nevertheless.
State Theatre’s forum this Monday, April 13, uses a recently popular term, performing gender, but the practice has a long history of being hot.
The argument, for example, that Shakespeare had it sorted 400-odd years ago holds water. In a time when all-male casts were mandated, he was able to thoroughly homogenise the gender debate, making it clear that any combination was possible.
His male actors played women who disguised themselves as men, making delicious undercurrents for the audience, if not for the performers. Imagine how a male Juliet or Titania came across in their sexualised scenes. But add the theory that some women pretended to be men in order to secretly take on some Shakespearean roles and the depth of these urges seems truly seismic.
Gender fluidity, from cross-dressers to non-binary people, in fact the entire LGBTQIA+ world is as old as humanity.
Shakespeare, writing in the era of the first dominant queens of England – Mary and Elizabeth – finds plenty of room for masculine women and feminine men, as well as crossovers of gender and same-sexuality.
But Chaucer, a couple of centuries earlier, has lots of twists and turns of gender and sexuality in his Canterbury Tales.
More than 40 years ago at London’s Barbican I saw Helen Mirren playing The Roaring Girl, the Jacobean play based on London’s Moll Cutpurse (Mrs Mary Frith 1584-1659), and written by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker in 1610. Needless to say Helen Mirren made an indelible impression.
But I now remind myself that in that period where England went from Elizabethan to Jacobean, women were unusually prominent, in the streets as well as in the courts.
Moll Cutpurse is emblematic of the roaring girls – the rude, wild, wanton women – of London circa 1600. Contemporary descriptions have her as “a very tomrig or rumpscuttle”. Moll even appeared on stage, dressed as a gentleman, complete with sword after The Roaring Girl had made her even more famous.
Long Meg was another, probably part-fictional part-actual character of the era. One story has the two-metre “Long” Meg secretly enlisted as soldier campaigning for the British against France and who avenged a murdered lover before removing her helmet to reveal herself as a woman with long flowing locks. She was celebrated in a play, now lost, presented by The Admirals Men in the 1590s. Gender-bending went so far as the intersex Aniseed-Water Robin, another celebrated character of the streets of London.
Meanwhile, in the royal courts, women were playing all the roles in masques, and Ben Jonson and John Donne were among contemporary writers alluding to the queer goings on in high places. Robert Burton wrote of those “wanton-loined womenlings”.
It is the Renaissance. A new rationality had arrived to replace the spooky Middle Ages.
The clitoris had been rediscovered, or should I say named and its purpose described, just a few years earlier. There had been no word of it since the era of classical Greece so far as western civilisation was concerned. So even those men of the age who were not street-wise had come to know what woman-to-woman “fretting” was about.
In any case, whether in the taverns or in the courts, some women were frightening men with their aggression, cross-dressing including poniards and stilettos – not the heels – and tendency to enjoy each other rather than the opposite sex.
Fashions come and go, and it feels as though there are times when performing gender has been well-received and adopted.
Peter Ackroyd’s 2018 book, Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day, notes there was even a fashion of cross-dressing by women in London streets and society, lasting about five years from 1620 to 1625. Perhaps Berlin of the Weimar Republic almost exactly 300 years later is the next equivalent.
It is sad to think the era of Roaring Girls, fluid genders and sexuality of a few decades would be followed by a few hundred years of reinforced compliance with society’s gender norms.
Now, like the clitoris, we have found a name – developed in the 1990s – for performing to whichever gender you prefer. Is it hot? The important thing may be to keep that notion alive and kicking in the long term.
State Theatre Company’s forum Performing Gender: Why is it so Hot Right Now? is at 6pm Monday, April 13, at the Hetzel Lecture Theatre, State Library of SA. Speakers include independent director, theatre maker and dramaturg Teddy Dunn, playwright Anthony Nocera, Adelaide University Screen Studies teacher Dante DeBono, Artistic Director of State Theatre Company South Australia and director of The Importance of Being Earnest Petra Kalive, and host Dr Cambrey Payne.