Adrienne Truscott: Asking For It

Let’s Talk About Rape! Taboo or not taboo at Ed Fringe

Hello Edinburgh! Everyone alright? Having a good time? So hey – here we are seeing a few shows, and what do you know? People just won’t shut up about rape. It’s out there. We all know it’s out there in the big bad world. But I mean it’s really out there at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2013, and issues around taboo and what is or isn’t acceptable on stage have been hot topics, onstage and off – in theatre, in comedy, and in the spaces inbetween.

Taking an ironic approach to the subject of rape is Adrienne Truscott, one half of the circus/cabaret act Wau Wau Sisters, who wins the prize for the longest and most cumbersome show title on the Total Theatre Awards shortlist: Adrienne Truscott’s Asking for It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else!

 She starts her show naked from the waist down – although her head is well dressed, resplendent in a trademark Wau Wau blonde wig. She’s bright and breezy and she bounces round the small space welcoming her audience. ‘Anybody here been raped? Anyone rape anybody?’ she asks, in a wide-eyed, disingenuous Marilyn mode. No rapists in the audience? Well that’s odd, because statistically that’s unlikely – they must all be at someone else’s show. Maybe someone somewhere, muses Adrienne, is doing a show to a whole room full of rapists.

A madcap hour ensues, a mix of sharp-witted subversion (she does a hilarious role-play scene with a male audience member about saying no), comic mockery, and a savage critique of the current trend for rape jokes amongst some male stand-up comedians. Playing the scatty blonde bombshell, she creates a comic persona who can stick the darts in with a smile on her face – her naming and shaming of American comic Daniel Tosh is brilliant (he’s the guy who, when heckled for telling a rape joke, replied ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by five guys right now?’) The point that Adrienne Truscott makes brilliantly, comically, is that regardless of what you feel about what is or isn’t taboo in comedy, he failed spectacularly in how he dealt with the heckle. He just wasn’t funny. Adrienne shows us what he could have done instead… I’m interested in the Tosh controversy, and the issues it raises around taboo (or not taboo) in comedy, so I do a bit of Googling after seeing Adrienne’s show. I discover that after his infamous retort, Tosh tweeted: ‘the point i was making before i was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them.’ Yes Daniel – but you wouldn’t tell a racist joke about blacks being attacked, and then if an Afro-American in the audience challenged you, say something like: ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if five white guys lynched this black guy right now?’

So let’s leave Tosh blustering and justifying and get back to Adrienne Truscott, who magnificently fights bad comedy with good comedy. Fight them on their own terms, that’s the way to do it! The jokes and raps and skits are all jollied along by various plays on dressing and undressing that involves multiple bras and wigs (and a nice spotty dress that she needs help squeezing into), and some witty and waggish interactions between film projections and the naked parts of Ms Truscott’s anatomy (pussy beards – I’ll say no more). Sitting somewhere between comedy and performance art, the show is a clever challenge to stereotypical ideas about rape, and an interesting critique of the male gaze – although to play devil’s advocate, I’d also say that its success is aided by the fact that she has the sort of body our society deems to be fit and attractive. A body which she has the right to display in a performance context in any way that she wishes, I hasten to add – but just noting that there might be a very different audience response if a different sized/aged female body were to be on display. She doesn’t win a Total Theatre Award but her consolation prize is the Foster’s Comedy Awards Panel Prize (which comes with a £5,000 cheque). As we are mentioning the Fosters, we can also note here that ‘feminist’ stand up comedian Bridget Christie was the overall winner.

At the other end of the spectrum, Nirbhaya is a serious look at rape, murder and extreme abuse of women. The show’s title is taken from the name given to the then-anonymous victim of the infamous case of rape and brutal physical assault on a Delhi bus that resulted in the death of the woman thirteen days later. The word means ‘fearless’ and the young woman, who had suffered the most appalling attack, violated in every horrible way you could imagine by six men wielding metal rods, became a symbol of resistance and protest for thousands of Indian women (and men). The woman is named at the end of the show, despite the fact that under Indian law it is not considered acceptable to name the victim of a rape. Her story acts as the nucleus of the play, around which circles stories of other abused Indian women, their stories ranging from childhood sexual abuse by ‘uncles’ to a woman whose lips are cut off for taking part in a Bollywood movie audition and allowing a stage kiss with a male actor. To make sure that this is not seen as exclusively an Indian problem, the story of an Indian woman gang-raped in America is included in the piece.

Nirbhaya

Nirbhaya 

So how do you critique a show like this? For some, the subject matter, the importance of this story, is enough to justify its existence, and making any commentary on how it works theatrically is problematic. For me, there are criticisms of it to be made of it as a piece of theatre, and if the story is presented as theatre then it has to be critiqued on those terms. So here goes…

The staging is safe and familiar territory – I can understand why the aesthetic decisions on soft lighting and tasteful visuals got taken, but there is an odd jarring between the harsh stories told and the theatrical playing out of them. There’s lots of post-Complicite walking on diagonals (to denote the streets of Delhi), and some well delivered but rather old-fashioned hero-and-chorus ensemble scenes (the actual bus rape scene is totally pointless – trying not to be too graphic or offensive, it offends in its tastefully passé physical theatre styling). Verbatim texts are delivered downstage in the spotlight by the cast (who have various degrees of professional performance skill), all in turn telling their own story  – other than the actor playing the dead victim from Delhi who switches from in-character acting to playing a kind of singing narrator/witness of the others’ stories, and the one male actor in the show who plays the bus victim’s companion, various abusers, a victim’s lost son, and finally a kind of Indian male everyman, standing with his female compatriots against the abuse of women happening in his country.

There are serious questions to ask about the way the theatre piece is used as a kind of conduit for public witnessing, therapy even. (Although it is not the only show to do this – see also the Total Theatre Award winning Have I No Mouth, far more successful theatrically, in my view). In one of the most harrowing scenes in Nirbhaya, a scarred (physically and mentally) victim of appalling abuse weeps openly as she tells her tale of being beaten, doused in kerosene, and set on fire by her husband. Her scars are there for us to see. Yes, it’s her choice but no, I’m not comfortable with this. Good, some may say – feel uncomfortable. But I’m convinced I’m feeling uncomfortable for the wrong reasons. I feel attacked, caught by the throat. I’m desperate for a bit of good old-fashioned Brechtian alienation. There are other ways than this, I feel.

Taking a totally different approach to the theatrical dilemma of addressing real-world oppressions and abuses come Belarus Free Theatre whose Trash Cuisine uses a variety show cum cookery programme frame to highlight the many forms of man’s inhumanity to man (and woman), a show principally about capital punishment and torture which takes in genocide, rape and murder along the way. The cookery theme also forces us to look at our attitude towards animal farming and cruelty. I’m much happier with this more detached approach to its ghastly subject matter, enjoying the horrible humour and irony, being startled into hearing and learning things I didn’t previously know, and reappraising things I did know, but it would seem to be one of those Marmite shows. I loved it, many hated it.

I ended up wondering how Belarus Free Theatre might have dealt theatrically with the Delhi rape and murder case as subject matter.  I was desperate for some between-the-lines questions to be introduced into the narrative of Nirbhaya: the collusion of women (mothers and mothers-in-law most often) in the horrific physical and sexual abuse of young women, for example. And here’s something to be discussed: the accused driver of the bus, Ram Singh, died in police custody on 11 March 2013. The police say he hanged himself – defence lawyers and his family suspect he was murdered, possibly after beating and torture. Who cares – no less than he did to another human being, say some. But to stand up and defend the human rights of those who behave appallingly – there’s the challenge. One thing I loved about Trash Cuisine was its unequivocal opposition to torture and the death penalty, no matter what, whilst yet flagging up some of the awkward questions that raises, including the difficult (for some) question that many of the people we – the liberal West, the Amnesty supporters – are trying to gain clemency for are people who have tortured, raped, abused, murdered others. But that’s the ultimate test, isn’t it? Love has redemptive powers – love your enemies, love those who harm you. That’s what Martin Luther King said, and I suspect he was quoting one Jesus of Nazareth.

Fight them with love, or fight them with comic wit and irony and a few vaudevillian songs and dances – the choice made by Adrienne Truscott, Belarus Free Theatre, and other of my Fringe 2013 favourites such as Theatre Ad Infinitum, whose Ballad of the Burning Star deals with the most difficult of subjects armed with a man in drag, a chorus of dancing girls, and an hour’s worth of scathing humour.

As for the question of taboo, I’d steal a line from Rachel Mars and say nothing is out of bounds in theatre or comedy – it’s the way you tell them that counts.

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Dorothy Max Prior

About Dorothy Max Prior

Dorothy Max Prior is the editor of Total Theatre Magazine, and is also a performer, writer, dramaturg and choreographer/director working in theatre, dance, installation and outdoor arts. Much of her work is sited in public spaces or in venues other than regular theatres. She also writes essays and stories, some of which are published and some of which languish in bottom drawers – and she teaches drama, dance and creative non-fiction writing. www.dorothymaxprior.com