I could not applaud this play

Writing about this play in which a 40-year-old man has had sex with a 12-year-old girl, Gary Smith hails the production for “flying in the face of notions of right and wrong,” describes the characters variously as having “an unsettling relationship” and an “affair,” and asks whether the relationship might, in fact, be “consensual.” In the play’s program, the director, Marcia Kash, asks whether “love can exist in an unlikely pairing” adding that, perhaps the man “cannot be simply labelled a monster” and the girl may have “some measure of responsibility.”

Let’s call this “relationship” what it is: Rape. Statutory rape. Young girls don’t fall in love with their rapists, they don’t burst into their lives confident and edgy 15 years after what’s happened as if they are the ones in control (like the female character does in this play) and they aren’t willing to have sex with them (again, as this female character is). I’m normally a big fan of the work of Theatre Aquarius, but this selection was way off the mark. Its absurd, unbelievable and damaging premise has been created by a male playwright fixated on the tired Lolita trope — someone who understands very little about women’s experience of sexual assault.

It’s not the actors’ fault, but I just couldn’t bring myself to put my hands together to clap for them a the close of the play without feeling I was betraying sexual assault victims everywhere.

Anne Bokma, Hamilton