The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Horizontal Collaboration
Byre Theatre, St Andrews, October 14
A powerful courtroom political drama, this play from acclaimed Scottish writer/ director David Leddy looks at an area of conflict which is often ignored; the role women play at the very peak of power.
“Four lawyers in the Hague are reading explosive interview transcripts relating to an African warlord’s wife called Judith K,” says Leddy.
“After her husband was killed in a car bomb explosion, Judith decides to lead her tribe in a new and hopefully more peaceful direction, but things don’t turn out the way she expected.”
First seen at the Traverse Theatre during the 2015 Edinburgh Festival with different actors each night, this version of the play stars Renee Williams, Camille Marmié, Saskia Ashdown and Joanne Tope.
It takes its name from a term of abuse applied to French women who were believed to have slept with German soldiers during the Second World War.
The womens’ punishment included head-shaving, a suffering which plays into the biblical themes of Horizontal Collaboration.
“That was the starting point of my research,” says Leddy. “I was interested in what happens to women in positions of power. What hypocrisies, abuses and ugly compromises are piled on them that wouldn’t be forced on their male counterparts?
“The character of Judith is a nod to Kafka’s The Trial, and the story also makes reference to the myth of Judith being beheaded by her new husband Bluebeard.
“The narrative takes elements from all these sources and twists them into something new.”
Leddy doesn’t, he says, buy into the theory that more women in power would lead to a more peaceful world.
“Certainly Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi and even Winnie Mandela didn’t prove that theory,” he says.
“In recent weeks even Aung San Suu Kyi, previously an icon of pacifist resistance, was criticised for remaining silent as her own military carried out what the UN called ‘textbook’ genocide.”
So – also taking influence from Leddy’s “voracious” consumption of news and current affairs – the piece asks if there is simply no difference between men and women in power.
“Or do the social structures and strictures around female leaders force them to behave like their male predecessors?” he wonders.
“Psychologists have found that power does indeed corrupt, and as Noam Chomsky says: ‘For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.’ But I wouldn’t presume to know the answers to any of these questions. I’m like the psychologist in Horizontal Collaboration – I don’t give answers, I ask questions.”
www.davidleddy.com