The explosive play that predicted cancel culture
David Mamet’s 1992 work ‘Oleanna’ created a storm, but how will a new production fare in today’s climate, asks Claire Allfree
Nearly 30 years ago, a play exploded off Broadway, containing a final scene that prompted a gladiatorial response from several people in the audience. A male professor knocks to the floor a younger female student who is threatening to proceed with a rape charge against him unless he removes several books, including one of his own, from the course reading list. Perhaps incited by the play’s pugilistic energy, the audience was firmly on the professor’s side. As the man advanced towards the prostrate woman, holding up a chair, they leapt from their seats. “Kill the bitch,” they shouted.
Next month, David Mamet’s incendiary two-hander Oleanna opens at Theatre Royal Bath, in a climate both radically different and eerily similar to the America of the early Nineties. A propulsive verbal punch-up, it centres on a floundering student, Carol, who has overcome significant socio-economic challenges to gain a much coveted place at college. Yet her professor, John, is a restless iconoclast who believes higher education has become a form of “hazing” that stifles independent thinking by encouraging students to simply “spout back misinformation”.
After a meeting to discuss her failing grades, in which he derides the institution she has worked so hard to reach, Carol feels belittled and seeks comfort in a militant campus group that encourages her to accuse him of elitism, sexism and finally rape.
At the start of the play, John has just been promised tenure; by the end his marriage and career are in tatters.
Oleanna was inspired by a friend of Mamet’s who had lost his university teaching job after a female student made a complaint against him, and the play landed at a time when the nation was fixated by a landmark sexual harassment case between the lawyer Anita Hill and US supreme court nominee Clarence Thomas.
Yet many critics saw Oleanna primarily as a furious attack on the political correctness movement sweeping through – and arguably strangling – American academia. “A bunch of jargon-spewing feminist rabble-rousers” is how one reviewer described the group who so emboldens the seemingly diffident, taciturn Carol to turn verbosely avenging Fury in the final act, trotting out lines about “elitist, protected hierarchies” and demanding supposedly offensive reading material be banned.
Carol “becomes the spitting image of the naive, pampered, self-pitying, white middle-class girl whose princess fantasies and whining demands for protection and approval have so deformed feminism on campus”, wrote the divisive feminist academic Camille Paglia, before adding that she too had been a victim of “the vicious Red Guards”, with her 1990 book Sexual Personae “routinely banned from most women’s studies programmes”.
In other words, Oleanna both chimes with some of the more censorious arguments to have emerged from the modern day Metoo movement and foreshadows today’s toxic culture wars that have seen the woke Twitterati and Paglia’s modern day “self-pitying” students demand that artists and academics, from JK Rowling to Germaine Greer, be cancelled or no-platformed for expressing views they disagree with.
Of course, Metoo’s more admirable achievements also risk making Oleanna look badly out of date. Mamet has never been credited with writing sympathetically from the perspective of women, and while he has always maintained there are no villains in Oleanna, that he wrote it as a “classical Greek tragedy with a telephone” (John spends a fair amount of the play on the phone trying to finalise a house deal), it’s not hard to see the play as stacked in John’s favour, casting him as tragic hero unjustly brought down by a monstrous woman even while exposing his entitled masculinity. (It wasn’t only early American audiences that felt licensed to loudly indulge their own misogyny: Harold Pinter reported that audiences cheered on David Suchet during his 1993 Royal Court production, while West End audiences were similarly vocal during Lindsay Posner’s 2004 revival starring Aaron Eckhart and Julia Stiles).
Yet if today’s audiences, newly enlightened and encouraged by the primacy given to female testimony in the wake of Metoo, are more likely to shout “kill the bastard” than the “bitch” in the play’s closing minutes, will they feel the same shock and chill Mamet intended at the methods Carol resorts to?
Oleanna isn’t really about who is right and who is wrong (although at no point in the play do we see John rape Carol), but a warning against the consequences for intellectual freedom when language and behaviour become weaponised. Leaving aside whether John is reinforcing the patriarchy when he says to female students “have a good day, dear” or whether, by placing what he maintains is a reassuring hand on Carol’s shoulder he is guilty of sexual harassment, what matters is the gap that opens up between the pair as the play proceeds.
Oleanna takes its name from a 19th-century Norwegian folk song satirising the American utopian ideal and Mamet uses it to imply that a linguistic utopia, in which words are uncontaminated by power hierarchies and instead have fixed,
In the play, a student accuses her tutor of elitism, sexism and finally rape
stable meanings experienced equally by all, is unachievable, and no more so, ironically, than in academia. Yet the flipside is a form of dystopia.
Nothing can be agreed between them, no sympathetic common ground found, because what has become most important to them both is the extent to which each can cast the other as aggressor and themselves as victim. For Carol, John isn’t a professor from whom she might consider new perspectives but a faceless symbol of a social and economic privilege she can only dream of. For John, Carol isn’t a disadvantaged student with a life experience radically different from his, but a symbolic threat to his marriage and livelihood. Rather than listen to her, he silences her with academic masculine posturing. Rather than talk to him, she silences him with dehumanised feminist dogma.
“Don’t you have feelings?” asks John, his career and his ability to buy a house lying in tatters at his feet.
“I have responsibility,” replies Carol, for whom a career and the ability to buy a house are ideals that have often felt impossible, “[to] those who suffer what I suffer.” In her defence, you can hear the voices of a wide range of modern day protest movements, from Black Lives Matter to those fighting transphobia, who make their suffering emblematic in order to amplify the rightness of their cause and the weight of the justice demanded. Such activists might argue today that Carol’s methods are necessarily crude and excessive, because they are the only methods available to her. That history has to overreach before it can swing back to the middle. That statues have to fall, books have to be banned and careers destroyed before everything can be righted again.
But to do so is to deny in Oleanna what today feels more at stake than ever: that when we imprison ourselves inside the grievances of personal identity and the stranglehold of political orthodoxy, we sacrifice our ability and our right to think freely for ourselves. Oleanna opens Dec 3 at Theatre Royal Bath. Tickets: theatreroyal.org.uk