Biting critique of patriarchy draws blood
The theatre team staging Gut Girls hopes audiences have a bloody good time.
Blood — or rather, fake gore — splashes about freely in Sarah Daniels’ play about impoverished Victorian women working in an English slaughterhouse.
“The amount of blood paint we’ve gone through to bring this play to life is very impressive,” director Alix Reynolds said with a laugh.
A student production of the 1988 drama, mounted by the University of Victoria’s theatre department, opens tonight at the Phoenix Theatre. Communications manager Adrienne Holierhoek hastened to add the squeamish needn’t be put off, noting: “You get the effect of [the blood] without the grossness of it.”
A fiercely feminist British playwright who emerged in the 1980s, Daniels is known for her biting criticisms of patriarchy. Her play Ripen Our Darkness ends infamously with a woman’s suicide note to her husband: “Dear David, your dinner and my head are in the [gas] oven.”
Some critics criticize Daniels’ plays for being overly didactic. Reynolds, who directs Gut Girls as a requirement for her master of fine arts degree, said Gut Girls is the “most refined” of her works.
In the play, five young women toil in a gutting shed, elbows-deep in cattle carcasses. It’s cold; the smell is horrific. In an attempt to help, Lady Helena forms a weekly club to teach the girls manners, life skills and, later on, alternative employment. Yet by contemporary standards, her approach is condescending, and she makes little attempt to understand their lives.
“In my mind, she is the oppressor. She has a male role and she aligns herself with the patriarchy of the system,” Reynolds said.
Gut Girls portrays a richversus-poor culture that allows men to treat women as possessions, assault them and — if they’re working-class — even rape them.
From the opening lines, the play connects with the audience viscerally. A new girl, arriving for her first day of work, insists the bloody scene will make her vomit. Another character responds in working-class dialect: “We got enough insides to deal wiv here without clearing up yourn.”
It’s not hard to feel empathy with their plight; many of the workers were in their teens. Nonetheless, Reynolds said part of the challenge is to make theatregoers aware they’re not viewing ancient history from the vantage point of an enlightened modern age.
“I don’t want the audience to leave thinking: ‘Isn’t that nice, we’re not in 1899 anymore — haven’t we come such a far way? Haven’t we fixed that? We don’t need feminism anymore,’ ” she said.
“We’re still fighting these same concerns, word for word, the same issues, more than 115 years later.”
Gut Girls was commissioned by the Albany, a performing-arts centre in Deptford, London. The original Albany Institute, housed in the same building, was founded in 1899 by the Duchess of Albany. She was a patron of the Deptford Fund, an initiative set up to help women working in slaughterhouses get safer work. This is the slice of history that inspired Daniels’ Gut Girls.
Reynolds said one benefit for UVic’s theatre students is that the play contains scads of good roles for women. Most of the acting students in the department are female. However, in terms of casting, theatre still tends to favour male actors.
“I have a particular moral issue with that,” Reynolds said. “There’s so many young females who are fantastic. And they’re not able to get cast because there’s not enough roles for them. I felt it responsibility, almost my duty, to address that.”