Unremarkable Violence: Staging Child Sexual Abuse in Recent British Theatre

Homi Bhabha's Nation and Narration argues that a nation's self image is shaped by the form and content of the stories it tells about itself. Alongside monuments, political institutions, memorials and so on, lie other cultural acts that inculcate current notions of national identity. It follows, then, that what also snakes through this national performance of shared narratives is the unsaid, the forgotten, the secret. What is denied, eclipsed, ignored, or even, invisible, form the intrusive ghosts at the nation's feast. The purpose of this article is to explore the apparently unremarkable; to excavate the political significance that lies beneath the seemingly unexceptional in relation to questions of gender, masculinity, and sexual power. I am concerned to put pressure on particular elements of plays that have gone unnoticed and tease out the sexual politics therein. Through an exploration of four plays - Terry Johnson's Hysteria, David Harrower's Blackbird, Arnold Wesker's Denial, and Mike Cullen's Anna Weiss - this article interrogates the pervasive denial of incest abuse and reflects on the role of theatre and performance within this landscape. What, if any, obligations do dramatists have to counter the pernicious perception that women and children frequently lie about sexual violence? Are particular theatrical forms inadequate to the task of articulating the experience of child sexual abuse? What might an ethical dramaturgy of child sexual violence look like? How do we look properly at children's bodies on stage? In short, this article examines masculinity, dramaturgy, memory, and the politics of child abuse.