Girl Power in the British Theatre of the Nineties: Violent Disoriented Girl Gangs Kick Tradition
Girl Power in the British Theatre of the Nineties: Violent Disoriented Girl Gangs Kick Tradition

Summary/Abstract: The decade of the nineties was marked by violent events in both the international and national spheres. Reports of genocide in Yugoslavia’s civil war and terrorism were broadcast daily. Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) is an urgent ethical appeal about this war and the necessity for moral commitment. In Britain the media reported child abuse, domestic violence, murder and street crime. Nevertheless, “such events had little impact on the public taste for stylishly violent movies, which … coloured popular culture throughout the decade …” (Sierz, 2001:206). This Jacobean-like relish in violence was both reflected and contested in the nineties’ theatre. A considerable number of British plays of the period portrayed crime and a worrying lust for violence. This glamorisation of violence was contested by a generation of new, young playwrights, such as Sarah Kane, Antony Neilson, Philip Ridley, Mark Ravenhill, Judy Upton, Rebecca Prichard, who used intensely violent images and shock tactics to draw attention to the causes of violence, rooted deeply in a social system without moral perspectives, based on consumerism and materialism. Sex and violence became one of the confrontational characteristics of nineties’ theatre. Most of the plays were staged in small studio theatres, and there was a feeling by the audience itself of being battered and bruised by the violence on stage. Sierz (1998; 2001) refers to this effect as “in-yer-face”. If female adolescent violence is shown blatantly on stage, the social phenomenon implied causes an even more disconcerting reaction, as it utterly shatters the long-established image of femininity. Of the nineties plays that challenged the widespread ignorance about the reality of violence committed by girl gangs we should mention Philip Ridley’s Ghost from a Perfect Place (1992), Judy Upton’s Ashes and Sand (1994) and Rebecca Prichard’s Yard Gal (1998).

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