The three plays on which this chapter concentrates mark three key respective timepoints at the beginning, middle and end of a decade that was formative socially and politically. In 2009, when Rona Munro’s The Last Witch opened at Edinburgh directed by Dominic Hill, Britain was reeling from a recession affecting both the national economy and the public spirit. Conjuring alternative ways of being in the aftermath of a startling collapse was not out of place as a topic—not least when it came to assigning the role of the disruptor/instigator to a woman, at a time when all-too confident, all-too dominant male authority had failed so spectacularly. Equally importantly, the play reminds us how that which might be branded ‘the Other’ is isolated; vilified; eliminated. In 2009, these were not the primary discourses in Britain, but tensions were quietly brewing. A few years later, and certainly by 2015, (self-)isolationist trends were increasingly taking hold, leading to the Brexit referendum and its own well-documented aftermath. Further, the fact that Munro’s stagescape is filled with a visceral sensation of the rural land and natural elements is equally crucial. Already in 2009, that is, the environment formed more than a mere canvas: it had become a force that determined and compelled emerging dramaturgies. The timelessness of Munro’s piece, as well as its sensory emphasis on nature, links it to Matt Grinter’s Orca, opening in November 2016 at the Southwark Playhouse in a production directed by Alice Hamilton. A play where the landscape looms heavy, as water abounds and the elements are dominant, alluring and unaccommodating, Orca, similarly to The Last Witch, also prioritises the experience of marginalised women, while exposing the very machinations of the marginalising practices at work. If 2009 was a particularly unfortunate time for the economy, 2016, as already mentioned in these pages, proved to be an especially difficult period for counteracting hegemonical, patriarchal forces and arising contexts of remoteness and entrapment. When Grinter’s play began its run, the American Presidential Election was mere days away; by the time the play closed, later that same month, the election had delivered the result already discussed in the previous chapter.

Creative (re)engagements with history/-ies, the folklore, and the primal have often served to provide the space in which stories with contemporary resonance and impact can unfold; inherited, or familiar—sometimes utopian and others dystopian—narratives and their retellings, especially in the opening up of potentialities and spaces for action, can deliver significant interventions. In the hands of intuitive playwrights, Lucy Kirkwood amongst them, binaries and boundaries can be undermined, revealed as holdouts for divisions that can no longer hold. In her 2020 play The Welkin, directed by James Macdonald and premiering at the National Theatre (Lyttelton) as the Trump Presidency was drawing its last breaths and as the world was, unbeknownst, about to be thrust into its next major crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, Kirkwood delivered one of her most emphatic works to date, taking on systemic failures on an epic scale. Kirkwood’s play queried prevailing practices of legislation and jurisdiction over women’s bodies developed and proliferated by heavily male-constituted institutional structures, attacking assumptions of authority and insight, while confronting the legitimisation of the nature versus nurture dichotomy. This chapter, then, takes on three historically-motivated contemporary plays, investigating how deviations from the norm have the capacity to upset the established order. In so doing, it considers how “[t]he quest for transcendence within scenarios of physical and psychological extremity is a recurring feature of the new writing for theatre […]” (Megson 2013). Tracing how person and landscape are co-constituted synergistically and with mutual impacts forms a considerable part of the enquiry, facilitating the consideration of how space, spatiality and lived experience figure in the function of parenthetical sites against dominant conditions, allowing the potential for disruption to emerge as a possibility.

The Last Witch

Rona Munro’s engagement with history—especially that of Scotland—has been plentiful. In her theatre, we detect not only a desire to explore historical fact, but, also, to create a space for disruption in the presumed linearity of narratives, especially where these may involve gendered assumptions, and the passing down of stories intergenerationally so that they become accepted wisdom. Female resilience is key to such disruptive storytelling. Critics have highlighted how, in The Last Witch, “a sturdy charismatic woman keeps her dignity amidst the stench of masculinity. Yielding not to the insecurities of man but the depth of her motherhood” (Corr 2018). This is the story of Janet Horne, “the highland widow who pays the ultimate price for being a woman able to out-think and overpower her weak spirited male counterparts” (Bosanquet 2009). When the piece was revived in 2018, critics additionally praised the text’s continuing resonance, as well as its range of female characters not only when it came to the impressive lead, but, also, to the character of Janet’s teenaged daughter Helen, or her neighbour, Elspeth Begg—wife of the man whose accusations cause the tragic spiral of events leading to Janet’s demise (Connolly 2018; Cooper 2018). The—almost—decade between the two productions also delivered, in many ways, forms of progress in terms of public condemnation of systemic abuse, as well as of the emergence of community mobilisation and protest, but still, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, rather a lot to be concerned about when it came to female civic and personal agency lingered. The Dornoch of 1727, where the real Janet Horne was executed as a witch, and the Scottish Highlands of witch hunting (certainly far from the only site of such crimes), driven by ignorance stoked by intolerance towards the different and marginal, would continue to resonate as paradigm well beyond the immediate geographical and cultural context.

The play enhances the visibility of injustices against the chronic repetition of discriminatory patterns, whether this repetition is enabled by means of active hostility or passive condoning. At the same time, communities of women, however embedded in problematic patriarchal structures that limit their agencies, also emerge as powerful networks in Munro’s theatre. In The Last Witch, it is another woman that saves the daughter of the one (Janet) sacrificed to the altar of religion: within small spaces of intervention, an act of mercy becomes possible. And so Elspeth invites the young woman, attempting to rescue her from the surrounding impact of Janet’s demise, to.

Take my name. Helen… listen… listen… sweetheart… This will save you. You’re Elspeth Begg’s wayward girl that ran off with a sailor. That’s why you’ve nothing but the clothes on you. That’s why you’re lost. You’re Elspeth Begg’s but she never wants to see you back again. You know nothing of Janet Horne and her trouble. You can never go home again because of your mother’s tears and your father’s anger. (Munro 2009, 77)

Motherhoods, in all their iterations—real, imagined, adoptive—abound in the plays examined in this chapter. And even though we may not detect sentimentalism, we do encounter acts of solidarity and care reflective of a higher sense of moral duty; the spaces that enable and accommodate them are tentative; their duration limited. And yet, it is in these contexts that the most impactful gestures materialise.

Even though this book does not have the remit of delving into Munro’s record in detail, it is purposeful to identify core elements that have characterised her playwriting sensibilities. In her two articles on Munro (2006, 2009), theatre scholar Kathy Smith identifies gravitational centres in the playwright’s theatre, while also pinpointing—and querying—the noteworthy lack of scholarship on Munro (Smith 2006, 243). More recently, some gaps have been filled through work by, especially, Gioia Angeletti (2018), Ian Brown (2016) and Trish Reid (2012). Still, it remains the case that Munro has not received as much attention as other contemporary Scottish playwrights, despite a rich and substantial body of work. Smith’s two articles predate The Last Witch in terms of writing (one is published in the same year as the play), but still arrive at observations that resonate here. Reflecting on Munro’s Iron (2002), one of the playwright’s most internationally staged texts, Smith identifies the thematic centres: “first, the representation of the mother/daughter relationship; second, the notion of feminine violence—crime, punishment, incarceration—and the idea of feminine as ‘other’ and finally, aspects of memory: loss of memory, recovery of memory, remembering, forgetting and the significance of memory, both individually and culturally” (Smith 2009, 255). I agree with this assessment; the final point pertaining to memory, considered against historical fact as to the real Janet Horne’s mental state, is particularly astute. Smith’s other points, specifically the importance of the mother/daughter bond, and the systemic handling of female transgression within penal systems run on patriarchal codes, also resonate strongly in The Last Witch, as we come to see in Janet’s treatment when prosecuted, incarcerated and, eventually, expired at the hands of the representatives of the state.

In her earlier article (2006), which offers a rounder assessment of Munro’s work, Smith observes her “creative use of language and imagery, in the weaving of the contemporary and the mythical, result[ing] in a theatre which is both magical and truthful, powerful and painful, simultaneously strange and strangely familiar […] both hard-hitting and poetic” (244). Elsewhere, Smith comments on Munro’s capacity to create verbalscapes “drawing on images reminiscent of dreams” and identifies the important relationship between myth and history, on which Munro draws across her work (2006, 246). As Smith notes relating to other work by Munro, her theatre bears witness to the playwright’s “interest in history, and although there is a certain timelessness about it, there are indications of a period piece” (2006, 248). The point could likewise be made about The Last Witch, which, given the interests of this book, I propose occupies and produces a spatiotemporal in-betweenness, belonging both to history and transcending any direct rootedness to resonate more widely as a metaphor. This dramaturgical (formal) in-betweenness cultivated by the play is matched by the character (thematic) in-betweenness as experienced and performed by Janet, who is both of her community and extrinsic to it.

The Witchcraft Act, which had been in force in Scotland since 1563, was abolished in 1736, nine years after the murder of the real Janet Horne (Goodare et al. 2003). In Munro’s text, other than character names, which imply certain historical events, no reference is made to the actual time setting of the play. This is how Munro troubles narrative linearities in historical re-engagements: an artistic dialogue with history still allows margins for the imagination, and for troubling orthodoxies—especially patriarchal (Smith 2006). In other words, to tie Munro’s Janet Horne specifically to historical fact is to give flesh to what is a tragic story of a persecuted woman; but it is, also, to risk missing out on, to use Smith’s description, Munro’s poetic intervention, which ultimately is the primary material on which the play’s rich dramatic tapestry is woven.

Women in Munro’s plays—in themselves, and in their relationships with others—are a concern that Smith prioritises in her two aforementioned articles. A primary bond that develops in Munro’s work, as already raised, is that between mothers and daughters. In The Last Witch, it is the latter—Helen—that is implied to actually be a witch, rather than her mother. Helen encounters, and spends time with, a man called Nick, who appears to be presenting the traits of the devil. It is Nick that, as a favour to Helen, later kills Janet with a knife at the burning stake, before there is time for her to feel an even more excruciating death in the flames. In the incident, Nick emerges unscathed. Helen occupies a space of in-betweenness in herself: in her antagonistic relationship with Janet, which proves to be very tender; in her place in society, in which she is both an outsider and suffering the effects of her mother performing her marginality considerably more than she does. Referring to mother/daughter relationships, not least in the presence of male authoritarian figures, Smith identifies “complexity and ambivalence”, as well as “the fundamental ambiguity of motivation” (2006, 243). Such are the moral interspaces that Janet and Helen Horne inhabit both in their relationship to the world, and in their relationship to each other.

The latter is, arguably, also the outcome of the women’s own sense of ambivalence as to their place and position in the immediate environment of their community. For example, we are given ample reference to attempts (including successful ones, for Helen) at flying: the body is not of the space to which it was given to dwell; flight—as in elevating oneself, also as in fleeing—is compelling. Smith raises issues of “anger and disturbance, the association of violence and femininity, and […Munro’s] writing/representation of the feminine body in performance”, or, always in Munro, “women as […] central characters” in the context of “explor[ing] notions of anger, violence, frustration, disturbance and ‘otherness’ in relation to femininity” (2006, 244, 250). Certainly Janet is an Other to the confined society in which she lives, and it is as Other that she is also eliminated. Helen is on her way to becoming marginalised in the same way, so she takes to the road, rootless, untraceable and forever mobile, in order to remain one step ahead of danger, and take her life in her own hands. At the end of the play, and as she flees her local community, her in-betweenness mobilises her transience. The feelings that Smith lists, then, are experienced by women towards their communities—ones that claim to be inclusive and supportive, while utterly failing to accommodate any sign of difference. External hostility can also manifest as an active performance of a heightened difference in response to one’s own exclusion; at the same time, a community’s exclusionary practices are an act of self-harm against its own agility, ignoring the fact that this ought to draw on diversity rather than uniformity. Violence against those Others, then, is ultimately violence self-directed.

I find Smith’s work on Munro lucid and inclusive, not least in its consideration of geo-embodied factors. Regarding delineations of space and their cognisant crossing by women, Smith observes in the distribution of spatial experience in Munro’s work “a kind of ‘spilling over’, where boundaries are disregarded, […] female characters acknowledge dangerous spaces, both physical and psychical—spaces outside of those designated by a patriarchal culture—and for this they pay a high price” (2006, 250). It is a comment that, as we will go on to see in the next part of this chapter, resonates profoundly with Grinter’s Orca as well, and the ways in which women interact with landscape—in that case especially the seascape—and suffer punitive and exclusionary consequences because of this perceived transgression. The following comment by Smith is even more striking in that respect: “[f]emininity, sensuality, intimacy, childbirth and motherhood are as much a part of the landscape here as rain, snow, wind or sunshine” (2006, 248). These entities and processes are cross-inscribed; the primal and durational exists in all of them, precisely, also, because of the ways in which they form part of a durational, deep narrative—personal, social, environmental, natural (in the sense of both reproduction and landscape) that is, in this case too, reminiscent of Urry’s definition of “glacial time” (1994, 135). It is, ultimately, for such dramaturgical reasons that plays like The Last Witch, but also Orca and The Welkin so successfully and purposely oscillate in temporal, and not only in physical, interspaces, in terms of how they conceptualise and root their plots and actions. This is also why characters in these plays exist as and for themselves, but, also, as archetypes; primal sketches of complex humanities attuned to a level higher than that of earthly life.

Smith additionally observes a “sense of stylization and dreamworld combined with real relationships and meaningful interactions [that] permeates” with “characters [that] operate on levels which are both archetypal and specific, offering […] a sense of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ worlds” (2006, 248). These worlds, we come to understand, are not either/or, but both/and, and all three plays examined in this chapter operate on this expansive interstitial level. Women are both ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’, and precisely because the ‘here’ often becomes too restrictive, they either co-construct, co-create, or co-imagine that ‘elsewhere’. As an early stage direction in Munro’s play notes, in a shared, quiet moment between Janet and Helen that is not to be taken for granted as we might at first be inclined to believe—and which reveals their similarities, and intimate closeness—both conditioned by their openness to a power greater than themselves, one attuned to the landscape and its forces, and therefore uncontainable: “A beat. They [mother and daughter] look together over the hills, the distant sea” (Munro 2009, 9). Then Janet asks: “Why are you so restless?” to which Helen answers: “I’m hot” (Munro 2009, 9). It is the perfect metaphor for being uncontainable, for dreaming of—and conjuring—the great beyond as, at least, a possibility.

As Janet has shared earlier “I am on this road…see…walking dark lands, seeing wonders…” (Munro 2009, 18); and as Helen will say later, when she sets on her own solitary path:

There’s a wind coming. A warm wind out of the south. You can smell the honey on it... It’ll blow the ice out of the air. Turn all the frozen ground soft with water. One warm day to keep us breathing till the sun is fat and yellow again. I’m calling it... Blow that reek over the silver sea. I remember. I remember. My mother could charm the fish out of those waves. She could. Here comes the wind. (Munro 2009, 84)

References to the wind in different iterations abound across the play: it is a conditioning, carrying, liberating force; one that transforms and re-situates; but also an interconnecting element between those that are unrestrainable. There is no greater community, the play suggests, than that between a mother and daughter—and their shared communion with the earth, in its unpredictability, its roughness, its allure. To ask questions that extend beyond the immediate context of rootedness, to feel oneself too expansive for one’s environment, and to conceptualise one’s home as the great beyond rather than any human-made structure, is, ultimately, an elevating force; a resistance to oppression as great as any. The two plays that follow are, likewise, invested in the hypothesis of the world’s expansion in the very moment that women, interrupting their mundane experience, lift their gaze out- and upwards.

Orca

In Matt Grinter’s quietly affective piece, the eponymous animal functions metonymically to stand in for an entire community, human and non-human. The creature serves as both itself (again metonymically denotative of its entire pod), and as grounding reference for its human co-dwellers in the remote seaside site that forms the setting of the play, and for whom it constitutes, alternatingly, a symbol of freedom, of ferocity, of danger—and even a trophy. Two of the play’s main characters are young girls: Fan (14); Gretchen (16); and one is a young woman—Maggie (18) (Grinter 2016, 2). The remaining characters are Joshua (early 50s), the father of Fan and Maggie; and a man in his 60s, only known as “The Father” (Grinter 2016, 2): a title that functions to denote his symbolic role in the community as its forefather and pillar, but also his character role in a ritualised performance of whaling that recurs each year. The premise of this event is that a young girl, performing the recurring role of the Daughter, sacrifices herself in the vicious waters and at the mercy of the wild animal to save her benevolent community when the whalers encounter difficulties in the open sea. So goes the legend that is re-enacted annually; so follows, also, the reality of a crowd of girls who suffer their plight quietly, so that their community—whose importance emerges throughout the play as insurmountable—may continue with its biorhythms unperturbed. In the process, however, the biorhythms of vulnerable people and animals become profoundly disrupted; the ecologies of place and its inhabitants are rendered toxic; and the place, landscape and overall environment is installed as the locus of deep-seated trauma. Further to the characters we see, there are numerous others, of no lesser importance, that we do not—but whom the play allows us to imagine. Moreover, the ‘orca’, whether as singular or as pod, as well as the seascape itself, form equally pivotal presences in the play; dramaturgically, their significance to the narrative is crucial.

The seaside community of the play, then, is long established on a culture of vulnerability and complicity, and of inward- rather than outwardness; the sea is conceptualised as barrier rather than as bridge. The play’s most vivacious character, Fan, is also, unbeknownst to herself, the most precarious one. Although we might initially think that any tension in her relationship with her sister Maggie is the outcome of mundane sibling grievances in the context of an age difference that is largely insubstantial but also sufficient to aggravate disagreements, some way into the play the overarching plot comes to be revealed. It is not so much that Grinter’s play operates on suspense when it comes to plot unveiling; it is, rather, that there is a feeling of anxiety because spectators, reasonably—as much as those characters whose care and experience alerts them to what follows—sense what gradually emerges as inevitable. The sacrifice of Fan will indeed take place, but neither to the elements, nor to the mighty whale: rather, she will suffer at the hands of the leader of the community that she so strives to impress, so that she may be welcomed by all, unlike her sister, restoring her family’s standing.

Literary scholar Graham Huggan considers the literal and symbolic function of whales, taking a nuanced and often sobering approach, which has value in both revealing and debunking myths regarding one of the most recurring figures in human-targeted animal life (2018). “Most stories of cruelty have heroic and melancholic versions; and so it is with the history of human encounters with whales”, argues Huggan (2018, vii). Elsewhere, Huggan addresses the fact that humans’ understanding of cetaceans has been largely contingent on representation rather than direct knowledge—which is why it has been particularly important that “representations have often organized themselves around specific narratives” (2018, viii). Huggan’s italicisation of the word emphasises that narratives are stories, depictions, but also tales and constructs; beliefs that become concretised and instituted through storytelling and proliferation rather than, at least in some cases, evidence. This is especially relevant to Orca, where doxa surrounding the animal are passed on across generations rather than being the outcome of empirical fact. Within the range of stories told about whales, Huggan notes, there tends to be a pull towards the “either explicitly or implicitly allegorical; for whales, whose existence long predates ours, have frequently been associated with mythical stories of human origin as well as apocalyptic presentiments of planetary demise” (2018, viii). Huggan adds that the ferociousness with which whales have been pursued by humans is effectively incomparable to the aggressive pursuit (for example for resources; in hunting) of any other animal (2018, viii). It is such historical trajectories that (re)produce the melancholy, as Huggan observes, or “the violence we have done to whales over the centuries is a violence we continue to visit upon ourselves. It is also a violence that haunts us” (2018, xi–xii).

Such comments, as well as Huggan’s reference to “cultures of whaling” (2018, xi), emerge as particularly relevant to Orca; the latter phrase very much reveals that whaling is also a cultural, community trope rather than merely a monetary necessity. That the animal’s demise is seen as essential for the human’s survival creates a narrative of interweaving and ontological cross-implication. The folklore element of Grinter’s play enhances this. It is, further, significant that the same group of men, led by one specific figure, that proliferate the violence against whales, is also the same one that preys upon human members of the local community: vulnerable girls. As the violent hunt of the non-human creature becomes established as a gendered, cross-generational staple, with the whale vilified as a major threat to the community, so the cross-generational narrative of abuse becomes another staple. Those who (attempt to) self-defend, or protect others, reactions observable amongst the young girls and the animal itself, are, likewise, vilified.

Misrepresentations, after all, take hold as easily as it is difficult to dispel them. Huggan notes, for example, that even though the orca is widely known as a murderous whale, in fact it hails from the dolphin family (2018, xv). In Grinter’s play references to the animal serve for showing how narratives of exclusion come to take hold; how pariahs are constructed; how campaigns of elimination and extermination are carried out. Such is the case in the community where Orca is set, with any voices of dissent silenced, including the long-erased mother of the two sisters who come to experience abuse at the hands of ‘The Father’. Grinter’s play, in all its containment and staging modesty, is important because it sets an environmental preservation agenda—of creatures as much as landscape—alongside the anti-abuse, anti-toxic-masculinity agenda. In that vein, the text also exposes the difficulties that follow such endeavours of reversal and counteraction. Or, to return to Huggan, “many of these losses, both human and animal, will prove to be irrecoverable; thus, while saving the whales should remain an urgent priority for all of us, it may never be quite enough to save us from ourselves” (2018, xvi). Interventionist drama, however, tends to function on the premise that it might, at least, attempt a disruption—along the principle that literary theorist Marco Caracciolo proposes in noting that “negotiation of uncertainty invites readers [and spectators] to transition from an anxious anthropocentric outlook on the future to a more hopeful affirmation of more-than-human interconnectivity, which involves a sense of human responsibility toward nonhuman life” (2022, 90).

The contained scenography (by Frankie Bradshaw) of the premiere of Orca, responsive to the minimalism of the text itself, drew on, as well as served and enhanced, what Huggan refers to as “the spectrality of the whale”, which may be both reality and simulacrum of itself (2018, 86, emphasis original). As Huggan notes, the specifics of the animal pose a challenge to its depiction; meanwhile we encounter

reflections on whales as projection screens for human desires and interests, but also as spectral figures whose literal as well as figurative elusiveness ends up troubling the process of representation itself. […] simultaneously substantial and insubstantial – […the spectrality] helps turn it, not just into a quintessentially unsettling figure, but also into an all-purpose symbol for entangled histories of disappearance and loss. (2018, 86)

It is in this vein that engagement with the whale as symbol and physicality is structured in Grinter’s play, while, at the same time, recognising that the true volume of the animal can never be fully captured in representation. In that sense, allusion becomes a potent dramaturgical tool. The way in which—beyond the actual title, which itself, of course, also plays a major role—Grinter’s text serves to establish the whale as inextricable part of the landscape and to presence it as much as possible evidences this.

Specifically, the orca is a constant reference—the very gravitational pull, we might argue, of the characters’ existence. At the same time as it defines the identity and livelihood of the whaling community, the orca is conceptualised by that same community as major threat against its survival. The relationship is entirely paradoxical, not to mention that the power balance tilts heavily on the side of the human, rather than the animal, even though human-constructed binarisms might have this the other way around. The ‘interest’ is evident—for the humans it is in the killing, for profit and for claimed self-defence. The ‘desire’ is one of conquering when it comes to the patriarchal whaling cultures—and broader community cultures—that are firmly in place: but, also, of freedom, and of the counter force of the animal as longed for, one might say, by the female members of the community who have been preyed upon themselves and who have sought to break the cycle of abuse. The “entangled histories of disappearance and loss” (Huggan 2018, 86) apply both to the animal, forever at risk of being exterminated to the point of extinction, and to these women: vanished mothers and daughters, sometimes hidden in plain sight, because they contravened the rule of the same men that hunt and kill the animal. Not least, and of direct relevance to Grinter’s play, an animal with a ferocious mothering and survival instinct.

Huggan’s theorisation of whales more broadly and orcas specifically is too wide-ranging and nuanced to capture fully here. My references prioritise certain areas of applicability to the specific play, but, also, to the broader conceptualisation of how narratives concerning the whale as outsider are structured, and to what extent these might apply to any other creature, human or non-human, that might be labelled extrinsic and threatening. It is also the case that once one is treated as an outcast one might, as consequence, begin to embody these characteristics: to self-isolate; to perform their projected difference; to self-defend and to even become excessively aggressive, or violent. These are traits that we are also observing—with their nuances and differences—in Kirkwood and Munro’s respective plays examined in this chapter. In this spirit, it is relevant to foreground Huggan’s framing of humans’ emotional projections onto whales, presenting by means of these very narratives of disappearance and loss that trigger both guilt and trauma (2018, 88). Huggan reflects on how “personal identification may be experienced subjectively or projected onto something/someone else; […] historically based or future-oriented, as in the apprehension of vulnerability as the imaginative foreshadowing of future pain” (2018, 88). Elsewhere, he notes how “whales not only bring together different worlds but also become metonymic stand-ins for the world itself” (Huggan 2018, 109). And even though there is value to the point that other scholars put across, namely that “the orca stands as a metaphor of the tension between gentleness and terror […] an elusive creature [for which…] seafarers [who] encountered the mysterious beasts […] conceived of stories to make sense of what they had seen” (Schutten and Burford 2017, 259), ultimately the argument that Huggan pursues in favour of metonymy seems to more intuitively capture the magnitude of the animal itself, as well as that of the tension in its relationship with its human would-be capturers and/or observers.

When the play opens the collision course between myth and reality is already set up: Fan is telling Maggie about all that needs to be prepared for her costume so that she may perform her dance in front of the fishermen, and be chosen as this year’s Daughter. The selection is to happen later that night. There is a darkness: Maggie advises Fan not to be disappointed if she is not chosen and through her elliptical speech we come to understand that there is some distance between their family, the village community and its lead: ‘The Father’. Fan declares, innocently, that she wishes for herself the appearance of a mermaid; the reference reveals both an affinity for the sea and a lack of distinction between human and animal. Fan has not yet been corroded; even though she has absorbed—and repeats, and performs—the community’s narratives regarding the orca, she has not become indoctrinated in the culture of treating the animal as an enemy. Her ideal projection, therefore, is to appear as a creature of the sea, showing an appreciation for the in-between state of human animal/animal human; a deeper connection to nature; a responsiveness to the interwoven ecologies between human and non-human element: here water.

Fan wishes to earn the admiration of ‘The Father’ through her dance; Maggie advises her that to capture his attention is difficult, attempting to deter her sister from approaching him. When the girls’ father (Joshua) enters, it is clear that his relationship with Maggie is fraught. The latest incident appears to have been Maggie’s sabotage of Fan’s garland (essential for the performance) by advising its manufacturer that the family is unable to pay for it. Joshua accuses Maggie of lying constantly; we will understand later that this is not the case, and the antagonism is not between Maggie and her family, but between her and the village. If she is unable to extricate herself—and the sister she cares for—from its toxicity, at least she will attempt to impede their reach and influence. And while everyone else appears willing to adopt the narrative of the orcas encircling aggressively at the first sign of sea unrest, already from the start Maggie confronts the prejudice that has enabled such narrativisation and the manipulation of natural phenomena for the purposes of upholding the division, separating human from animal, and retaining the established whaling/patriarchal order.

The culture of silence—with whales and the sea as the only witnesses—is one that Maggie is unable to condone and perform. On the one hand, she is driven by the need to preserve her sister’s happiness; in the absence of their mother, it is she who has assumed this role. Fan’s relationship to Joshua, unlike that of Maggie, is entirely harmonious; but this does not mean that Joshua is able, or, even, ultimately, willing to protect her. There is, we come to realise, a load that Fan also carries: through her ‘proper’ behaviour the family may become reconstituted in the community; reincorporated following the so-perceived aberration of Maggie’s hostility to the locals—a trope also associated with her mother—that has led to marginalisation. Hints as to what has transpired land early, even though it takes some time for the play to fully gather momentum; this is achieved when Gretchen, the mysterious character that appears emotionally detached and communicatively evasive in the beginning—quite literally—finds her voice to share her own traumatic experience.

Returning to Urry’s community framing, already from the start in Orca we notice the exclusionary modes of a community that takes pride in its coherence and cohesion. They materialise doubly: firstly, by marginalising the human outsider (Maggie and her family); secondly, by vilifying the animal outsider (the whale). Human and non-human outsiders, then, seen as the deviants, come to occupy the same interspace of both part of and extrinsic to the community. Their existence is narrativised as parasitical by the dominant local agents to conceal the fact that it is their practices that are, actually, the devious ones. Meanwhile, the interspace of what we may call the incorporated margin is established as dynamic, potent—it is there that the disruption of the dominant and its entrenched biorhythms might begin to take shape and garner strength. In the work of Amanda Kearney we observed how space becomes an agent in itself, impacting the life quality of both human and non-human entities (2018). It is important to once more return to Urry’s “glacial” time (1994), where temporality becomes spatialised through metaphor: to be attuned to time, then, is to be attuned to the landscape, and vice versa. The process is defined by a more profound sense of interconnection and mutuality, which produces intimate ecologies between spaces, their biorhythms and their inhabitants. The fissure, then, opens, against the hegemony of ordered time, which, in the case of a context like Orca, is controlled by those in positions of power in the community.

Grinter’s play demonstrates this further in the repetition of the Daughter/Father/Orca ritual that re-runs annually on the very premise of the orca’s villainy and its narrativisation as set in place by those agents in control of the community’s financial, civic and emotional economies. Imagining the landscape as ally rather than adversary, and feeling un-installed in her limited village surroundings, Maggie attempts to disrupt the repetitive pattern and interfere with its inevitability. Against ordered, patriarchal “clock-time” (Urry 1994, 135), Maggie endeavours to carve out an interspatial opening, existing outside the spatiotemporal narrative of her cultural context. In order to illuminate this understanding of the interspace in Orca, I would like to further nuance Urry’s “glacial time” (1994, 135), considering his discussion of the intersection between leisure and “hegemonic clock-time” (1994, 131). I especially focus on Urry’s troubling of the binary between these two notions of time, with a view to understanding that it is their fraught co-existence that Maggie seeks to disrupt in Orca, and it is in that locus that she attempts to open up a space for independence, acting to reveal how both these spaces, presented as separate and distinct, in fact serve to maintain the extant orthodoxy.

The fishermen control the village’s economy, as well as its most popular common ‘leisure’ activity: the Daughter dance, which leads to the selection, by ‘The Father’, of the girl sacrificed to preserve the economies of power of a land that both relies on her and treats her with contempt. The dance is only in place to proliferate the structures of power and perform it practically and symbolically. Fan’s meticulous engagement with the story of the Daughter, as well as her dedicated and rigorous rehearsals, but also her emotional investment in the process, intersecting with the symbolic and financial significance that a favourable impression of her performance will yield for her family in the village, evidence the hight stakes and the extent of labour involved. There is nothing pure, or spontaneous, about the ritual; if leisure and hegemonic times converge, the hope is in the exposition of the fact that both serve the same exploitative economy and ought to be supplanted by a redistribution of the spatiotemporal field. As Urry notes, a meaningful shift does not necessarily imply a more relaxed understanding of time; it does, however, suggest a mode of operating more attuned to and in concert with non-human elements (1994, 133). Still, however, the determination of tasks even before capitalist-driven temporal assignment was a matter of cultural as well as religious patterns, which served to frame the natural, inscribing it with culturally-conditioned signification (Urry 1994, 133). Here we come to understand the extent of the challenge Maggie is facing, as, in her context, nature has been co-opted and presented as adversary by the dominant culture in the village, its adherence to its own arbitrary laws, and its quasi-ritualistic repeat performance of these. The interspace that Maggie is seeking to create, then, runs against a corrosive and extensive structure, which has to be counteracted in its entirety.

When Fan, who is too young to have a clear memory of her mother, is attempting to connect to her, she also displays, like the other females in her family, an intuitive connection to the non-human, and to landscape. The following exchange is indicative:

FAN. […] I was reading one of Maggie’s books, and it talked about a palm tree and I thought, if I never live anywhere but here, if I never go anywhere else then I’ll never see a palm tree. I’ll never, all the things in the books, I’d never see them. I felt sad about that. I love it here, I love our village but… I don’t know.

JOSHUA. You’re young, Fan, your mind will reach out to far off places, because you think that they’re better or more beautiful. Your mother thought about things like that once, like palm trees. You learn as you grow that palm trees are just trees to some folk. The ocean is still the ocean no matter the shade of blue. […] That’s something your sister could learn, there’s no better place than another […]. If you find a place that lets you stay, once they know who you are… That’s the best you’ll get… (Grinter 2016, 16–44)

Like Maggie, Fan is also, in her own way, imagining an interspace and the possibility of a different life for herself, on different terms. Whereas Maggie is traumatised and therefore contained in what she dares to desire, Fan is still unburdened and innocent. Consequently, she allows herself to be moved by a greater ideal, exemplified here in the image of the palm tree, another fragment of nature, which, like the orca, also functions metonymically: it stands for the elsewhere, the possibility of having roots without feeling confined and without being considered deviant for pursuing this state. This is a context that would position identity as a fluid rather than polarised and exclusionary concept. What might seem like modesty, or self-sufficiency on the part of Joshua, is another way of retaining the patriarchal hegemonies that have long squashed female freedom, punishing those that have dared to imagine it for themselves. The girls’ mother, in renting a boat so that, even momentarily, the family could be transported to another world—unafraid of the elements and feeling at home in the sea, was found guilty of precisely this kind of visible agency and expansive imagination.

It is nature that grounds the experience into fact: in the absence of her mother, Maggie might have forgotten the event were it not for the fleshy image of the “tiny red strawberries” “on my dress”, or the way “the water felt on my hand, cool” (Grinter 2016, 16–44). Then, a startling conjunction occurs, one of the most impactful moments of tying the human- to the non-human maternal. Maggie recounts how she “was scared because I thought the orca might come and sink us”; and yet, not only did this not happen, but, in fact, as her little sister was crying, their mother breastfed her on a boat in the open sea, no longer concerned as to how she might be judged by the people on the island, because they were no longer under their jurisdiction (Grinter 2016, 16–44). It was another environment that was now dominant, and there, in the water, in the space between, the girls’ mother was not only free, but at peace. The image of bare motherhood, protective of the child, moved by a primal instinct and with no regard for any human prohibitive agent, is, in my view, purposely paralleled in the play to the orca’s behaviour in its own natural element—unrestrained. The text appears to be taking on the animal as broad category, establishing correspondences on the premise of immediate ease within the natural environment and of uncontainable striving for freedom, thereby attacking the human/animal binary as reinforced by the oppressive community that the girls’ mother longed to escape. Even the way in which Maggie describes her sister as a “funny fish” enamoured of mermaids and imagining them in the water, equally mesmerised by the sea and frightened of the whale’s aggression, further points our attention to the play’s fascination with hybridities rather than binaries (Grinter 2016, 16–44).

In the darkest moments of Grinter’s plot, the parallel between human and non-human is presented in allegories, showing how these can be weaponised to cultivate fear and suppress freedom instincts. As ‘The Father’ warns Fan, referring to a mother orca with the pod under pursuit by whalers, “the thing she loved would be the thing that did it for her”—as in care and resistance renders one vulnerable to exposure and attack (Grinter 2016, 45–51). Protecting the pod was the cause of the orca’s own capture, while an equally strong maternal force, it is implied in the context of the conversation, caused the girls’ mother to speak against the abusive male hegemonies in place in the community—for the purposes, we gather, of safeguarding her children. This led, then, to another form of relentless ‘hunting’ pursuit, this time with a human victim. Moreover, when ‘The Father’ recalls Maggie’s stint as the Daughter he reminds her of how “the pod appeared and she looked straight at you”, adding a particularly bracing undertone to the metonymic function of Orca and pod: mothers and daughters at sea, persecuted, attempting to escape, eliminated (Grinter 2016, 16–44). In the next play examined in this chapter, the term “pod” also features, an early sign, perhaps, of a human pregnancy; the kind of natural cause that would, in that case, save a convicted murderer from hanging (Kirkwood 2020, 75–121).

In Grinter’s play, the orca stands as permanent reminder for the ferocity of the motherhood lost; the sea, likewise, stands as protective environment, the space of solace between vulnerable women and girls and the village—an element that can provide support and defence, if one may conceive of embarking upon an escape. Throughout the play, Maggie is working against the clock: the dance is looming; Fan is about to become exposed to the collective trauma that Maggie has experienced first-hand. The only source of hope is the possibility to intervene and disrupt what appears as a foregone process that will perpetuate systemic abuse. But the temporal margins of hope also operate on oppressive ‘clock-times’ dictated by the very structures that female agents like Maggie seek to disrupt, and any intervention is not only tentative, but also highly precarious. Through institutional Symplegades, the passage must be swift and strategic; or else, one is crushed. The condition persists in this chapter’s final case study.

The Welkin

Kirkwoood’s dramaturgical trope of placing the death of a female child at the heart of the plot is important, especially given the way in which the play establishes the importance of the interventionist interspace within a judicial framework, encouraging intellectual involvement but discouraging emotionalism. It largely achieves this by retaining a balance between the human and non-human, elevating its plot beyond the room, to the skies. A child born to a family of privilege has been murdered; a woman born in precisely the opposite conditions shows no remorse and is unequivocally guilty. When, during the matrons’ deliberations, as they are summoned to establish whether she is pregnant and may escape hanging, Sally Poppy, the perpetrator, describes how she first came to encounter the man that instigated the abduction and murder of the child, and as whose accomplice she acted, her words carry a distinctive tone of the metaphysical. Here, desire is framed as a cosmic experience:

and I wanted and I wanted and I wanted and then the wanting rose up around me like milk boiling like clouds boiling and then opened my eyes and saw a streak in the sky, a sort of dull blaze. And soon on the horizon I saw a smudge. And the smudge came closer and soon it became a thumbprint and the thumbprint became a smear and the smear became a hovering swarm and the swarm became a mechanical and the mechanical became a man […] I knew I was adrift and would do whatever he asked of me. (Kirkwood 2020, 75–121)

The only other event, beyond this encounter, that instigates emotion in Sally, is her longing to see Halley’s comet. In the above description, both states of rapture merge, where the wonders of nature are projected onto a human and vice versa. And so, the next stages in Sally’s life and death become interwoven with that of the comet. To Sally, whose life has been dull, colourless, classed and thankless, shiny objects, especially ethereal, are a source of fascination. The murdered child’s very hair, golden and still plaited, a trope that Poppy has kept (as the image on the cover of the published text clearly foregrounds), is not all too dissimilar from the golden shape of the comet’s tail; except the former is tangible, and the latter is not. But to Sally, they are both something to behold, and even to capture.

The correspondence is further bolstered by the celestial tone delivered by a landmark scene in the National Theatre production of the play’s premiere, which occurs immediately after the interval. The scene serves to create an interspace in nuanced ways: physically, notionally and temporally. The events of the scene transpire, with a dreamlike quality, on a time plane entirely separate from the standard action time of the play itself; the segment is an interruption and fissure in temporality and in the otherwise realist pace of the judicial part of the plot. At curtain rise (for the play’s second part), Sally is seen playing ‘airplanes’ with the child; she lies on her back on the floor, the child balanced on her hands, facing her, eventually lifted up in a movement that implies Sally has pushed her upwards to heaven. Here is the moment of transition between life and death, as the ‘sky’ above the stage space opens to take in the child. The child is seen as happy; so is Sally. The only moments in which she appears connected to her world in any joyous way, then, appear to be the ones where she faces the heavens. The title of Kirkwood’s play is perhaps nowhere else more viscerally felt than in this moment, although, certainly, by selecting an archaic word for ‘sky’ or ‘heaven’ in naming the play, Kirkwood emphasises its preoccupations with heavenly phenomena and higher layers of existence already at first contact with the audience.

There are further levels of discourse in terms of how the celestial/comet setting serves to create interspaces in the play. These include a form of time travel, presented in the play’s Act Two. Although a visual record of the segment exists on the production scenographers’ website (Brinkhoff/Mögenburg 2020), the scene was not staged in the premiere production, insofar as one may extrapolate from the archival recording. The segment is short and impactful: its strategic placement in the playtext’s finale underlines that the plot concerns are durational, applying across different cultural and historical contexts, towards a universal interconnectedness for the experience of women across time. The play opens—in production as well as playtext—with a verbally silent scene that features the matrons performing household tasks of manual/physical care and labour. It is titled “Act One, Housework”, mirroring “Act Two, The Comet” (Kirkwood 2020, 8, 122). The two serve as bookends for the play, and the circularity that they convey, reflected in the circularity of the comet’s (re-)appearance, evidences that for women the narrative is not a linear one, but one that repeats across time.

For the better elucidation of the connection, the longer quotations are merited. In The Welkin, then, this is the status of women’s lives in 1759:

Charlotte Cary is polishing pewter

Emma Jenkins is soaping her husband’s collars

Hannah Rusted is carrying pails of water on a yoke

Helen Ludlow is mending a dress by candlelight

Ann Lavender is changing a screaming baby

Kitty Givens is scrubbing a floor with sand and brushes

Peg Carter is sweeping the floor and ceiling with a besom

Judith Brewer is using a smoothing stone to force creases from linen

Sarah Hollis is beating a rug

Mary Middleton is kneading bread as she rocks a crib with her foot

Sarah Smith is plucking a pheasant

Elizabeth Luke is drying washing at a wringing post

The baby cries, the brush scrapes, the water slops, flour rises, feathers fall, silver squeaks, t

he broom and the carpet send up clouds of dust. (Kirkwood 2020, 8)

Meanwhile, in 2061:

The Matrons are working.

Charlotte Cary is wrestling with a bin bag and putting a new one in.

Sarah Smith is on her knees cleaning a carpet with a Dust Buster.

Hannah Rusted is carrying two heavy bags-for-life home.

Helen Ludlow is breastfeeding as she replies to emails on her phone.

Ann Lavender is using a sewing machine to make a Red Nose Day costume.

Kitty Givens is cleaning an oven.

Peg Carter is folding laundry as a washing machine whirs.

Judith Brewer is ironing while she watches TV.

Sarah Hollis is cleaning a toilet.

Mary Middleton is chopping leeks and anxiously watching a video baby monitor.

Emma Jenkins is defrosting a freezer.

Elizabeth Luke is a nurse visiting a primary school, treating a child’s head for nits.

Elizabeth sees it first. Looks up.

One by one the others look up too.

The Comet is returning, passing overhead. (Kirkwood 2020, 122)

Kirkwood’s opening segment serves to underline how women’s existence is forever occupying and proliferating (in) an in-between space, in which women function as agents between private and public domains—the latter becoming emphatically obvious when they are summoned to their judicial duties. The housework, captured here so viscerally, audibly, texturally through the stage- and audioscape of the production, is shown for the unseen space of committed, everyday labour that it truly is: a performance of that which is chronically essential and invisible at the same time.

In the finale, the circularity is accentuated by the fact that the same women—or more likely their future iterations, depending on how metaphysical an interpretation one may pursue—are again described as matrons; we have seen (versions of) them before. They exist in an elastic, in-between space that stretches diachronically beyond synchronic differentiations. They are forever peers, each other’s judge and community at the same time. As Clare Wallace notes, the women’s “silent labour frames the play’s overt agonistic scene, suggesting a systemic objectification that overspills the immediate setting and points to the policing of women’s place more generally” (2022, 34). As spectators, we serve at/as the in-between site of observation all along, mediating in different historical moments, invited to reflect on precisely what this policing entails, and how it might be disrupted. Moreover, as Act Two highlights, we—or our own future iterations—will continue to operate in this role. Our agency is conceptualised as actors in historical narratives of whom at least some empathy, but ideally also mobilisation against institutional wrongs and systemic failures, is expected.

In the space of a play having transpired, our familiarity with Elizabeth (Lizzy) Luke, the midwife who drives the action as much as Sally Poppy in The Welkin, is such that the fact that Kirkwood gives more prominence to her perspective by means of her being the first to observe the comet’s return is merited. Lizzy is the fore-matron in the events of 1759; she is the one who coordinates the deliberations of the women who have been summoned to evaluate the evidence and establish whether Sally is indeed in the early stages of pregnancy. There is a link to The Last Witch here, in that the bond between mother and child is shown in its full range of life-and/or-death iterations. Once more daughters emerge as systemically vulnerable, with motherhood the ultimate condition of care, tested against all adversity. In Munro’s play, a mother sacrifices herself to preserve her child from prosecution; in The Welkin, a (perhaps) mother to be is to be (possibly) saved by her unborn child, but, for that to even be plausible, she first needs to be saved by her mother, Lizzy. This is the same woman who, in attempting to save her daughter the first time around by giving her up for adoption, when she gave birth to her as a teenaged mother as a result of rape, unwittingly—and without fault given the limitations of circumstance—did not succeed in providing her child with a better future. The events of Lizzy’s early maternity are revealed at an advanced stage in the play; that Sally is her child is not a fact widely known amongst the matrons until then, therefore the impact of the revelation is considerable.

The comet, then, is the absolute schema for such states of recurrence, circularity and embeddedness. Additionally, and directly linked to the above, the analytical rigour in the comet’s monitoring mirrors the (at least predicated) meticulousness of procedures of juridical nature. The spaces of observation and adjudication that open and close, whereby the natural phenomenon serves as schema within which to situate the human condition as not separate from, but pertaining to planetary ecologies in itself, invite an engagement with relevant scientific literature, as considered in this book’s first main chapter. Taking into account that The Welkin is a modern-day historical play, I am interested in proceeding also synchronically, bearing in mind the sources that relate to the comet’s appearance and recurrence originating in the timepoints where the events of both text (fictional) and phenomenon (actual) occur, and therefore probing the play’s deeper threads and imagined, but also real, histories.

“I wanted to see the comet when it came”, Sally answers her husband in one of the play’s early scenes, “Act One, The Night in Question”, returning to her home after a four-month absence and interrogated as to her whereabouts in the intervening time (Kirkwood 2020, 9–12). This is that other crucial interspace harbouring the action that we do not get to see, except in a split fragment, in the spatiotemporal fissure of the ‘airplanes’ scene; this is also the parenthetical space that leads to yet another liminal space, that of the judicial process. Confronting her husband’s ignorance, Sally adds: “It has been predicted by Mr Halley, / don’t you read the newspaper?” (Kirkwood 2020, 9–12). Elsewhere, in an early dialogue with Coombes, the bailiff who comes to summon Lizzy to the jury, Lizzy’s (other) daughter Katy also appears to be mesmerised by the comet, inspecting the sky for its arrival during housework. Coombes remarks on her being fixated; she retorts that she has long awaited the comet, already three months late as “Mr Halley said it shoulda come before Old Year’s Night” (Kirkwood 2020, 13–22). She does not blink when Coombes returns with a humorous remark—the rudeness in the comet’s lateness—quipping back: “I dassent miss it. I’ll be dead before that comes round again” (Kirkwood 2020, 13–22). There is dramatic irony here in that one of Lizzy’s daughters will indeed die, in fact much sooner, but this will be Sally.

Further on, once the matrons’ deliberation begins, frequent references to the comet’s expectation land, punctuating the discussion as much as the references to Sally's crime, or the contested status of her pregnancy. As one matron comments, “I do think it’s very queer that we know more about the movement of a comet that is thousands of miles away than the workings of a woman’s body” (Kirkwood 2020, 75–121). A remark made by Lizzy at a crucial point in the deliberations process, namely that Sally “has been framed by a comet” in the sense that the comet’s sudden, forceful (and unobserved by others) arrival may have played a role in the events of the child’s death, producing a mistaken assumption of guilt for what was, perhaps, an accident, cements the overall dramaturgy of Kirkwood’s play (Kirkwood 2020, 75–121). Human and celestial bodies, that is, are conceptualised in tandem, with the comet functioning as compass and gravitational force when it comes to the action. Even though it never appears throughout the events of the play, the space of anticipation that the comet sets up, corresponding to the space of uncertainty for Sally’s fate, is the play’s crucial interspace. It is an act of waiting that is urgent, super-enhanced beyond the realm of the earthly. As life continues during the waiting, so it is also suspended.

This, then, is the interspace par excellence: fluid and elastic, taking substance within and in spite of measured and accounted, institutional/judicial and systemic/domestic time. The parenthetical space, that is, becomes the event, in a perfect union between science and nature: the in-between space is identified by scientists in the context of the comet’s framing; and the comet itself frames the interlude in which the events of the play transpire, mirroring, in its slow progress until a sudden visibility, the stages of a pregnancy. Both comet and pregnancy are events of monumental significance given their impact and consequence, and they also share a precariousness in their tenuousness in terms of visibility, temporariness, and the ability to be believed sight unseen.

When it comes to appreciating the intimacy between space and time in the context of The Welkin, I return to Urry’s mention of “glacial time, where time has almost entirely slowed down” (1994, 140). As Urry expands upon, “the emptying of time and space establishes something of a single world” (1994, 140). In The Welkin, we are dealing with time- and agency-pressurised space that the matrons have been interpellated into; here, they face both an immense responsibility and the realities of their chronic marginalisation in a profoundly classed and patriarchal society. Proceeding from Urry, such realisations are interwoven with the development of a non-anthropocentric eco-conscience that, reflecting the interests of this book, co-exists with the burgeoning possibility of the interspace as a fissure to linearity and continuity, and as the space where intervention and change are possible (Urry 1994, 140). In the case of the matrons, the two co-exist naturally: they are the ones who labour in domestic chores, forever in contact with the land, and in an intimate conversation with the broader world around them—their daily labour is both of and preserves the cosmos. It is an interactional ecology that also fully explains the engagement and fascination with the ultimate cosmic phenomenon of the time: Halley’s comet. As the matrons have been looking out for it, attempting to anticipate and trace it, and as they also look up in the future moment of its reappearance, so they have been mindful of, and preserving, through their daily care and attention, a richer universal/cosmic economy.

For Lizzy, a midwife well aware of the cyclical narrative of life, nature is the great equaliser. When she is first summoned, reacting to the news of the wealthy Wax family having lost one of its children to brutal murder, she exclaims: “They’ve a house full of decencies to put between themselves and the rest of the world but now the world has got in nonetheless” (Kirkwood 2020, 13–22). The world is both controlled by class and privilege and transcends these at the same time. Disruptions occur. Or, as Lizzy puts it, reflecting on Lady Wax, “perhaps the experience will sweeten her, like frost on a parsnip” (Kirkwood 2020, 13–22). Urry discusses “a re-evaluation of nature, which becomes increasingly viewed as not simply disposable, for humans have an especial responsibility for its preservation. And this entails taking a very long-term perspective, extending way beyond the lifetime of anyone presently living” (1994, 140). Additionally, “to presuppose a glacial sense of time, [is] to feel the weight of history” (Urry 1994, 140). The ‘very long-term perspective’ is precisely the commitment that the women make to the future of the world; to the ecologies of womanhood and personhood, because, to them, time is durational—there is such a thing as a long game, because their own experience as daily labourers is one such. With this comes the double appreciation that, firstly, the moments of interruption, interjection and intervention, especially those that hinge on and invite collective action, do not occur frequently, and, as community endeavours, ought to be recognised and taken advantage of. Secondly, because it is the everyday labour that teaches duration, that interconnects women themselves as invisible agents and that hinges on care and preservation, and, indeed, on principles of non-disposability, it is essential to extend the same courtesy to nature and to human beings alike.

As Wallace argues, “female bodies feature as the sites of agonistic dialogue about beliefs, rights and duties” (2022, 26). Mindful of the momentous weight of responsibility, Lizzy further comments on the clash of time and task, seeking to prolong it, to stretch that space for change, to highlight the cosmic implication: “You [the judicial authorities] give us an hour to make a decision that must be lived with for an eternity” (Kirkwood 2020, 22–28). As she also remarks in an impassioned statement, some considerable way into the deliberation:

Because every card dealt to her [Sally] today and for many years before has been an unkind one, because she has been sentenced by men pretending to be certain of things of which they are entirely ignorant, and now we sit here imitating them, trying to make an ungovernable thing governable […] I ask you to hope for her, so that she might know she is worth hoping for. And if you cannot do that for her sake, think instead of the women who will be in this room when that comet comes round again, and how brittle they will think our spirits, how ashamed they will be, that we were given our own dominion and we made it look exactly like the one down there [the courtroom, the angry mob, though arguably, also, a nod to the audience and their agency]. (Kirkwood 2020, 29–74)

Here, once more, is the recognition of the glaciality of time; of embeddedness in a cosmic narrative, for which the comet, like the orca in Grinter’s play, serves metonymically—for the responsibility of agency in the time and space of justice intervention. And all this, indicative of the radical lack of institutional care towards women as another form of coercion even when their agency is sought by the same system that oppresses them, in a room with “No food, no water, no fire, no candle” (Kirkwood 2020, 29–74).

Still, it is this same room that will become the space of community against disparity and of intervention, against the odds. It is the space where women will develop tactics of care towards the transient space, and towards each other—all in the spirit of preservation of something greater than themselves; all in the spirit of mutual self-recognition that does not erase, but acknowledges and respects difference, while also respecting commonality. The act of care towards their shared space is reflective of and directly related to their care and attention to their legally assigned task. As Lizzy observes, in order to focus it is important, in addition to the individual circumstances of each matron, to acknowledge that:

This whole affair is a farce. We are cold, hungry, tired, thirsty women and all of us’ve had our housework interrupted. […] It is a poor apparatus for justice. But it is what we have. This room. The sky outside that window and our own dignity beneath it. […T]ogether we must speak in one voice. It is almost impossible that we should make the right decision. But shall we not try? (Kirkwood 2020, 29–74)

What Lizzy appears to acknowledge here, in her appeal to her peers, is that it is in the space of interruption, in the interlude, when the event occurs. The narrative may well be another, and time depth and longitude might prepare one for the action they are to take in the crucial moment, but the change occurs in the in-between. Parenthetical time and space may be incidental, but is not negligible. Rather, it is the event.

In order to furnish the site for an intervention, they must, quite literally, create the space: not only in terms of a break in the standard patriarchal order, but, also, in terms of the material surroundings that enable them to co-exist in a civilised manner, one conducive to the labour they have been tasked with. The spatial equilibrium is as much local as it is universal: attention begins in local minutiae to extend well beyond them. The matrons’ attention to the land and to the domestic embeds them firmly within their context: the space where one performs an act is equally important to the act being performed; an act of disruption does not emerge out of a vacuum. Defying judicial order not to have a comfortable experience in the material space afforded—as a way, arguably, of speeding the deliberation process along—is the first step towards disrupting systemic prejudice, labouring for the material conditions towards the physical interspace that might also produce the ideological one. Interventions, too, require meticulousness, care and attention; The Welkin shows that no one is in a better position to provide these than the very agents that have been kept intentionally removed from the majority of the bureaucratical and legal processes shaping the society in which they live, and whose wellbeing they shoulder on a daily basis. Acknowledging responsibility towards the human world, it is shown clearly, departs from assuming responsibility towards the non-human environment.

Here, this environment comes in the shape of “A cold bare room above the courthouse […] gloomy. No fire lit although one is laid” (Kirkwood 2020, 29–74). The matrons observe the lack of care immediately, with one of them—Emma Jenkins, whose agency we later realise proves pivotal, in her quiet alliance with Lizzy—commenting: “Dirty skirting, does that not make you want to weep? Who cleans for them? Who keeps house for the law?” as another matron uses her own handkerchief to clean (Kirkwood 2020, 29–74). Already we notice Emma’s confidence, her care, but also her ability to be moved by what strikes her as an imbalance and injustice, precisely where justice ought to be a given; her sense of “duty to the parish” is also proclaimed, while she regrets the absence of women’s voice except in rare moments of spectacular(ised) crisis (Kirkwood 2020, 29–74). The law by which Emma abides is compelled by a moral imperative; an empathy that one might even call old-fashioned, motivated by a deeper urge than sympathy. She will, at the finale, describe herself as “quite a tender creature behind closed doors”, which, matched with her sober reasoning, provides a catalytic moment for action—and for the radical potential of the interspace, even when it might appear that the intervention that attempts to disrupt the linearity of the judicial system has failed (Kirkwood 2020, 75–121). As Wallace observes, peer adjudication contexts such as the one that the play depicts show how “[w]ithin a resolutely patriarchal judicial system, […] open[s] a small, if ambivalent pocket of female agency” (2022, 33). It is this agency that will be tested and maximised by the conclusion of the play's events.

Early in the process of deliberation, already tired and effectively captive, the matrons are beginning to feel physical discomfort alongside the mental and moral—in some cases also emotional—pressures of being in the jury. Lizzy is able to offer partial relief when she produces some bread, which is eagerly shared. While no claim can be made as to uniformity, a community is, in its way, beginning to form. As time wears on, the matrons support one another towards defying the so-called letter of the law. Eventually, “They have produced a spark that has caught the kindling. The fire starts to take” (Kirkwood 2020, 29–74). It is a direction as significant for the gradual reclaiming of the space as it is for the reclaiming of agency and of the bond amongst disparate individuals. But it takes effort; coordination; sharpness of spirit in a context where the body is deprived of foundational comforts. So when Lizzy notices the dwindling of the flame, she exercises her summoning strengths—and powers—“and pumps air vigorously into the fire” (Kirkwood 2020, 29–74). The fire livens as much the hearth in the room, as it does the women’s debate; if it dies, the interspace dissolves; the moment of intervention disappears. Lizzy succeeds and “the fire is kicking into life”; as debate swells, so “the fire is roaring” (Kirkwood 2020, 29–74). But the interspace is tentative, exposed—each time the window opens, mostly due to Judith Brewer’s menopausal hot flashes, the matrons are reminded of how temporary and transitory their spatial grounding truly is: the violent shouts of the crowd, hungering for the spectacle of hanging and the performance of punishment, invade.

It is a non-human entity that will, eventually, extinguish the flame and escalate events towards a more dramatic resolution: a dead crow lands spectacularly through the unswept chimney of the lit fireplace. In the crucial moment of milk having seemingly been extracted from Sally’s pregnant breast, a cloud of soot descends upon the room, covering everything; the momentum is ruined—the room also; the flame is “smothered” (Kirkwood 2020, 75–121). And while this could prove detrimental, Lizzy continues to rally. It is in the aftermath of the event, as the show resumes following the interval, and as we witness the ‘airplanes’ scene, that the interspace comes fully into being, and the women’s agency—all of them affected now by the intensity of the moment, mentally and emotionally, but also physically—comes fully into its own. Sally is examined by a doctor, who has volunteered his services; she is found to be pregnant. The women share in the moment, different sources of pain and grief rising to the surface; and Kirkwood builds a dramaturgically stunning fissure as they all join to sing Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” (Kirkwood 2020, 75–121). In the “strategic” anachronistic spatiotemporal occurrence (Wallace 2022, 37), the matrons transcend their time and space to form an intimate alliance, not despite of, but because of the differences that make their shared afflictions all the more strongly felt. Now, literally and metaphorically, they form a chorus of agreement. The interspace has taken root. They have claimed it through care for the room, and for each other.

Such is the magnitude of the event that, once Sally is found to be pregnant and the verdict returned, saving her from hanging, one of the matrons, Kitty Givens, is hesitant to leave because, as she quietly reflects before being alerted, “gently”, by Sarah Hollis, to the fact that it is time for them to vacate the premises, “It’s been so nice to be out of that house all day” (Kirkwood 2020, 75–121). Hollis agrees and regrets “But it is over now” (Kirkwood 2020, 75–121). Kirkwood’s stage direction here is profoundly poignant: “The spell is broken” (2020, 75–121). That is, “Sally’s unruly body and unrepentant agency” have provided the “fractures [to] the consensual common sense that positions the women in this environment, opening instead a discursive agonistic space” (Wallace 2022, 37). Now, the physical space remains, but the parenthesis has closed. The liminal space may have been an uncomfortable enclosure, but, for the matrons, it was a metaphorical clearing in the forest. The room is soon to be restored to its systemic proprietors; the intervention has occurred, and normality, in its relentless gendered orthodoxy, resumes.

Even so, nothing might quite prepare spectators for what follows: namely, the brutal physical assault that Sally will sustain in a few moments with Coombes as the perpetrator. In a play that wholly casts male authority into doubt, from ineffectual husbands to myopic judges and all degrees in between, it is especially important that even as this act of major violence and transgression is perpetrated by a man, he is still shown to be ineffectual; a weakling. The decisive disruption to the interspace, then, occurs not at the end of the proceedings, not even when the matrons, one by one, vacate the room. It occurs in what, on the stage, as well as in the text, emerges as a moment of immense darkness and gravity in the shape of Lady Wax infiltrating the space of the courthouse to demand an audience. She does not, however, speak to Sally. She does not speak to Coombes either, or not audibly; but she presses money in his hand. He appears to have qualms, but, in Lizzy’s absence (fetching food and water for Sally) and following Lady Wax’s exit, he still “stamps on [… Sally’s] stomach twelve times”, as if to erase each of the jurors that have engaged with and scrutinised that very body (Kirkwood 2020, 75–121).

Consequently, Sally miscarries violently. Upon returning and encountering the scene, Lizzy is mortified at the realisation; and while the brute force of the event, paired with that of class, privilege and money, might have been enough to erase the narrative of justice that the twelve matrons intervened to formulate, it is now that we most resolutely come to grasp the disruptive potentialities of the interspace, and its own gravitational pull and force. Sally, facing the realities of the execution now certainly awaiting her, pleads with Lizzy to kill her before she is surrendered to the authorities and the spectacle-hungry crowds. Lizzy is confronted by the vast scale of circumstance, but finds herself morally unable to fulfil Sally’s repeated pleas. Then, suddenly, Emma returns. Objects in space also matter: they are agents; they punctuate the moment. In this case, it is a knife—a blunt instrument that was earlier used towards an act of care: the “letting” of Judith in the toe, so as to relieve her hot flushes (Kirkwood 2020, 29–74). Another relief is about to be delivered, as the knife serves as prompt for Emma’s return; she had left it behind and has come to retrieve it.

Once more, Emma, unemotional, “not the person to come to for mercy”, as she says of herself, appears compelled by a higher sense of duty and agency (Kirkwood 2020, 75–121). Reflecting on the violence of the mob awaiting Sally, she delivers one of the play’s most poignant lines: “There is a moral slippage in this country I find most troubling” (Kirkwood 2020, 75–121). And then, an allegory from personal experience: the cover-up of a domestic incident involving Emma’s husband’s favourite pet, which was aggressive towards her and which became poisoned by true accident, but whose circumstances of death, through his extraordinary love for the dog, her husband would have been incredulous towards. Emma’s merciful intervention occurred as she “took off […her] stays, wrapped the laces round the poor thing’s throat and released her” (Kirkwood 2020, 75–121). Emma, however, needed a witness to corroborate that the dog was already gone when she found her; her sister, as Emma mentions, was able to swear impassionedly that so it happened. In what were extraordinary moments in the play’s premiere production, without a hint of sentimentalism, an understanding is reached; a camaraderie between women who are aware of each other’s struggles as peers, and as mothers. Emma, then, restores the interspace through personal narration; and, so, a different ending will be delivered to the story. Sally will die with a face cleaned by her mother, as she is instructed, also by her mother, who stands behind her, to face forwards and upwards, to the sky, because the comet—once more described as a “smudge”, the same word Sally used to describe first seeing her lover’s figure against the sky (and therefore further interconnecting the two experiences)—is about to appear (Kirkwood 2020, 75–121). It is an once-in-a-lifetime moment and it will end in a flash. Sally is released, even if she does not leave the room.

Reflecting on how enclosure can also mark liberation, it is relevant that the play, landing in January 2020, marginally predates the COVID-19 pandemic; the distance between premiere and lockdown is, we might say, within the margins of the temporal interspace that forms at the time of the play’s events as far as the appearance and disappearance of the comet is concerned. The sudden stranding of individuals within a closed-up space, the developments that this expedites and their engagements with an outside that is both beyond a door and very far away, would come to acquire greater resonance still within the space of a few weeks from the play’s opening. In this context, the Burgtheater premiere of the play, which came in the autumn of 2020 shortly before Vienna would enter another lockdown and as theatres all across the world remained disrupted, acquires heightened significance. Thrust within a COVID-19 context, the staging showed the twelve matrons in an actual physical interspace: a glass room within the room (the stage), revolving, their hands leaving marks on the windows as they, themselves, had just been thrust into an unknown situation—confined under a strict lockdown protocol for the purposes of serving the greater good. The eeriness of the image—with the women’s colourful costumes cast against the darkness, together and yet disparate—as the soundscape of the production swelled, adding to the haunting atmosphere of the set, and as the windows served as dividers between ourselves and the actors, would bring to Kirkwood’s already nuanced play dimensions even more profound. A new reality was now shared across stage and auditorium, as our common environment was redistributed: being in a public space comes with agencies and responsibilities that may limit freedom, but also preserve it—a delicate balance that, like the spark in the fireplace, requires delicate kindling.

Sally herself forms part of a broader cosmic ecology—as such, even she, a murderess, a neglected child, a classed and othered pariah, is not to be treated as disposable. In the very beginning of the play, when re-encountering her verbally abusive husband, Sally undermines his church-fearing bigotry through a phrase that appears to acknowledge a grander narrative, and a non-hierarchical way of being: “God isn’t up there, Fred. He’s inside us. In our bodies. In your body and mine and Poppet’s too [the dog that he neglects, and which she cares for]” (Kirkwood 2020, 9–12). Even Sally’s curt answer to her husband, “I’ve been to look at God”, when he insists upon his line of questioning as a man betrayed, reveals the one and only fascination Sally allows herself: that with a world greater than the one she has known, and which has failed her; a more expansive life (Kirkwood 2020, 9–12). That the choice she makes in terms of her lover is entirely ill-conceived does not alter the fact that Sally is motivated by a quest for the majestic; for an event that takes her beyond the mundane; that does not disappoint.

Time in The Welkin is both/and: it is both almost entirely slowed down and parenthetically interjected, with long-lasting consequences. Its glaciality relates both to how it is experienced in the present moment by the agents involved, and to how these agents’ actions will inscribe a legacy, in the form of social attitudes towards women, as well as legal precedent, that will long postdate the temporality of the specific action. Kirkwood’s glance at the distant future at the projected time of the comet’s return attests to this. One might, of course ask, whether even in contexts where the dramaturgy of the play produces a rootedness in a specific time period, we are not, actually, always embedded in a temporal elasticity by virtue of the fact that we are encountering the events of the play in our own time—processing them through our present perspective of circumstances. Still, there is an essential distinction to be made: in cases of new plays engaging with past historical periods, meaning that we share the same present historical moment with the playwright, our receiving conditions will be different. In other words, the playwright knows that which we also know; we form part of the same, or similar, cultural, political and social conditions. These parameters combined both imbue the play with the weight of circumstance and defy the strict temporality of the present. Humanity runs more slowly than ‘clock-time’ might predicate: its narrative its cosmic, interwoven, interspatial.

Conclusion

This chapter has concentrated on three plays: Rona Munro’s The Last Witch, Matt Grinter’s Orca and Lucy Kirkwood’s The Welkin. In clustering these texts together under a collective title that foregrounds deviance, this chapter has asked how environments and behaviours are not only cross-attributable, but, rather, form part of deeper and more intricate synergies. The environments in which each of these plays unfolds could be described as ‘hostile’: a hard land that is the amalgam of a harsh landscape and of unkind behaviours. But there is more to be said about environments that induce, escalate and conceal—landscapes that host and absorb transgressions, witnessing and erasing evidence of these actions; local residents beholden to bonds of dependency and cross-benefit at the expense of those more vulnerable, and defenceless; and an exploration of how such defencelessness might be equally the result of exposure to the elements, and to people. As this chapter has argued, beyond facile anthropomorphisms, these plays conceptualise their terrains as intricate and dynamic, rather than ascribing to the earth the characteristics of its people. The questions that are asked here, regarding human and non-human nature, and the desire of the human to transgress their immediate geo-spatial and geo-social limitations, lead to a consideration of the interspace as the site of the metaphysical, of that which the human invokes to be delivered of the insufficiency and hostility of the man-made world. Here, the term is used mindfully, because, in each of these plays, we are dealing with social environments that are profoundly male-gendered, with legend and mythologies serving as ground for persecuting any agent of difference, or of change.

The interspaces that open within the institutional, however, are the ones where the upset in hierarchy appears to be momentarily possible: it is so in The Last Witch, where one woman is sacrificed to the parochial beliefs of a society that vilifies the different, where her daughter, living at large, in nature, strives to be accommodated in a world whose vastness she rivals with her own desolation. It is so in Orca, where a recurring sanctioned ceremonial serves as the ground of sacrifice of young girls to abusive patriarchal forces, but for the intervention of a community of sisters, and of mothers—both human and non-human—that throw their own bodies in the way of breaking the cycle. And it is so in The Welkin, where a punishing judicial system both relegates authority and castigates action, only to find itself subverted from within, in that pregnant space of a sisterhood forming amongst dramatically different women, brought—and maintained together—by a commitment to true justice. As these plays show us, and as this chapter has demonstrated, it is looking to the horizon beyond, to the sea and the sky and the non-human, that the lesson is to be gleaned. The lesson is from nature, rather than a community of men: its own unruly landscapes, as these plays have shown, if gendered at all, are, then, female-gendered, inhabited and tended by women. And so the female body strives to connect to a sense of purpose higher than the human, while, at the same time, serving to preserve this very humanity. It is in such a space where change takes flesh.