Abstract
Lisa McGee’s play Girls and Dolls was first performed by Tinderbox Theatre Company, Belfast, in 2006. At the centre of the narrative is a violent crime which closely resembles the murder of two-year-old James Bulger by two ten-year-olds, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, in 1993 — but for the fact that the two perpetrators, as well as the young child they kill, are female. McGee’s play was by no means the only response to Thompson and Venables’ crime which emerged from theatre in the United Kingdom. Rather, Mark Ravenhill has noted that the Bulger case provides the starting point for much notable British new theatre writing of the 1990s because of the particular ‘dramatic landscape’ it suggests: ‘the shopping centre, the video camera, the child-killers’.1 For Ravenhill, the level of creative and media interest in this crime — committed by children, and in which the victim was an even younger child — was a reflection of the fact that this case exposed the individualist and infantalised society associated with consumerism, ‘an environment of the infant “me,” where it is difficult to grow into the adult “us”’.2 Thus the Bulger case prompted immediate creative responses to the questions of morality, the nature of the penal system, education, and childhood which the case raised.3
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Notes
Mark Ravenhill. ‘A Tear in the Fabric: the James Bulger Murder and New Theatre Writing in the Nineties’, NTQ 20/4 (2004), 308.
Ibid., p. 312.
The plays that Ravenhill refers to are his own Shopping and Fucking (1996), Handbag (1998), and Some Explicit Polaroids (1999), as well as the work of writers including Sarah Kane, Joe Penhall, Patrick Marber and Martin McDonagh. The Bulger case excited so much media attention that it brought other, similar instances into focus — in particular, the case of Mary Bell (who murdered two young boys while still a juvenile herself), which received renewed press attention in 2003 and which is the subject of Jack Thorne’s Fanny and Faggot (2007) and Simon Stephens’s Morning (2012). Again, these plays focus primarily upon the motivation for, and the details of, the murder, rather than its aftermath.
Downing Street Declaration in A Farewell to Arms? From ‘Long War’ to Long Peace in Northern Ireland Ed. Michael Cox, Adrian Guelke and Fiona Stephen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 327.
Denis Cosgrove. ‘Landscape and Landschaft’, in GHI Bulletin 35 (Fall 2004), p. 57.
See Victor Mesev, 1’eter Shirlow and Joni Downs. ‘The Geography ot Contlict and Death in Belfast, Northern Ireland’ in Annals of the Association o fAmerican Geographers 99/5 (2009), 893–903.
See, for example, Karen Lysaght and Anne Basten. ‘Violence, Fear and the ‘Everyday’: Negotiating Spatial Practice in the City of Belfast’ The Meanings of Violence, Ed. Elizabeth A. Stanko (London; New York: Routledge, 2003), pp.224–42; and Lorraine Dowler. “‘And They Think I’m Just a Nice Old Lady”: Women and War in Belfast, Northern Ireland’, Gender, Place and Culture 5/2 (1998), 159–76.
Willmar Sauter. Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames (2004), p. 11.
Susan Bennett. Theatre Audiences: A Theoty of Production and Reception (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 103.
Lisa McGee. Girls and Dolls (London: Nick Hem Books, 2006), p. 5. All subsequent scene/page references from this edition are given in parentheses, abbreviated as GD, after quotations in the text.
Graham Dawson. Making Peace With the Past?: Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 66.
Kim Lacy Rogers, Selma Leydesdorff and Graham Dawson. Trauma and Life Stories: International Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 6. (quoting from Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery).
Dawson. Making Peace with the Past?: Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles (Manchester: MUP, 2007), p. 3.
Ibid.
Gay McAuley. Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 24.
Ibid., p. 30.
Ibid., pp. 28–29.
S. E. Wilmer. Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 2.
Carole-Anne Upton. ‘Review of Girls and Dolls by Lisa McGee’, Irish Theatre Magazine (Winter 2006), p. 69.
Linda Connolly. ‘Feminist Politics and the Peace Process’ in Capital and Class 69 (1999) p. 150.
Ibid., p. 152.
Ibid.
Bill Rolston. ‘Mothers, Whores and Villains: Images of Women in Novels of the Northern Ireland Conflict’, in Race and Class 31/1 (1989), 44.
Ibid., p. 45.
Ibid., p. 44.
Victor Turner. ‘Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual and Drama?’ in By Means o f Per formance: Intercultural Studies o f Theatre and Ritual, Ed. Richard Schechner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 12.
Ibid., p. 45.
Cathy Turner and Synne K. Behrndt. Dramaturgy and Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 14.
Mary Luckhurst. Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 11.
Anne Whitehead. Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 5.
Cathy Caruth. Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 153.
Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart. ‘The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 164.
Ibid.
Tim Etchells. Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment (London, New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 17.
John Countryman and Charlotte Headrick. ‘The “End” of Violence in Northern Ireland: Gender, Dramaturgy, and the Limits of Aristotelian Form’, in Theatre and Violence, Ed. John W. Frick (Tuscaloosa: Southeastern Theatre Conference and the University of Alabama Press, 1999), p. 69.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 68.
Ibid., p. 69.
Ibid., p. 70.
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© 2013 Rosalind Haslett
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Haslett, R. (2013). Demarcating Violence in the Dramaturgy of Lisa McGee’s Girls and Dolls . In: Matthews, G., Goodman, S. (eds) Violence and the Limits of Representation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137296900_6
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