Theatre
Portrait of a feminist
by Ruth Nicol
Joanna Murray-Smith’s comedy The Female of the Species considers the legacy of Germaine Greer and other women’s rights activists of her era.
Any resemblance Margot Mason bears to persons living or dead is entirely intentional. But it is only a resemblance, insists her creator, Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith. Just because Margot Mason has many of the same characteristics as outspoken feminist Germaine Greer – including an alliterative name and a gargantuan ego – that doesn’t mean she is Greer.
“I didn’t want to do a character portrait of Germaine Greer, because I didn’t have the courage,” says Murray-Smith, whose latest play, The Female of the Species, is being staged by the Auckland Theatre Company. “The scenario in the play is definitely based on Germaine Greer. But the character, although she shares similarities with her, could be one of 19 or 20 feminists from that era.”
That may be true, but it’s hard to imagine any other feminist from Greer’s era with such a facility for getting up people’s noses. It was Greer, after all, who managed to alienate a good proportion of her fellow Australians by suggesting that the animal kingdom had finally got its revenge when crocodile hunter Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray in 2006.
More recently, she described Diana, Princess of Wales as a “devious moron” and denounced Hillary Clinton as “cold, bossy and manipulative”. (Bill Clinton, on the other hand, is “adorable” – “He’s always flattering me and inviting me to stuff in Britain and we’re buddy-buddy,” she said in March.)
With source material like that, it’s not surprising that Murray-Smith’s “non-portrait” of Greer is a comedy, with Margot Mason the butt of many of its jokes.
“It’s more complicated than saying that what makes her funny makes her absurd,” says Murray-Smith of Margot. “Some of the time she is absurd – her vanity, her ego, her blindness, her love of being the centre of attention. They make her laughable. But at times what she says has to register with the audience as making sense.”
Murray-Smith isn’t exactly a household name in New Zealand, but across the Tasman she is one of Australia’s best-known and most popular playwrights. Previous plays include Honour, which was produced in both the West End and on Broadway, and Rapture, also a success internationally. Her one-woman show Bombshells will be staged at Wellington’s Circa Theatre in July.
Bombshells is also a comedy but, according to Murray-Smith, The Female of the Species is her first true comic play. It’s loosely based on an event that took place in 2000, when Greer’s country home was invaded by a disturbed former student.
At the very start of the play, Margot, too, is handcuffed to her desk by her captor, Molly Rivers. But the plot quickly departs from reality into full-blown farce. Soon, the rest of the cast, including Margot’s daughter, Tess, and her son-in-law, Bryan, are climbing through Margot’s study window at an increasingly hectic pace as the play builds to a surprising climax.
While the underlying theme is serious – feminism and its social legacy – Murray-Smith’s treatment of it is anything but. The witty exchange of barbs and one-liners saw her being hailed as a brilliant new comic voice when the Melbourne Theatre Company premiered the play in 2006.
It’s that humour which attracted American actress Annette Bening to the role of Margot, though plans for Bening to star in a Broadway production of the play later this year are now on hold for “personal reasons”. But all the cleverness can leave you wondering where Murray-Smith sits on the matter of feminism herself.
“I consider myself a feminist, but I think that art and comedy and theatre should look at things with some complexity and reveal the inconsistencies and flaws and hypocrisies of any ‘ism’ – whether it’s feminism or communism or sexism,” she says.
“A lot of the feminists drove us mad with the rapidity that they changed their minds about things. There were constant contradictions and a failure to understand that many women were caught up in a maelstrom of ideas and many suffered for it. On the other hand, where would we be without those women who were willing to throw grenades?”
One issue she says most early feminists failed to address was how women combine work and motherhood. Making Margot a mother – something that Greer is not – gave Murray-Smith the opportunity to explore the issue in the play.
“I think one of the fairly legitimate claims about that first wave of feminists is that they didn’t honour mothering enough. They didn’t fight enough for mothers – they fought for issues for working woman. I think women can recognise that, particularly as so many qualified women are now going back to the house because they find it so hard to do both.”
Her own working life is one of constant compromise. She has three children aged two to 13, and works from home, recently with the help of a nanny two days a week.
“I have forced myself to become adaptable. When people say to me, ‘You’re so successful, how do you do it?’, I feel like saying that if they think I have paid no price for it, they’re mistaken. There’s always a price paid, you just have to work out how high a price. For me, I think it’s acceptable not to do canteen duty at my children’s school, but not to be away more than 10 days at a stretch.”
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