Skip to main content
NSDF Logo NSDF
Donate
What's On
NSDF HUB
What We Do
What We Do
What is NSDF all about?
NSDF LAB NSDF HUB NSDF CREATES Access Toolkit Our Yearly Festival The Bigger Room Project
Support Us
Support Us
How can you support NSDF's work?
Alumni Supporters Scheme Our Supporters Make a Donation Leave a Legacy
Our Story
Our Story
Find out more about the 65 year old Festival.
Our Mission Our History Our Principles Our People Our Alumni
The Fourth Wall
The Fourth Wall
Read articles from Noises Off, our Festival Magazine, and catch the latest from Team NSDF at Blogs & News
Blogs & News Noises Off
Register
Noises Off Article

Must it be this way

Published on
21st April 2019

Aimee Dickinson questions violence against women as a plot device

Share this article

Watching A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing was not easy for many reasons. 

The one woman show presented a visceral and painful evocation of the life of a young woman speaking to her younger brother growing up in a stifling Catholic household. Much of the play centred around this character’s sexual abuse and her subsequent unhealthy relationship with sex. While fantastically performed, these scenes did raise a question that has been bothering me for a while, especially with some of the theatre that I have seen produced by universities over the last few years: why is sexual abuse at the heart of so many plays centred around the female experience?

This is by no means a denial of the reality that women are much more likely than men to be victims of sexual assault, or in any way suggesting that the voices of these women should not be expressed. But I would argue the presentation of this issue in theatre has moved beyond an exploration of this serious issue, and instead become a lazy plot device.

In this new trend, plays around female experience are less interested in exploring the female characters than presenting a voyeuristic and almost fetishized presentation of violence. This has the insidious effect of reducing women to victims who must constantly protect their bodies from the men who threaten them, making the plays instead about these male characters.

It almost seems to me that for playwrights, sexual abuse has become a sure-fire way to create vulnerable female characters in a way that is certainly not done with male characters. This is an issue that was also raised in Yen, another play in which sexual assault is used as a plot device to complicate the male driven plot. To make a man a sympathetic character and evoke emotion from an audience, a play would be much less likely to jump to sexual assault. Instead, a playwright is much more likely to focus on career failures or family dissolution as a cause for emotional turmoil.

While I am in no way suggesting erasure of these experiences in theatre, I think we need to seriously consider presenting women as fully rounded characters rather than reducing them to victims.

@noffmag / noff@nsdf.org.uk

Latest from Noises Off

Latest from Noises Off

See all
NSDF 2023

Space to grow

13th June 2023

Imogen Usherwood interviews Selwin Hulme-Teague on the creative process behind Plant Gays.

Read More
NSDF 2023

How it felt to be 16

1st June 2023

Mailí Ní Ghormáin on an evocative work-in-progress from Big Creative Academy

Read More
NSDF 2023

we really might do it

30th May 2023

Julia Brookes on community, collaboration and conversation

Read More

Sign-up to our newsletter

Sign-up for our newsletter
Follow us
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube
Contact Us Frequently Asked Questions Young Person Protection Policy Website Accessibility Privacy Policy
© NSDF Site by Grandad.digital
Sign-up to our newsletter

Sign up to our newsletter to stay up to date on all our upcoming events, information and news. Read our Privacy Policy to learn more about how we process your data.