Linda Griffiths - Age of Arousal
Nightwood Theatre's TO premiere at Factory's Theatre's Mainspace
The Victorian Age is a paradox where ladies literally bound by their corsets dared to unleash thoughts of sexual passion while on the verge of a womens' revolution.
Nothing's ever the same, after four new recruits, including a dishy modern-thinking man, fatefully arrive at Miss Mary Barfoot’s School for Secretaries. Linda Griffiths' Age of Arousal, “wildly inspired” by George Gissing's Victorian novel The Odd Women. debuted to critical acclaim at The Alberta Theatre Project’s EnBridge playRites’ Festival. Nightwood Theatre's Toronto premiere, directed by Maja Ardal and starring Clare Coulter and Sarah Dodd, opens November 17, 2007. It is accompanied the same night by the published version of Griffiths' play and (drumroll please) Age of Arousal receives its U.S. premiere this December.
In this five-part series, one of Canada’s playwriting pioneers Linda Griffiths (Maggie and Pierre, Alien Creature) talks about her roles in the theatre and film, as scribe and actress, in additon to her latest theatrical ambrosia Age of Arousal.
Part One: Novelist George Gissing, a shortage of women in Victorian England, and Suffragette Mary Barfoot's "secret weapon for the battle of equal opportunity. Behold the Remingtons!"
Has Age of Arousal changed much since its debut at ATP?
"I don’t know if an audience would notice the differences. I certainly have worked on it again, but in a sense of fine tuning. It’s great to be able to do that and I am just preparing the published version of the play which will come out opening night in Toronto."
George Gissing and Odd Women: Gissing’s downfall was women and he “had a stunning capacity for self punishment”.
"Oh yeah. I read Odd Women a lot and then I didn’t read it for years and the play is definitely inspired by the book. And yes,Gissing, he had an insane private life."
Why was there was a female population imbalance in England at the time, and why all these Suffragettes running around?
"I really don’t know because you would think that would be the case more after the First World War when there was a decimation of the male population, but this population imbalance is noted from the 1860s and went right into the '90s. Some people question the numbers, but there is no case, no question, that they were looking at half a million more women. They actually took a look at offloading them to America and figured out how many ships it would take to put all the surplus women on, to send them to the Americas. That’s like 10,000 ships needed to make 10,000 voyages."
How many men would there have been in America?
"Who knows, but the balance was of course the other way. I have no idea why. It is one of those mysteries, but there it was. It’s also true in the Baby Boomer generation, that there is an imbalance. It’s never fifty fifty, but certainly in the Baby Boomer generation it’s something like 2% more women were born."
I have a Remington Noiseless Portable Typewriter... Why does Mary Barfoot (Clare Coulter) think that this machine is the “key” to women’s liberation?
“In those days,that was the way to get women in the work force doing a non-traditional job. At the beginning men were secretaries. The word “secretary” would have meant a man because women had very restricted areas in which they could work – basically teaching of any kind – "governessing" being kind of the same thing, so when the idea surfaced that all these women had to find a way to make a living of some kind, there was a double thrust. One was, educate and challenge, the idea that women could do things other than work within the home, or with children, or with the sick. The other was, what are they going to do? They have got to enter into business somehow so this was the way to get their foot in the door. Certainly in my version of Mary Barfoot, she sees that only as the beginning, so the way women could get in the door is challenging the idea that a secretary is a male."
