Abstract
“How is all of this going to get used by fascists and authoritarians, and people who wish to control people and shut down dissent and to influence and divide people and exclude people and eliminate people? It concerns me deeply,” she said of the current crisis.
“Once you dislocate people from their bodies – and the body has always been the loci of revolution and change – you take away some fundamental power that they have, and agency and authority over their own life.”
We are discussing Chamomile Tea – a new version of a play she first conceived of during the Ronald Reagan years in the USA. The play imagines two women living behind masks as a result of a nuclear fallout. When she originally wrote it – when the president was constantly talking about a winnable nuclear war – V entered a period in which she couldn’t eat or sleep, imagining people disappearing “in various ways”.
Writer and activist V, whose play The Vagina Monologues has been performed in over 140 countries
CREDIT: Mike McGregor
The play is an exploration of one of these scenarios, and while its backdrop is one of nuclear waste, the questions the women ask about freedom could be copied and pasted into today’s crisis.
“Will you go out and risk getting ill? Will you live with freedom and potentially die [going outside] or will you live inside a gas mask where you can no longer eat, talk or feel? What is it like living without touch, without connection to people, without community?” she asked.
While she describes Donald Trump’s presidency as a “grotesque nightmare”, V believes that what we’re seeing now is the devastating consequence of the full-throttled neo-liberalism that began with Reagan. It’s the result of some people dominating conversations to such an extent that warnings over things such as the environment and, crucially, global pandemics have been ignored.
“So much has become polarised,” she said. “In the US, people listen to news media and get absolutely opposing views. Where is truth? What is truth? In my lifetime it has never been so extreme. We’re living in a post-truth world, where people don’t know what is real and who to trust. We don’t have anywhere near a collective understanding of what is true.”
She believes that one result is that these “denying powers feed into people’s desires to not do anything”.
V founded the global protest movement One Billion Rising, which seeks to empower women to speak up against gender-based violence, and at the time of the interview she is deeply troubled by the prospect of not being able to easily protest while restrictions are in place.
“What disturbs me at the moment is that we need to congregate, we need community – movements are based on people coming together in the street, the town hall and meeting places,” she said, adding that class and racial divides were diabolically apparent now. Essential workers go to work and risk their lives while the more privileged can take shelter.
“Is this going to open the door to the wicked, who are already trying to deregulate everything, already trying to extract every possible inch of this planet and the next, or is this going to bring in a time when care is the most central part of society and we live for people over profits?”
She is deeply concerned about stories that domestic violence has risen during the lock-downs, but it is not just women whose voices are being silenced.
“There’s such a judgment of men by other men who really want to talk, to change their bad behaviour and address patriarchy. It is very hard for men to come forward without getting judged or put down,” she said, explaining that when she toured the world in 2019 to promote her book, The Apology, many more men were in the audience than she expected and many were interested in a process of reckoning.
“But there is fear and apprehension,” she said. “An apology process is a very good place to begin. Without this I’m not sure we’ll end violence towards women.”
Chamomile Tea
By V
INT. LIVING ROOM
A woman, Jane, in her 50s/60s is seated on a sofa in a lovely living room. She is surrounded by elegant furniture, an ambience of wealth and sophisticated taste. She is dressed in L.K.Bennett and is wearing a gas mask. The gas mask is decorated with flowers which match her dress. She sits, waiting on the sofa. In a bit, another woman, Eugenie, the same age enters. She is also dressed in L.K.Bennett and is wearing a similar gas mask. She carries a tray of tea sandwiches, a teapot and delicate china cups.
Inside each of their gas masks is a microphone. Initially Eugenie’s microphone is turned up too high.
Eugenie speaks as she enters.
CREDIT: Kerry Roper/Ikon
Eugenie turns her microphone down by adjusting a switch in her pocket.
Eugenie sniffles.
Her goggles are all steamed up. Eugenie takes out her purse-sized Windex spray.
She sprays Jane’s goggles and cleans them off.
They both take out needlepoint and begin to sew.
She fills her cup.
Jane says nothing, Then she accidentally knocks over the teacup and it breaks.
It’s been months and months.
Jane turns the music off.
The feeding bell goes off.
Jane continues to undo her mask.
Jane takes off her mask.
Black out. End of play.