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Geographies of oppression : the cross-border politics of (m)othering: 'The break of day' and 'A yearning'.

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Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>09/1999
<mark>Journal</mark>Theatre Research International
Issue number3
Volume24
Number of pages7
Pages (from-to)247-253
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

In the autumn of 1995 the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester, UK, staged two plays which offer a dramatic treatment of the politics of motherhood: Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Break of Day (Haymarket Mainhouse, first performance 26 October 1995) and Ruth Carter's A Yearning (Haymarket Studio, 31 October to 4 November 1995). Neither play had significant box-office success, and The Break of Day received poor and hostile reviews from (male) critics, many of whom, like Paul Taylor for The Independent, commented on the play as a dramatization of ‘how the maternal drive can cause women to betray orthodox feminism’. My counter argument is that by addressing infertility as a feminist issue for the 1990s, both plays index the need to re-conceive a politics of motherhood in an international arena, highlighting the ways in which the biological contours of women's lives are globally mapped with the specificities of social, material and cultural geographies.

Bibliographic note

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=TRI The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Theatre Research International, 24 (3), pp 247-253 1999, © 1999 Cambridge University Press.