“Madame Geneva”: Part of the Feminist Playwriting in the Twenty-First Century: Staging the Extra/ Ordinary Working Group

Described by one reviewer as “a fantastically ambitious piece of writing: fiery, bawdy, angry and unashamed of its own intelligence” (Higgins, 2017), Madame Geneva links the growth of the gin industry in Great Britain from the late seventeenth century onwards to the concomitant surge in prostitution in London. The plot moves primarily through historical scenes of dialogue-driven narrative (including characters like a sniffly King William of Orange, the artist William Hogarth, and the embodiment of gin, Madame Geneva herself) interspersed with large group scenes and the occasional musical number, featuring a tribe of Londoners, a chorus of prostitutes, and newspapermen narrating the march of history.
Egan ultimately connects the “gin craze” and the resulting moral outrage to the foundation of the first Magdalen Laundry in the eighteenth century, in an effort to reform what were seen as “fallen women.” This moral reform was effectively an othering of the impoverished and sexualized female body. These fallen women were “tidied” away into what was effectively the first penitentiary (literally – a home for penitents), described by later analysts as “a sophisticated method for social control” (Nash 1984: p. 617). As Egan was honing the script (inspired in part by her own past experience in the Bessboro Mother and Baby Home), we found that reminders kept emerging of the oppression of female bodies by religious and conservative ideologies (the Repeal the 8th Campaign in Ireland; the discovery of human remains buried in a sewage system in the site of a former institution for unmarried mothers run by the Sisters of the Bon Secours in Tuam, Galway; the attack on Planned Parenthood in the USA.) I am keen to interrogate if this new work offers a new and valuable perspective on the othering of the impoverished and sexualized female body as an attempt at social control.