So let’s say a 40-year-old man has sex with a 12-year-old girl. What would you call him? A pervert, a sickly criminal? What would you call her? A victim, a child who had been abused?
David Harrower’s devastating play, Blackbird, which generated great controversy at the Edinburgh Festival last year, deals with this very subject. Harrower brilliantly explores both characters, writing in shades of grey rather than in black and white.
Before transferring to the Manhattan Club in New York this spring, the play is being staged at the Dublin Project in a production directed by Michael Barker-Caven and starring Catherine Walker and Stephen Brennan.
If the events chronicled in Blackbird sound far-fetched, bear in mind that it is inspired by a true story: American Marine Toby Studebaker ran away with an under-age girl he met on an Internet chat room.
“One thing that is so exciting about the play is that it is a very sensitive and intuitively written piece,” says Barker-Caven.“The subject of an older man having a sexual relationship with a young girl has huge baggage and it gets people very hot and bothered, for every good reason. But, David always says, ‘It’s not my job to write about what people want, I want to write about what happens and to explore the boundaries of human relationships to show us that things are not as black and white as we want them to be, that they are actually shades of grey.’ That’s what Blackbird is about.”
In the play, the victim, now aged 27, confronts the man, who is in his 50s, During their conversation we learn that the woman, Una, doesn’t see herself as purely a victim. Nor does she see Ray as purely a pervert. In fact, they both realise that they had – and have – feelings for each other.”
“It is very much true of Una that her life during the 15 years has been a product of that first experience and, in ways, has been in turmoil since,” says Barker-Caven.
“But in some sense she comes back and confronts him with the reality that no relationship ever since has been as meaningful for her and that she has lost something by losing him. In other words, there is a feeling there that transcends what the law says it should be and she calls it love.”
What Harrower does in the piece is paint two extremely rounded characters, Nonetheless, this ultimately is provocative stuff, isn’t it?
Barker-Caven agrees: “I am a parent and I have very profound feelings about the sexualisation of children, the abuse of children. But this play takes you right up to the line. And there is that debate in Ireland about the legal age of consent, whereupon one day it is not legal and the next day it is. That is how the law has to operate because it is desperately trying to protect vulnerable people, i.e. children. And yet those children themselves have a journey to adulthood which is very complicated and can happen shorter and quicker than the law wants it to happen and that is what happens to Una in this play. It’s a wonderful piece of work.”