How Does Stoning Mary, by debbie tucker green, Shape Time, and How Does this Reflect its Form?

Stoning Mary, by debbie tucker green, is a British drama that follows three main scenarios – Husband and Wife argue over the only life-saving prescription; Mum and Dad worry about their son, a child soldier; the only named character, Mary, awaits execution by stoning – happening at unspecified times. As the play develops, the three timelines converge. It is this non-linear narrative that I am interested in. I aim to investigate how time functions in the play; how time is potentially a construct of perception; the relationship between time and place. For David Wiles argues that plays are 'of time'[1] – implying that plays are a series of temporal transactions within a narrative; especially, how the temporal construction of a play affects its relationship with the audience. I use this as a springboard in my belief that a play's form dictates how time is read. The main text in this investigation is Steve Waters' The Secret Life of Plays[2]. I will begin by applying the different forms of time as outlined by Waters.

 

Waters describes 'biographical time' as 'arising from the nature of the human body.'[3] Stoning Mary is mostly driven by human relationships, perhaps to invoke 'a cognitive rather than affective response'[4]; the audience is focussed on the victims rather than the event. Nevertheless, Stoning Mary also adheres to 'functional time', a unit 'determined by an activity'[5]: Husband and Wife argue over the last prescription. This physical commodity drives time forwards in the form of a narrative conflict. Here, time is given a physical value, for the prescription is effectively a capsule of time. David Wiles also sees this: 'In a consumer society, it is hard to escape from conceptualising time as a resource',[6] suggesting that time is intertwined with a Capitalist ideology. If time is given value by the bodies (both human and inanimate) that it interacts with, then perhaps time is a construct of perception; perhaps we can only perceive it when something physical inhabits it,[7] such as a play. Plays have a finite 'performance time';[8] therefore, conventional plays maximise time for a completed narrative (which a Capitalist ideology values as profit.) Plays are 'of time' because they are confined by 'performance time', a constant acknowledgment of time that runs throughout.[9]

 

Finally, Waters outlines 'Historical time' as an action that changes history:[10] in Stoning Mary, this is Mary's execution, which could potentially alter the play's history if it were to continue afterwards. Nicolas Ridout argues that the audience 'recognise[s] that there is a relationship' between the 'dramatic' world and the 'real'[11] – the audience is transcended into the heterotopia of the play, accepting its rules during their spectatorship; for Foucault argues that to enter a heterotopia is to 'submit to a ritual'.[12] This ‘ritual’ is the process of watching a play and suspending one’s disbelief. If an audience accepts the relationship between ‘real’ and ‘drama’, then what happens in the play could be applied to reality, too. Therefore, ‘historical time’ could also be an event that the audience applies to society; is useful in discussing the relationship between the audience and Stoning Mary.

 

Time in Stoning Mary also breaks convention. There is a lack of 'calendrical time',[13] (frames of time associated with the seasons) making the temporal discourse unclear, which, in turn, makes place unclear. There is only the locational didascalia of 'the play is set in the country it is performed in.'[14] As space and time are linked, the play is set in contemporary history. Therefore, if the time of the play evolves with the 'country it is performed in', each version of the play has a different time, relevant to the context of that country. ‘By transposing […] African issues […] into a British setting, tucker green makes the trauma of such atrocities more tangible for her […] white liberal audience.’[15] Time, therefore, as a capsule of context, works alongside the audience in Stoning Mary – the two worlds are bridged by this contemporary ‘historical time’; perhaps suggesting, as previously established, that the play comments on reality. Each world becomes a microcosm of space.[16] Therefore, using Stephen Jeffreys' categorisation of Time and Place Structure, Stoning Mary is situated in open time and open place.[17]

 

For Jeffreys, anything that is non-linear is 'disrupted time'.[18] Sarah Grochala, however, critiques this, for 'the audience can rearrange the events of most non-chronological plots to form a chronological story.'[19] Whilst Stoning Mary is non-linear, Grochala’s argument can be applied to determine whether it is truly ‘disrupted time’. In scene thirteen, there is analepsis in 'she did you a favour […] when he was with us.'[20] This dialogue from Dad uses the past tense spatial deixis ‘when he was with us’ to imply that their son is dead. In the previous scene, we learn that Mary 'killed a man who was a boy'; 'that boy was a soldier.'[21] This exposition tells the audience that Mary killed the child soldier, acting as prolepsis to the subsequent grief of the parents. The use of the pronoun 'she' by Dad, however, in Thirteen, suggests their awareness that Mary killed their son – so she must already be in prison. It is unclear, however, because of the lack of temporal didascalia, whether the action of the two scenes is parallel, linear, or non-linear. Therefore, Stoning Mary conforms to Jeffreys and Grochala because, whilst the story can be rearranged chronologically, without discourse the plot cannot be put on a linear timeline with any certainty. 

 

Nevertheless, our minds automatically place events in chronological order. As Hermann Lotze hypothesised: minds 'assign themselves their position in relation to their more remote or nearer conditions'.[22] The conscience places itself in the present, in relation to the past and future events. Arguably, to reconfigure events linearly is to conform to an ideology.[23] It is a dominant way of thinking that we accept in our perception. tucker green breaks this convention by using a non-linear form, making her audience active to decipher the order of events. From the previous hypothesis, then, the audience's conscience will automatically rearrange events into a linear order, but they are made conscious of the process of doing so. Returning to Ridout's comment, the audience is phenomenologically transcended into the play.[24] This means that their conscience is invested in the world of the play, its 'dramatic time', whilst their bodies are fixed in the auditorium, acted on by 'lived time'. This would imply that the body and mind experience different effects of time. Consciousness might experience time different depending on emotional conditioning, like how a play's time is compressed; the body is always fixed in regular 'lived' time – the perception of the mind changes how it is felt.[25] Perhaps, then, time is layered.

 

These layers become clearer when the different components of form are deconstructed. As I observed before, Stoning Mary has a lack of temporal didascalia. This subverts what Martin Meisel calls a 'manual script'.[26] Dialogue becomes important in conveying deixis, as Waters argues, 'time is enacted in speech acts', which he calls ‘pastoral time’.[27] 'Speech acts' suggest spoken temporal deixis, or that words take time to be spoken. All speech has an illocutionary force, for words make an utterance that directs the listener towards something. This is not only rooted in the spatial, but also temporal discourse. Therefore, 'action establishes its own present';[28] just as Lotze argued, the body and mind are situated in the present.[29] Even if action is recounted from the past, its new utterance occurs in the present. Stoning Mary relies on dialogue to convey discourse, such as the egos repeating 'eyes to the skies'.[30] tucker green, therefore, has a 'representational script'[31] in this ‘pastoral time’; one that reflects an audience's spectatorship in a theatre, rather than a reader in possession of the script, for the audience can only gain information through action and dialogue – they cannot see the stage-directions.

 

Susan Lori-Parks argues that form is an 'active participant in the sort of play which ultimately inhabits it',[32] conveying that form shapes whatever meaning is in the text. This can be applied to time, so that form is active in how time is constructed and received. tucker green's active silences are examples of this. Abram Nicola suggests that the active silences 'invoke a visual register', suggesting that they allude to an action that takes place during the silence.[33] This action is ambiguous. Series of active silences, like that in scene eleven,[34] could suggest a transference of looks between characters. However, these interpretations aren't fixed. Likewise, their timeframe is unspecified. The amount of time taken in reading might not be the same in the performance, when they will speak semiotically as a 'visual register.'

 

Similarly, the use of repetition and revision also affects time. Rhythm is created, which affects tempo.[35] tucker green's rhythm is a 'form of musical artillery', creating a fast tempo.[36] Phrases like, 'You gonna go out with them on – gonna go out there with them on you gonna go out lookin / like that?'[37] slow narrative progression in being focussed on the same revelation. Arguably, then, narrative progression and 'performance time' are different forms of time, for the rhythm is fast, not taking long to perform, but narrative exposition is slow. 'Dramatic time', therefore, should be how events drive the drama. In repeating the same phrase, although speech is uttered differently every time, the lack of narrative progression inhibits 'dramatic time.'

 

These different perceptions of time agree with Willis' comment: 'time is a function of our point of view'.[38] Subjectivity and layered time are conveyed in scene two, when 'Mum and Dad are trying to think'.[39] The mental verb 'think' makes explicit that the process is internal to the characters. Either their thoughts are frantic, with the uncertain fillers 'er... um...' voiced slowly, or their minds are empty; their external ruminations quicker than the language that comes to them. Therefore, internal and external time are perceived differently to one-another.[40] This is supported by scene six, ‘there’s not enough good words’,[41] which criticises language and conveys its relationship to thought – they cannot think because there are no words to articulate their emotions. From Steve Waters' comment on Martin Crimp's The Treatment, that the characters' 'inner clocks are set to urban time, where thought is often released from physical being',[42] I can support that language dictates thought, as Ferdinand De Saussure hypothesised. The inability to articulate thought potentially distorts the internal ‘clock’, for the point of view cannot be expressed. Perception of time, therefore, is affected by the conditions of the mind.[43] An audience can only experience the external time: they are unaware of what Mum and Dad are thinking. If 'time is a function of our point of view',[44] it can be affected by emotional discourse, so the audience's perception of time might be tainted by their bemusement. This can be achieved because of the audience's phenomenological relationship with the theatrical world.[45]

 

As I set out in the introduction, I have investigated the modes of time in Stoning Mary; how, in some cases, form affects how time is encapsulated – especially in the active silences – and how space and time is perceived, looking at the relationship between stage and audience through ‘historical time’. I have argued that there are many layers of time in this relationship; that time can be affected by mental conditions. Overall, the effect of time in Stoning Mary is to make the audience active, as the ambiguities of withheld information otherwise disrupt time. This potentially has the effect of making the audience re-aware of the world, reflecting theatre as a heterotopia that can comment on reality.

 

[1] David Wiles, Theatre and Time, 1st edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) pp1-14 (p3)

[2] Steve Waters, ‘Time Codes’ in The Secret Life of Plays, 1st edn (London: Nick Hern, 2010) pp110-137

[3] Waters p116

[4] Nicola Abram, 'Staging the Unsayable: Debbie Tucker Green's Political Theatre', Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2:1 (2014) pp113-130 (p119)

 

[5] Waters p115

[6] Wiles, Theatre and Time, p12

[7] Edmund Hurssel, ‘Introduction’ in The Phenomenology of Internal-time Consciousness, 1st edn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964) p3

[8] Elaine Aston and George Savona, ‘Dramatic Shape’ in Theatre as sign-system: a semiotics of text and performance, 1st edn (London: Routledge, 1991) pp15-33 (p29)

[9] Jiri Veltrusky, ‘Man and Object in Theatre’ in The Performer and the Machine, ed. by Paul Garvin (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1964) pp80-91 (p80)

[10] Waters, The Secret Life of Plays p116

[11] Nicholas Ridout, Theatre and Ethics, 1st edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) p59

[12] Michel Foucault and Anthony Vidler, ‘Heterotopias’ in AA Files, 1st edn (London: Architectural Association School of Architecture, 2014) pp18-22 (p21)

[13] Waters, The Secret Life of Plays p114

[14] Debbie tucker green, ‘Notes on the Play’ in Stoning Mary, 1st edn (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) p2

[15] Abram p117

[16] Michel Foucault p21

[17] Stephen Jeffreys, ‘Time and Place Structure’ in Playwriting: structure, character, how and what to write, 1st edn (London: Nick Hern, 2019) pp32-54 (p33)

[18] Jeffreys p45

[19] Sarah Grochala, The Contemporary Political Play: Rethinking Dramaturgical Structure, 1st edn (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) p94

[20] Stoning Mary p66

[21] Stoning Mary p64

[22] Hermann Lotze, Metaphysic: in three books, Ontology, Cosmology and Psychology, 1st edn (Oxford: Clarendon Series Press, 1884) quoted in J E Turner, ‘Lotze’s Theory of the Subjectivity of Time and Space’, The Monist, 29:4 (1919) pp579-600 (p581)

[23] Ibid

[24] Hurssel, The Phenomenology of Internal-time Consciousness, p2

[25] Ibid

[26] Martin Meisel, How Plays Work: Reading and Performance, 1st edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) There are no page numbers

[27] Waters p133

[28] Waters p127

[29] Turner p581

[30] Stoning Mary p5

[31] Meisel, ‘Introduction’

[32] Susan Lori-Parks, ‘Elements of Style’ in The America Play and Other Works, 1st edn (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995) pp7-11 (p8)

[33] Nicola Abram, 'Staging the Unsayable: Debbie Tucker Green's Political Theatre', Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 2:1 (2014) pp113-130 (p123)

[34] Stoning Mary p60

[35] Waters p123

[36]  Maggie Inchley, Voice and New Writing 1997–2007: Articulating the Demos, 1st edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015) p95

[37] Stoning Mary p61

[38] David Wiles, Theatre and Time, p2

[39] Stoning Mary p10

[40] Hurssel, The Phenomenology of Internal-time Consciousness, p2

[41] Stoning Mary p32

[42] Waters p120

[43] Hurssel p1

[44] Italics are mine

[45] Hurssel p3