Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 34

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The Popular Culture Review

them in detail. She also makes little attempt to discuss why people
apparently derive so much pleasure from melodramatic and other
mainstream forms of drama.
The solution to the foregrounding in the theatre of woman as
object is, for Case (as it was for Mulvey), the construction of an
alternative that would deny the male spectator's pleasure from
viewing the woman as an object of sexual desire. Case’s alternatives,
like Mulvey's, are highly problematic, not least because they retreat
into the area of fringe or alternative theatre where theatre and
populism tend to part company. Case ultimately resorts to celebrating
the work of Monstrous Regiment (a fine, but alternative, feminist
theatre group that fights the patriarchal dominance of the theatre),
or the plays of Caryl Churchill and advocates the formation of a
new, feminist poetics. Her concluding assertion to that end is
positively cathartic in tone. The only solution must take place
outside of the dominant culture. Once the patriarchal forms of
representation have been deconstructed:
the stage can be prepared for the entrance of
the female subject, whose voice, sexuality and image
have yet to be dramatized within the dominant
culture . . . The feminist in theatre can create the
laboratory in which the single most effective mode of
repression-gender—can be exposed, dismantled and
removed.(5)
One is left bemused as to exactly how the female subject will
enter. Will this relegate to the point of worthlessness all theatre
that does not follow the new poetics? Will the female subject enter
from within the mainstream theatre, or from within the alternative,
fringe sector. Will anyone be in the audience when she enters?
Without an understanding of the pleasure mechanisms of the
dominant theatrical forms, it seems doubtful anyone could persuade
an audience to embrace such radical revisionism.
The question, then, remains as to where this feminist revolution
will leave the popular audience, and whether or not it is possible to
create a new poetics embraceable by a populace who prefer to attend
the work of Wendy Wasserstein or Marsha Norman to the avantgarde. Psychosemiotic revolutions are of little use to those who have