ABSTRACT
How, as women, can we go to the theatre without lending our complicity to the sadism directed against women, or being asked to assume, in the patriarchal family structure that the theatre reproduces ad infinitum, the position of victim? Who is this victim? She is always the Father’s daughter, his sacrificial object, guardian of the phallus, upholding the narcissistic fantasy which helps the Father to ward off the threat of castration. Like Electra or Antigone, she is eliminated. Or, like Ophelia, she is three times condemned to be buried alive by the three jealous father-figures-Polonius, Laertes and Hamlet-who are in agreement only in laying down the law to her: “Be thou woman, be mad about me, get thee to a nunnery.” Locked up and put away. If she is Ophelia, her body banned and her soul violated, she will never have lived. And if, like Cordelia, she finds the strength to assert a femininity which refuses to be the mirror of her father’s raving, she will die. For in every man there is a dethroned King Lear who requires his daughter to idealize him by her loving words and build him up, however flat he may have fallen, into the man he wishes to appear: “Tell me that I am the greatest, the me-est, the most like a king, or I’ll kill you.”
