310: Blog Post Three

Consent is a staged courtroom drama that takes the conventions of the genre and inserts them into life outside of the physical courtroom. While the play seems to mostly revolve around marriage and infidelity (every couple shown features members who cheat on one another – Jake on Rachel, Ed on Kitty, Kitty on Ed, Tim on Zara), the themes of rape, justice and morality are the crux of the play’s emotion.

I arrived at Harold Pinter without knowing much at all about Consent. Casey and Mary gave me a bit of background on the bus to Oxford the day before, telling me that it was about a rape trial and in it, a woman is raped, but not graphically/on stage. I prepared myself for a setting much more like King & Country (a static stage set literally in a court before a judge) and was thus surprised and elated to watch the action unfold on a dynamic, home-based set. This setting is important for the play because it provides an access point sometimes unreachable in a standard courtroom drama; the brown banisters and gates and uncomfortable pews radiate inaccessibility, whereas the well-worn couches of a home only halfway unpacked are warm and familiar. I felt that I was a houseguest listening to the conversation of my hosts instead of an audience member without legroom.

That being said, though the scene itself was accessible, the sentiments of the main characters (I can hardly bring myself to say ‘protagonists’) were so morally different from my own feelings that I didn’t feel particularly bad for any of them, save Kitty in the second half of the play. They themselves were inaccessible.

(Insert: And so here is the old argument of relatability. You crazy kids and your innate need to see your own emotions represented during every single moment of anything you’re looking at. Insert: I could not care one ounce less about whether or not something is relatable. I don’t think that that concept has a home in literary analysis at all. I’ve never cheated on a significant other, do not have children, do not plan on acting in Medea, have no intentions of becoming a lawyer, and very rarely wear light wash jeans. What I’m interested in here is whether or not I can understand a character’s motives even if those motives differ from mine, whether or not I can believe that someone would act in the way that they do given the traits they have. In the case of Consent, I think that these characters are all too smart to stay with people who have cheated on them, people who are emotionally unavailable or, pardon my French, douchey.)

I did, however, feel deeply for Gayle. She was unable to express her whole story in court because the case was not prosecuted from her side but rather from the Crown’s. The scene in which she stumbles into the Christmas party and learns that the prosecuting and defending attorneys are “mates” was heartbreaking and emotionally complex, a momentous breakdown that leads to her off-stage suicide.

This is the crux of the play. This is the moment that encapsulates every theme I’ve found relevant: rape, justice and morality. Before this scene, the fact that Tim and Ed are friends feels almost background to their work life; though Ed has lost three cases in a row, his emotional detachment allows him to get along with Tim just fine (until his wife cheats with Tim, but that comes later). Presumably, they’ve all been friends for many years, and the whole mess of them are comfortable relaying personal emotions and details of their marital fallouts with one another as if it’s nothing secretive. The questionable morality of their friendship is background music to the soundtrack of adultery. Gayle points out what is so detrimentally conflicting about her trial – there’s no way that she’s been treated fairly when the person meant to be protecting her via the Crown is drinking wine with the person who’s torn her apart as a witness.

This is morality corrupted. This is justice diluted.  

What’s horrifying about Consent is the verisimilitude of the matter; rape is handled here as it is in our own justice system. Gayle’s story is heartbreaking, but it’s typical. There is nothing unique about a woman taken advantage of, nothing unique about a woman misrepresented by the justice system in her country, nothing unique about a woman driven to suicide because of her deep depression after multiple sexual assaults. (Insert: According to the playbook, 2013 saw 20,748 reported rapes in England and Wales alone, with only 3,891 prosecutions. Conviction rate was only at 60.3%.)

This is a gut-wrenching play because it’s nothing new.