On 30 April 1971, Norman Mailer squared up to feminism in a public debate at New York’s Town Hall. Germaine Greer was on the panel and Susan Sontag in the audience. According to the radical lesbian Jill Johnston, one of the participants, it was a political disaster but a social triumph. Greer was riding high on the success of The Female Eunuch; Mailer had recently caused outrage with a defence of the randy male artist, The Prisoner of Sex. It was always going to be a cage fight.
Four years later, New York’s foremost experimental theatre company, the Wooster Group, was founded – so their Barbican debut, a deconstruction of the Town Hall debate directed by co-founder Elizabeth LeCompte, feels like a historic moment in its own right. But is it anything more than that? The answer is a resounding yes.
The disruption begins with the roughing up of one of London’s suavest theatres. We are walked past the familiar ranks of automatic doors, across a backstage wilderness, to a samizdat auditorium with unreserved seating. Before us is a jumble of screens and tables – at one sit the panellists and two Norman Mailers, neither of whom look anything like the grizzled titan whose image is projected behind them.
What follows is in some ways more like choreography than dramaturgy. Footage from a documentary of the debate cuts in and out of the onstage speech, forcing the performers to be pitch- and time-perfect, and making the point that they are not simply restating arguments but interrogating historical modes of thought and ways of being.
Mailer chairs the conversation and tries his best to dictate the structure, but his authority is immediately undercut by a giggly Johnston (Kate Valk), who begins a loopy freestyle presentation by pointing out that he has just introduced the clever young Australian polemicist everyone had come to see as English.
Greer’s precisely articulated, stop-start delivery is brilliantly captured by Maura Tierney. At first it suggests nervousness in the face of Mailer’s lazy put-downs, but gradually it becomes clear that she represents not just a new politics but a new style – serene, serious and lethally accurate in the face of his increasingly frantic bombast. Nor is Mailer the only panellist to be disarmed. After Johnston’s speech is cut short, she reacts by flitting around the back of the stage creating as much mayhem as she can, while the critic Diana Trilling responds in slabs of psychoanalytical theory.
The one false note in an otherwise pitch-perfect show is the casting of a male actor, Greg Mehrten, as Trilling. If the intention is to underline that this literary grande dame was a stooge for the male intellectual establishment, it misfires, drawing unsisterly attention to her frumpy appearance and undercutting her valiant, and surely correct, defence of a woman’s right to have whatever sort of orgasm she can with whomever she wants.
But this is a quibble. Intercut with the debate are scenes from a preposterous 1970 vanity movie in which Mailer directed himself as a megalomaniac film director who documents his own campaign to become US president. An increasingly frenzied re-enactment climaxes with the two onstage Mailers (Ari Fliakos and Scott Shepherd) locked in a blood-spattered, onanistic brawl while their/his small daughter begs them to stop. Could there be a more politically pertinent metaphor for the mess we’re in today?