At the end of Lucy Kirkwood’s Maryland, nobody clapped. The silence was potent. No one knew what to do. The short, stinging play – a response to the murders of Sarah Everard, Sabina Nessa, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman – had been written in just two days. The Royal Court Theatre staged it last year – so swiftly that it was performed by a rotating cast of actors, all reading from scripts, with a set so bare that chalk was used to mark out the play’s locations. But then, as audience members left, something started to happen. They began to quietly pick up the pieces of chalk and write messages on the stage. Things like: “Thank you.” Or: “I’m pleased I was here tonight.” Or: “I needed this.” A moment of communion had been forged from a shared, righteous anger. “We were paying respects and protesting at the same time, just by being there,” Kirkwood tells me, talking on Zoom from her shed in Suffolk, the sun shining through the open doors.
Applause, she adds, would not have been appropriate. “It’s not a play that’s about going, ‘Oh, bravo!’ It’s a play that’s about giving you a left hook.” In Maryland, two women – both called Mary – go to a police station to report an experience of sexual assault. They are treated patronisingly and indifferently. A male police officer warns them not to talk to one another. An all-female chorus of furies appear like guardians, describing private fears that have become banal in their ubiquity: “I have Googled how to kick out a taillight from inside the boot of a car.” At its heart are two questions: why are women so killable? And why aren’t we angrier about it?
