CW: Mentions of abuse, misogyny, capital punishment, violence, sexual violence
Interview with Joshua Robey, Director of The Welkin, conducted by Tully Ellis
On Tuesday, amid the clatter of Opera Cafe and the coughs of the Oxford cold, I sat down with Joshua Robey, Director of The Welkin in Keble O’Reilly. Despite recovering from a cold himself, Josh was able to articulate his passion for the script, and provide eye-opening context into the themes of the show. At its core, he emphasised, the play is an investigation into gender and the cast is dedicated to honoring the parallels between 1759 and today’s society.
Tully Ellis: For our readers at The Oxford Blue, in a nutshell what is The Welkin about?
Joshua Robey: So The Welkin is a wonderful play from 2020 by Lucy Kirkwood, about a woman who’s been found guilty of murder but she pleads the belly, which is where she claims to be pregnant and therefore she can’t be hanged if she is pregnant. So to work out if she is or not, they get a jury of twelve women in this room without food, or water, or light, or fire. They have to basically, in quite horrible conditions, work out if she is pregnant or not. The play focuses on this deliberation and what that might mean.
TE: The play covers a range of topical themes, despite being set in the 18th century. Do you think this was Kirkwood’s intention, and where do you see these parallels?
JR: It’s a super contemporary play. It sort of uses the historical drama form as a bit of a Trojan horse – I love plays that are sort of Trojan horses of other things! It uses that to reflect on contemporary issues of power, gender, progress, and what are now postcolonial, but at the time of the play were colonial issues. It uses this historical setting to talk about all these things. It’s definitely a play about the way that women are treated and believed and not believed. It’s a lot about how gender dynamics affect people depending on the spaces they’re in. What does the presence of a man in the room do to these characters? What happens when that man is legally forbidden from speaking? What happens when the women are legally empowered to speak with authority? There are very few places in the 18th century where women were really given a legal right to express an opinion and beliefs and so I think that is very resonant with issues that are very relevant right now.
TE: The women in the show are given an unusual amount of authority despite their own weakened position in society. How are the themes of justice and morality explored through the idea of women judging other women?
JR: I mean the play is a really nuanced and rich play. There is some kind of utopian possibility in the idea of women being given a chance to work together liberated from male influence. However, they are clearly working within a male court and the protagonist remarks at one point that it is a broken and poor apparatus for justice, but it is the best that they have. These characters are also deeply prejudiced. Some of them are very rational, some very irrational. Some have expertise and some do not. The play is really playing with these complex dynamics and there is an element of liberation by putting all these women together, but there is also a strong element that these are twelve complex people that are struggling to make a difficult decision together. It really has that rich complexity all the way through.
TE: How much of the show do you think is about an abuse of power, or in reality is it about the responsibility that comes with having power?
JR: I think in the play the character Elizabeth really encourages the women to see the responsibility they have, and to take that responsibility and not let it go. However, I think the play really is asking how much power do they have? I wonder if Kirkwood might suggest through the play that an abuse of power isn’t even the right framework, as power is the ability to operate outside of moral scruples, and that power is the ability to act entirely in accordance with your own will. So actually I think there are some fairly horrendous moments that could be seen as an abuse of power, but Kirkwood would say that this is just how power operates.
TE: And this is particularly heightened in the unique conditions these women find themselves in?
JR: Well yes, they have been empowered to make this decision, but there are also real breaks on that power. The fact that they’re not able to even have a candle in this room, it makes a mockery of the whole process because there has been a male jury which found Sally guilty within twenty minutes, and they haven’t been subject to such strict conditions. Clearly, the whole situation has been set up to get them to come to a decision as quickly as possible. It is not protecting the processes, and so yes I think that the amount of power they had in the first place is limited.
TE: Has the rehearsal process brought out any unexpected connections between the cast and their characters?
JR: Many of the cast have noticed subtle differences in the process. For many rehearsals I have been the only man in the room. For many rehearsals it has been thirteen women together, plus myself, and an AD [Assistant Director]. This means that in some ways they get that mirrored experience being in this space where male voices are relatively quiet compared to what’s more typical. A lot of student drama here, even when the cast is very evenly split, often is because some women are playing male roles and so the repertoire of roles are disproportionately male. Therefore this play is rare in that there are fourteen female characters and three male characters. What that means is that there is a particular female-ness to the play that I think the cast have felt, and that mirrors the experience of the women in the play too.
TE: Have you found your experience working on this show to be distinctly different having such a female dominated cast?
JR: In some ways. The cast have been absolutely delightful. One thing I think about is that I choose plays because it feels like I’m investigating something that I don’t fully understand. I do plays out of a position of curiosity, and I think about how much people should be making artistic work that is outside their experience. You have to do it very sensibly, making sure you have people on the team whose experiences you can draw on, but I think in a lot of my work I have been trying to explore issues of gender in various ways. That was there in The Writer that I did in my first year. I am very interested in what it is to be a female writer, and make work as a woman, compared to men who get to make gender-neutral work almost. Then I think in plays like The Effect [by Lucy Prebble], The Flick [by Annie Baker], Uncle Vanya [by Anton Chekhov], themes of gender have been quite present in subtle ways. I think that this is my play that very directly looks at these issues.
TE: Was there anything in the script that made you question your own assumptions about society and the way in which women interact with one another?
JR: There’s definitely a running question in the play about the ways in which hierarchies get established. It’s interesting in the play when there is a very female space, class hierarchy becomes a very legible dynamic in the scene. A lot of the women are deferring to the others based on who their husband is. It’s interesting that this sense of patriarchy remains present even when they’re in some ways liberated from their partners. Some of how the play climaxes I don’t want to spoil, but there are a couple of moments that led me to question what is the ethical and feminist way of staging this? Is it to make something as horrible and unpleasant to watch as possible? Is that honouring the truth of the moment? Or is it that we need to find a way of not just presenting gratuity? I think we have found a balance that keeps the savagery that needs to be there, but I won’t say any more!
TE: Despite being outside of the cast, is there a particular character you have found yourself resonating with?
JR: No. I don’t normally approach plays looking for mirrors. It’s more that I try to find in every character, the thing that I can feel close to. There is one character who exposes herself as quite small minded, self interested and quite cruel – at one moment she has a line about how much she hates the poor! This character is trying to have a sense of superiority, but we have found a love for her despite her small-mindedness and bigotry; we have found a way to really sympathise with why she needs to hold on to these beliefs because they are the things that sustain her. She needs to believe she is superior to others otherwise she is going to be confronted with how miserable her life is. There’s a character I have a lot of sympathy for in the play, who we hear has lost twelve children in miscarriages, and it is about honouring the truth of these characters and finding how these experiences have a bearing on what they’re doing and how they’re acting. Kirkwood writes so brilliantly such that every character has a nuance, and we can focus on making them real while allowing the audience to have an opinion on them. She allows them to do things that are morally compromised, while still making them loveable. Even the most horrendous act in the play, it is so clear towards the end exactly why it happens. It is not to justify or excuse it, but you can see exactly why it happens and why the characters feel like they have no choice. And that is why it is such a brilliantly written piece.
TE: I know that 50% of the profits from the show are being donated to Rape Crisis charity [umbrella charity for UK non-profit rape crisis centres that work to raise awareness of sexual violence]. How did you choose this charity and why is this important to the cast?
JR: It felt very important to this play because one of the things that has become clear as we have rehearsed, is that every one of these characters, both the men and the women, have a relationship to violence in some way. There are lots of subtle moments where a character will allude to something in the past. For example a character that always carries a knife with her ever since an uncle came back from the navy, and someone says ‘Oh was it a present?’ And she says ’No’. We don’t hear anymore, we just have to figure out why that might be. So many of the characters have a story like this, and violence is such a huge part of the play, especially section one. There is so much mistreatment, abuse, and sexual harm being done, and so many of the women in the play don’t even fully register it as this. One of the questions we have been asking is how much do these women actually want to be having these children, and how much are their horizons at a point where they can even think to consent or not? This is particularly horrifying as you watch the play, and with this in mind it felt very relevant as a cause to support. I think the play has some little moments which connect the past to the present, which you will have to understand by watching the play itself. But by making this gesture not only are we supporting a charity, but also part of what we are doing within the play is locating contemporary harm on this continuum of violence. By saying that the things represented in the play are deeply, deeply connected to what is happening even now.