Permanent Marker is a deeply affecting, beautifully written and exquisitely performed 60-minute monologue about women’s experiences of, reactions to, and repair from, rape.
30 July 2022
It is not an easy watch, but Claudia Vyvyan’s script is imbued with a quiet dignity of purpose, and a depth and breadth of poetic lyricism that, at times, leaves one breathless.
Presented as a series of vignettes separated by brief musical interludes, the unnamed central character appears first as a 16-year-old aspiring artist, unprotected by a coercive aunt, and raped by the man her family favour as a future husband. Later the same individual describes much the same experience, but this time as a more worldly-wise,19-year-old, who fights back. Then she is a tipsy club-goer in a flimsy black dress who cannot quite recall how she ended up in a dark and dingy club toilet. Then a 24-year-old violated by a taunting, sneering boyfriend. It is not entirely clear if these are the disassociated experiences of a single woman, or examples of the brutalities that tie every victim together. In a sense is does not matter.
In each iteration the central character, performed with immense charisma by a talented and committed Flora MacAngus, puts on a different pair of shoes – glitzy evening heels, trainers, zip-up black Doc Martin’s, sensible flats. It is a neat theatrical device, one of many deft directorial touches, that reminds the audience that whatever they look like, the path to repair that rape victims must walk is often very similar.
The images Vyvyan presents can be visceral – the sound of the rapist’s breath in her ear, his smell, her desire to turn around so she does not have to see her abuser. A central theme is around the separation of self between the before and after. Of the experience victims have of looking in on their past lives, now permanently and indelibly marked, as if they belong to someone else.
But Permanent Marker is not just or even mainly about the brutality of the act. It is about the potential for change embedded in the process of repair. It is about emerging stronger. There is an extraordinary dream-like sequence in which the character muses on the practice of fixing broken ceramic with veins of pure gold, thus creating something that is, in its own way, more beautiful than before. As an allegory of self-repair after a violent and cruel rupturing, it is deeply moving.
The musical piece that ends Permanent Marker is a soft, soulful, winsome re-working of Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I will survive’. It is well chosen, but Vyvyan’s concern here is not just surviving, it is thriving.
Quite a writer, quite a performer, and quite a gem of a show. Highly recommended.
Duration: 3 hours. One interval.
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