New play: Sexual harasssment at sea

Corrina Corrina, Everyman Theatre, Liverpool, UK (17 May – 4 June 2020 https://www.everymanplayhouse.com/

Corrina faces a metaphorical storm. All pictures by Helen Murray

Workplace sexual harassment today is a big mental health issue, especially for seafarers. Victim’s lives are wrecked. Promising careers are wasted in an industry facing severe shortages.

The death of Cadet Akhona Geveza in 2010 and the at-sea rape of Midshipman X in 2021 mean most people now know that being on a ship where someone senior is pursuing and disrespecting you is a 24:7 hell that needs to be stopped forever. Pronto.

For the first time, a play – not a trade union survey or policy document – is making that story of sexual harassment at sea come alive. Corrina Corrina also shows the structural injustice and the gas lighting in a context of the racial injustice against the Filipino crew.

THE STORY

Third Mate Corrina Wilkinson (Laura Elsworthy) is 28, smart, fair-minded and set on becoming a captain. She joins container ship MSC Keto in Felixstowe, headed for Singapore. The good news is that her captain (smug David Crellin) prides himself on being progressively pro-women. That’s one battle less for her, she thinks.

Then Corrina  finds that she knows the First Officer, Will Lewis  (creepy Mike Noble) from Warsash training college. He’s a guy who once before didn’t believe her ‘No’ meant no, although conveniently he now mis-remembers her as complicit.

Being a prat and egotist, he thinks he’s in with a chance this trip. But she’s makes it clear she just wants to get on with her job.

The Filipino crew have mixed feelings about a woman onboard. Corrina doesn’t endear herself by telling bitter gendered jokes, swearing, eating in the crew space and not being up for karaoke. She’s not being an acceptable sort of lady, and that’s as upsetting as Mr Bligh’s bad language was on the Bounty.

Luckily, in this tenderness-free zone, deck worker Angelo (loveable James Bradwell) and Corrina become pals. They enjoy the kind of extraordinary camaraderie that can be possible between even the most mismatched of shipmates; they  trust, despite the class divide.

Not so luckily, Will takes against this (non-sexual) affinity. In a racist way he warns her that as an officer and woman she should keep her distance. They aren’t used to a woman being  ... open with them.’ 

Confrontation on the Keto: Rafael, Coriina, Rizal and Angelo.

Angelo’s fellow crew members are uneasy about this friendship too.  Lonely Rafael (a convincingly wary Martin Sarreal) resents people crossing boundaries. And the older Rizal (Angelo Paragoso) stays circumspectly out of the way.

Trouble mounts as Will ‘chivalrously’ bullies Rafael, which undermines Corrina. Will clearly becomes a liability when he plays a traumatising trick on Corrina. (This is a thriller, so I’m holding back. On what happens, but it’s so bad that she complains to Captain.

Will not only denies what he did, he wrecks her status – which may ruin her future career.  Similarly, his impact on Angelo causes an irredeemable tragedy and worsens class/race relations on board.

Stressed out of her wits, Corrina takes revenge. See it to find out how she does so.

WHY IT WORKS

This is a moving and wise play, about the importance about integrity and respect, and the proximity of suicide. It’s a world where a Dolly Parton song can save your life, where loan shark attacks are inescapable, and where pix of your kids are a constant reminder that your shipmates can never be your real family.

The two-tier set makes the class conflict clear: white officers can move between the high-tech site of control aloft and the scruffy crew mess room below with its pitiful microwave and sauce bottles below. But the crew are sentenced to the netherworld dump where the karaoke machine is the company -supplied sweetener that doesn’t ever make up for the structural injustice.

The production by Headlong and Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse, with a script by Chloe Moss. The director is Holly Race Roughan. If you can't wait until a tour gets sorted then pre-order the book at https://www.nickhernbooks.co.uk/corrina-corrina

Traumatised Corrina faces Will in the ship's citadel

IT'S SPECIAL

I’ve watched and read a lot of ship-based dramas. This stage play ranks with the two best modern merchant shipping movies: Stowaways (1997)  by Denis Chou nard and Nicolas Wadimoff, and Fidelio: Alice's Odyssey (2016) by Lucie Borleteau. 

Corrina, Corinna is about a totally different world from Anything Goes, Carry on Cruising and the Love Boat TV series. The production gives us a  profound understanding of human relationships and the intensity that can make a voyage life-changing, even fatal.

Piratical theatricals and 1970s feminism

Pic by Tristram Kenton.

This new play about women pirates (The Pirate Project, Oval House, London, May 20 - June 2 2012) is an expression of the way some (I'm sorry to say, rather naive) feminists like to think of women pirates: as swashbuckling heroines rather than as lower members of a hierarchical maritime workforce.

Some lines from Brecht's Galileo seem appropriate. 'Pity the land that hath no heroes' a pupil says to the great physicist. Galileo replies 'Pity the Land that hath need of them.'

When I wrote Bold in her Breeches: Women Pirates across the Ages a lot of film and stage companies got in touch with me about making productions based on such sassy interpretations. And I spent a lot of time trying to inject realism: 'I don't think piracy was that glamorous, really. Try thinking about them as a gang of minicab drivers or squaddies. They're not Tina Turners and Madonnas in dominatrice gear.' Yes, I enjoy strapping on my shoulder parrot and strutting with my cutlass at fancy dress parties. But it's not real.

And then, well over a decade later, real-life Somali pirates stepped in and disabused everyone, finally. Pirates were revealed in all their seedy thuggery: just macho crims side-stepping poverty, brutally, and much less privileged than all the high-level bankers engaging in heists with pin-striped chutzpah.

Two reviews of The Pirate Project sum up the problem of perceptions of historic women pirates. Sally Stott, in the Stage (21 May) wrote 'Like an assertiveness training session for women, the first show of Oval House’s OUTLAWS season suggests getting in touch with your inner pirate in order to find out who you really are, (sisters). However, despite plenty of self-conscious roaring and lines like “stop oppressing me with your patriarchal bullshit”, the realities of pirating and feminism are contradictory bedfellows. When being a pirate is essentially about violence and theft, how can it also be a part of aspirational modern womanhood?'

Quite. But also there's no evidence that women challenged these essentially patriarchal institutions, albeit outside the law and more communal than naval and merchant vessels. And although a few iconic stories suggest two or three pirate women spoke and acted boldly, I have to say that I suspect that most non-cross-dressed women on pirate vessels were more likely to have been gang-banged and systemically relegated to reheating the turtle stew (again).

Director Lucy Foster created a devised production (an Improbable Associate Artist Project). Stott writes that the play light-heartedly reworks (is that code for 'inauthentic' or 'fancifully trashes'?)real-life 17th and 18th-century pirates Annie Bonny, Mary Read and Ching Yih Shih.'By the final scene the cross-dressing heroines are denouncing killing and setting up an on-board creche... Performers... add their own life experiences to the mix, but the “it’s OK to be yourself” message is familiar and risks sounding condescending, despite good intentions.
... the play’s conclusion feels disappointingly traditional - a celebration of women who excel at multitasking, caring and being honest. It could be braver.'

Lyn Gardner, in the Guardian (20 May) asks 'Will learning to say "Haargh" very loudly like a pirate further the cause of feminism? The creators of this playful oddity clearly think it's a step in the right direction as they weigh anchor and invite us on "a journey of empowerment over an ocean of self-discovery to find the treasure buried within us".

'It's like a 1970s consciousness-raising meeting with added swashbuckling....In these stories of women who stepped outside the rules of conventional society, there's scope to explore why so many of us want to be good girls, conforming to ideas of how a woman must look and act. But that's never examined in any depth in this piece, which is intellectually and theatrically at half-mast. "A pirate doesn't ask permission, she just takes what she needs," we're told. Yes, so do many modern-day pirates, including Somali raiders and hedge-fund managers, but that doesn't make them good role models.

At the end there's back-tracking and a suggestion that we should all be touchy-feely sharing pirates. But the show isn't well thought-through and tries to disguise its lack of rigour with a messy DIY aesthetic. There are some filmed snippets (sometimes hard to hear) of older women talking about their lives and motherhood, and some acted-out scenes from 17th- and 18th-century women pirates' lives – even these have an oddly romantic gloss. A sadly wasted voyage.'