Based on George Gissing’s 1893 novel The Odd Women, Linda Griffiths’ new play Age of Arousal sets its sights on a time and place that, although officially Victorian, is characterized by a tremendous amount of unstuffy chaos. Gissing’s title refers to the New Women or The Woman Question current at the time — its use of “odd” meant to suggest both an emergent, atypical femininity that (among other things) resisted marriage, as well as a real statistical imbalance in the population of London, a city that saw a remarkable growth in the number of its female inhabitants in the 1880s. Griffiths’ title, in turn, presses on the implications of “arousal” — a word denoting literal awakening, freshly sparked political fervour, and, of course, sexual stimulation.

Age of Arousal’s director, Maja Ardal — also the interim artistic director of Nightwood Theatre, which has mounted this play in association with Factory Theatre — notes that all of Griffiths’ characters’ “reproductive organs are shouting.” Ardal is amused and interested in the turmoil produced by such shouting; to her, Age of Arousal has nothing really to do with the zeitgeist Gissing was trying to capture, and much more with the impulses within us that barely change over time.
“Linda is one of the bravest playwrights I know,” says Ardal, “because she loves to write characters who make messes. She has written through the lens of her own imagination, and her own passion for politics. This is an extraordinary interpretation using Victorian times.”

Sex is underscored in Griffiths’ and Ardal’s interpretations of Gissing — who wrote only insinuatingly about it, dwelling on types (conspicuously, in Odd Women, the militant suffragist, the shopgirl and the spinster). Griffiths has her characters, in her words, “thought-speaking,” a tool that allows for a torrent of personal yearnings to buttress the social roles of her characters. In one scene, the nubile Monica — whose straight-oriented urges threaten the new kinds of freedoms proposed by Mary Barfoot, her lesbian secretary school teacher — says to herself and the audience, “Flirting, can’t stop, can’t stop flirting, my body does it all by itself.”

“The action of the play is also about the struggle [i.e., the suffrage movement] itself,” says Ardal. “If you take any revolution to its logical, fullest continuum, then you become very extreme in how you conduct your personal behaviour. Will you marry, for instance? Is it possible to do so while still upholding the principles of liberation? There are always internal conflicts within these pure ideas.
“As soon as we dress people up in Victorian costumes people begin to think it’s got nothing to do with their lives,” Ardal continues. “But people died for things like the eight-hour workday. Suffrage — meaning, of course, that you’re getting the vote, and therefore staking a political place in society, having a choice in how we’re governed — is utterly taken for granted now. In this sense, Linda has really written something for young people, which opens up [Gissing’s] characters, these historical memories, and reminds the audience that they are flesh and blood and vibrantly alive.”