In their 1988 essay, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” gender theorist Judith Butler posits that “gender cannot be understood as a role which either expresses or disguises an interior ‘self,’…As performance which is performative, gender is an ‘act,’ broadly construed, which constructs the social fiction of its own psychological interiority” (Butler 11). Essentially, gender is much more malleable than it is often understood to be in society, and is instead a matter of performance. Although Butler’s essay was published in the late 1980’s, this idea of a less restrictive gender binary had been explored for decades before, one such instance being in The Island by Athol Fugard.
The Island, which follows two men on Robben Island during apartheid, uses performances, both literal and figurative, to question and challenge societal norms which are as prevalent today as they were at the time of its publication. In structuring John and Winston’s story around a performance of Antigone, a play about a woman who stands up to unfair laws, Fugard allows The Island to be as much a critique of the time period as it is a dissection of the gender binary and other systems of oppression. As a result, each performance in the play serves a slightly different purpose; John and Winston are introduced, then characterized, and finally developed not as “prisoners” or “characters,” but as people whose stories reflect a brutal reality many were forced to endure.
The first performance between John and Winston within the play occurs at the end of the first scene: John pretends to be on the phone with friends from home while Winston eagerly listens. The telephone conversation with Sky and Scott has two primary functions. First, for John and Winston, the conversation is–at the start–a moment of catharsis, an opportunity for the two men to forget about their unrelenting surroundings and reminisce in memories of their lives as free men. This performance from John allows them both to be truly happy for a brief period of time, something that rarely happens during the play. When John mentions their wives, however, the joy that once inhabited the men melts away, leaving them both miserable as “The mention of his wife guillotines Winston’s excitement and fun… [and] A similar shift in mood takes place in John” (Fugard 57). As much as the fantasy was pleasant, it was just that: a performance. Despite being enough to provide some respite from their situation, the memory of their marriages is more than enough to return them to their lonely lives in prison, unceremoniously killing all the pleasantness they had created to confront the emotions they cannot process.
The second role of this phone conversation is that it is the audience’s first real introduction to the characters of John and Winston. Although by this point, in the scene, the Antigone plot has already been introduced, the two men have not yet been fully characterized as individuals with lives outside of the prison–the phone conversation provides the first look into how lonely the two of them truly are. This becomes much clearer when Winston asks Sky to “…talk to Princess, my wife… I haven’t received a letter for three months now. Why aren’t they writing?” (Fugard 57). The isolation the two men feel is crushing them, and the progression of the phone conversation serves to demonstrate this to the audience and emphasize it with each other.
Another performance from John and Winston appears at the very beginning of the second scene, when Winston is wearing false breasts and a wig to play Antigone. Once Winston has the entire costume on, John begins to joke and “…fondles her breasts, he walks arm in arm with her down Main Street… He climaxes everything by dropping his trousers” (Fugard 59), resulting in Winston throwing the costume pieces to the ground in humiliation. This interaction, in which both men perform a role they cannot socially inhabit–John plays a free man and Winston plays a woman–provides the first ideas of gender performativity as would later be discussed by Judith Butler in “Performative Acts.” To Winston, being dressed up as a woman is not inherently dysphoric, rather John’s mockery of him dressed in women’s clothing is what causes him discomfort. However, when John leaves the cell, Winston takes a moment to don the costume again and attempts to do poses evocative of what being Antigone (and a woman) means to him, but ultimately fails after laughing at himself. John’s treatment of him, and eventually his own laughter at himself, stems entirely from his appearance as a woman rather than his actual gender identity, which alludes to Butler’s idea of gender as performance. In that very moment when Winston is dressed as Antigone, his actual identity does not matter; instead, what is most important is what gender he is performing.
Mirroring John’s mockery of Winston is Winston’s enactment of John’s life on the outside after his release. When John tells Winston that he is going to be released, Winston tells an extensive story of his life on the outside, culminating in a moment of aggressive sexuality similar to John dropping his trousers to Winston’s Antigone in the previous scene: Winston gets cut off by John after telling him he’ll “watch [a woman], watch her take her clothes off, you’ll take your pants off, get near her, feel her, feel it…” (Fugard 71). For John, this is far too much, and results in feelings of discomfort reminiscent of those felt by Winston hours before. The performance aspect of this scene stems less from presenting as another gender, but instead comes from an overtly crude portrayal of one’s own gender identity; it more accurately represents overcompensation. The crude allusions to female genitalia that Winston provides in the scene are deeply aggressive to the point of near objectification, which does not sit well with John. As a result, the performance is used for harm; Winston’s jealousy of John’s release leads him to weaponize sexuality in a way that distorts his own identity, tapping into John’s loneliness and his pain. This subversion of performance as it has been used thus far demonstrates how dangerous and powerful it can be when used for different purposes.
The fourth scene, John and Winston’s production of Antigone, is the final opportunity the play takes to explore how performances affect the two men. Despite his hesitation in the scenes prior, Winston goes on as Antigone and performs the role opposite John as Creon. The play-within-a-play is faithful to the text on which it is based, but the most crucial aspect of it is the final image wherein Winston removes the costume separating him from both the literal and figurative audiences and addresses them directly: “Gods of our Fathers! My Land! My Home! Time waits no longer. I go now to my living death because I honoured those things to which honour belongs” (Fugard, 77). The quote in the context of Antigone and The Island is exactly the same, as both Antigone and Winston (as well as John) were imprisoned for resisting an oppressive system–Antigone was imprisoned for burying her brother despite Creon’s orders, and John and Winston have been imprisoned on Robben Island, a place which held political prisoners during apartheid. What results is a moving commentary on their situation through the voice of the ancient Greeks, their own form of resistance with what little means they have. In the production, Winston’s abandonment of performance is a very significant shift, as it suggests that what is happening in the play is no longer make-believe, but is instead a version of reality examined through the lens of performance.
The most impactful performance in the play comes not from any particular scene or moment, but is instead a defining characteristic of the play itself: there are minimal props, set pieces, and costumes. In a lengthy stage direction before any lines are spoken, Fugard specifies that “the two prisoners–John stage-right and Winston stage-left–mime the digging of sand” (Fugard 47). Without the aid of visual cues, the actors playing John and Winston are forced to literally “perform” these actions, relying on the actual audience’s imagination to fill in the blanks. The result of this–in combination with Winston’s final address to the audience–is a blurred line between what is diegetic and what is not, and as the audience is forced to create the tools of John and Winston’s oppression, they are unwittingly thrust into a position of power: it is their own mind that is keeping these characters in prison. It is due to this that The Island masterfully meddles with what the boundaries of performance are, questioning what constitutes reality versus fiction.
Although apartheid in South Africa ended roughly two decades after The Island was first performed, the situation in which John and Winston find themselves is one that reflects more contemporary discussions about oppressive, hegemonic structures that people around the world are subject to every day of their lives. Especially considering the ongoing redefinition of gender identity norms, as ushered in by Judith Butler, The Island finds itself at a compelling intersection between past and present. As a result, it is more important than ever to consider how performances can equally uphold and dismantle repressive power structures.
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Works Cited
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theater Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4, 1988, pp. 519-531. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3207893?origin=JSTOR-pdf&seq=1# metadata _info_tab_contents
Fugard Athol. “The Island.” Statements, Theatre Communications Group, Inc,
New York, 1986.