Can a person change?
If so, is it done by denying your past or by accepting it?
And who determines how you should change? You or others? Are we creatures of our culture or autonomous individuals?
Charles Dickens funded a home for ‘fallen’ women. This play by Seanna van Helten explores the state of five of these women as they prepare for a new life in the colonies.
Image by Marnya Rothe
Historical fiction always serves a contemporary fantasy. The Victorian world fascinates us because we can posit it as a cautionary tale: this is repression. There’s the danger we can be smug or complacent in our comparison, but used appropriately, it’s a yardstick to hold up to our own society and judge if we’re doing much better.
The rule in this home for ‘fallen’ woman is that your past is not to be discussed. It’s a perfect metaphor for the silencing of women’s voices.
Dickens doesn’t appear, so we never hear his take. And, intriguingly, we don’t hear too much from the women themselves. The characters silence each other, and the playwright chooses to tell us little about their backgrounds, or about the outcome of the whole experiment. The plot becomes the relationships between the women in that place, that time. It’s a fascinating miniature.
The play could be read by a misogynist as an indictment of bullying, manipulation and emotional immaturity. That’s not the intention, of course – no more than Hamlet (say) is meant as a criticism of men. The play acknowledges that we are, to a huge degree, products of our environment. If this small contained world of women is less than perfect it reflects only a larger, more deeply flawed, world.
Now, let’s change it.
Paul Gilchrist
Fallen by Seanna van Helten
directed by Penny Harpham
at the Reginald at Seymour til 22nd April
Tix and more info here
Theatre Red 
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