Run Rabbit: crash course in militant feminism

To combat the culture of violent misogyny, Susan Sontag recommended that women “whistle at men in the streets, raid beauty parlors, picket toy manufacturers who produce sexist toys, convert in sizeable numbers to militant lesbianism…deface…disrupt…organize.”

That’s just about what Victoria Abbott does, perched atop a small stage, carrot in hand.

Run Rabbit, created by Kate McGill and Victoria Abbott, co-produced by Madeleine Withington, is forceful yet playful, confronting yet kind. The play is splintered, or deconstructed, into several parallel narratives that illustrate the realities of harassment and violence embedded into the experience of presenting as a woman. Abbott makes us aware that many women are present throughout the play: different versions of herself, one of her ancestors, members of the audience, and those who have found themselves a statistic in the institution of violent crime.

Much of the play follows Abbott’s ancestor, Black Agnes who, alone in her Scottish castle in 1338, defends herself from a horde of twenty thousand Englishmen. She’s irate, acerbic, heavily Scottish (which Abbott plays convincingly). She calls on “prissy boy” (a well-built, elderly man in the audience) to read her letters. She hurls insults, metaphors, and threats at another member of the audience. And she mounts her roof that has been catapulted by the English Siege, spine straight, sinews strung:

How dare you men bond with each other over breaching my gates?

Why are you here? You’re here to lay siege to me, to breach my walls and drive me from my home, all because you’re unhappy in your own!

Black Agnes’ spitting reproach travels centuries to attack the culture of the manosphere, where pretensions to masculinity form a sort of lattice, thick as a cult, through which the suffering of non-men are unable to be seen, unable to be felt. It resounds with critic Elif Batuman’s reading of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which holds that the nineteenth-century epic reveals why men of war become men of war—due almost ubiquitously to unhappiness in the domestic sphere, which is created by the oppression of women, which is enforced by the conditions of war, and so on and so forth, perpetuating a violent, miserable cycle of unhappiness. It also resounds with the ongoing, violent siege currently occurring in Gaza, a parallel that Abbott herself draws, concluding her piece with a hopeful, angry, heartful “Free Palestine.”

Abbott steps down from the promenade. She’s no longer Black Agnes, leaving no time for the audience to register the change. She squats down, so low that she’s almost sitting, and emits an animalistic squeak. “I’m so hungry,” she simpers, in a childish voice. “If only somebody would give me that carrot.” Indeed, a carrot lies in the corner of the stage, two metres away.

“If only somebody would help me reach that carrot,” she sighs.

Nobody moves.

“If only somebody would kindly offer to pass me that carrot.”

This goes on for about an entire minute before a guy in a mustard sweater says, “I’ll do it,” and swaggers awkwardly down onto the stage. He passes her the carrot like a baton. Abbott pounces him immediately. You think I can’t do it? I can’t get my own food with my dainty little lady paws? The audience dissolves in laughter.

Abbott excels at manipulating the syncopated pulse of the play, and of her femininity. Scenes are stitched together abruptly, but Abbott ensures the audience is comfortable, gently describing methods of dealing with triggers, even as she prepares to contort herself into the next powerful or obscene character. After empowering us, harassing us, condescending to us, pleading with us, joking, insulting, educating us, she stands centre stage for a final monologue. “One in three women,” she tells us, “is a victim to violence in her lifetime. One in six men. Not to speak of the countless horrors imposed on those outside that binary.” The following show, Melon, confronts watchers with one such horrific, visceral case.

Run Rabbit is at once charming and confronting, running at breakneck speed to an off-kilter heartbeat. It’s an entirely unpredictable experience, and although Abbott plays the rabbit, there is an unspoken understanding that between the two of you, she’s not the prey.

Run Rabbit is playing at The Flight Path Theatre until the 31st of May