Unnatural Causes: Ladies’ Night
Unnatural Causes was a 1980s anthology series about unusual deaths, all the episodes written by big names. This one is by Nigel Kneale, who needs to introduction to blog readers.
The title of course refers to an evening in a gentlemen’s club where members can bring their wives or other female relatives as guests. In this case it’s a club called the Hunter’s Club, appropriately full of badly cured taxidermy and other colonial relics. The ladies in question are allowed into only certain rooms and clearly the experience of visiting is very traumatic for them, because they receive at best a lukewarm welcome, despite ladies’ night obviously having been agreed as a trial by the members. It becomes clear during the play that the club in is serious financial trouble and ladies’ night has been agreed in an attempt to attract new members. The parlous state of the club as a group and its premises provides an image for the parlous state of the members’ masculinity, personalities, and ability to relate to women.
The clear unhappiness of the members with the ladies’ presence and the clear discomfort and distress of the ladies being there for the sake of their husbands, lead to a crescendo of conflict and argument through the episode, culminating in one of the members killing his wife on the club premises. The other members find out and grotesquely start working out how to hide the body, only to find the body has disappeared and resulting in a twist for the gentlemen right at the end.
While this episode is clearly open to a feminist interpretation, a feature which I don’t think has largely been commented on is the nature of the club members. It is dominated by the club secretary, a singularly strong character called Colonel Waley (played to histrionic effect by Alfred Burke), who leads the planning of getting rid of the body and the others just go along with him. I do understand that women marry, or stay with, all sorts of inadequate men, for all sorts of strange reasons, but frankly you wouldn’t want to marry any of these men. They may be ‘clubbable’, but they are definitely not marriageable. They are definitely not gentlemen in the true sense. Even in the most hide-bound bastions of tradition, if a guest (even a woman) breaks a rule you either let it go or prompt them gently into not doing what they’re doing. You certainly never suggest that they are at fault in any way. In other words you act like a gentleman and make them welcome. The club members are not gentlemen, and I felt like screaming at the wives who are guests that they should certainly get rid of their husbands at once because they’re complete duds. It’s a comment on masculinity and the lost masculinity, embodied in the decline of the Hunters’ Club, of the club’s members.
Much of the criticism online of this episode revolves around the apparent contradiction that nearly none of the members want to have a ladies’ night at all, and yet somehow it has apparently been voted for by the members. I’m not troubled by this contradiction personally, and is easily explained by assuming that the relatively few members we see are not the entire membership and probably ladies’ night has been agreed by a more liberal majority of the membership who mostly aren’t present on this evening.
However I have another criticism which is that I don’t think Alfred Burke’s character works very well. In my opinion he is actually too dominant, and rather than make the club members a collection of weaklings who just follow their over-dominant club secretary, the play would have worked better if the whole membership had been similar personalities so that they are all equally monstrous characters. As it is the colonel, barking orders, comes across as a dictator and the other members don’t provide an adequate foil to the two ladies who are the only characters with any backbone.
Perhaps I should stress as always that if I thought this criticism meant the play didn’t work at all I wouldn’t be blogging about it.
This is a very complex play providing a commentary on male and female roles, which can be seen from a feminist perspective, or else on power and submission. I recommend it very highly.
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