The director of a powerful play about domestic violence is hoping to secure funding to take it on a tour of schools around Kent.
Hurried Steps is a translation of the Italian play Passi Affrettati by Dacia Maraini and has been brought to the UK by New Shoes Theatre, a production company based in Tunbridge Wells, and Amnesty International.
The internationally acclaimed play is being presented to support International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, on November 25, and will be shown at the Trinity Theatre on November 28 to mark the end of Domestic Abuse Awareness Week.
Each 60minute performance is followed by a discussion between a panel of experts such representative from women’s refuges and charities that support survivors of domestic violence and the audience.
Director Nicolette Kay said: "Education has come up a lot in the panel discussions. These agencies very much want to go into schools, they are restricted by the funding, but they want to get their message across."
Anna Holland, co-producer at New Shoes Theatre, said on the opening night of the play at the Finborough Theatre in south west London, the group manager from Hestia women’s service was on the panel.
Research the group had carried out in schools in the Royal Borough of Kingston Upon Thames found that one in four children thought it was acceptable for their mother’s to get hit if they had done something ‘annoying’, she said.
Ms Kay said it was important to teach young people about domestic violence, she said: "It is to do with education that has come up again and again.
"There has been a cultural shift in my lifetime – not so many years ago domestic violence was regarded as normal to a certain extent.
"It can become normalised within a family so that children see violence perpetrated against their mothers and think that is what a relationship should be like."
Hurried Steps has been performed worldwide and translated into six languages, igniting a global debate about the impact of violence against women.
The Trinity performance has been funded by the Kent Community Foundation and the Brook Trust. The Town and Country Foundation and the Tunbridge Wells Community Safety Partnership are sponsoring the performance.
Ms Kay said that her next aim was to take the production of a tour around schools so that it could be performed to young people aged 14 and over.
The play tells eight stories inspired by the experiences of real women, which are presented to the audience in a stark and honest style.
"With hurried steps these women flee from pain and discrimination," Maraini, an Italian playwright, novelist, poet and journalist renowned for her work on women’s issues, said.
"Inspired by real facts reported by Amnesty International, the text is a testimony, an accusation, a gesture of solidarity and acknowledgement of all the women who are still prisoners of a forced marriage, of a violent family, of a hustler, of tradition or of age-old discriminations which are so difficult to overcome."
Ms Kay said that the same issues arose in each of the panel’s discussions including that one in four women experience domestic violence in their lifetimes as well as the complexities of cases meaning that the same men would go on to abuse new partners often because the women did not want to put the father of their children in jail.
"The other thing that has come up is that it is always down to an issue of control," she said. "The agencies are taking a zero tolerance attitude that there is no excuse for domestic violence.
"Often they use an excuse like alcohol or stress, stress at work women taking it upon themselves to blame themselves.
"If you look at the history of women reporting domestic violence that is a pretty recent attitude, it is only relatively recently that the police certainly would interfere. But now that has been turned on its head."
Research shows that although only a tiny minority of incidents are reported to the police, forces still receive one call about domestic abuse for every minute in the UK. The British Crime Survey found that less than 40 per cent of domestic violence crime is reported.
For more information visit www.newshoestheatre.org.uk. The Trinity performance starts at 7.30pm, tickets cost £8 and there will be a collection for the local women’s refuge. Call the box office on 01892 678 678.
POSTED: 28/11/2009 10:00:00
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