Review 45: Ruined by Lynn Nottage

Reading a book can be a comforting, warming experience. A little radiator that you fire up inside your belly and brain. Lynn Nottage’s Ruined is not such an experience. Don’t settle down to it expecting a rosy, joyful time. But you can expect devastating and important questions to be asked.

Nottage’s Pulitzer-prize-winning play is set in the Democratic Republic of Congo in its most recent years, crippled by civil war. Most of the play takes place in a bar and brothel that’s situated in an area that’s increasingly becoming a key battleground between the insurgents and governmental forces.

While the background of the play is national strife, the focus is very much on the human impact – specifically noting how, whoever wins the battle, the Congolese women end up losing.

The proprietor of the brothel, a sturdy and charismatic woman called Mama, illustrates this perfectly. She takes up space and, in her property, her word goes. She’s setting herself up as indomitable, irrepressible. But undermining this throughout the entire play is a sense of constant threat, that bubbles just under the surface. She’s in charge only as long as the men choose to allow her to be in charge. In a situation where sexual abuse is a favourite weapon of war, her own awareness of the fragility of her position shines through in just a couple of key scenes, but it’s enough to set the tone for the whole piece.

Ruined doesn’t shy away from the horrors that war holds for women. It made for brutal, infuriating, heart-breaking reading – I can only imagine the impact it would have as a performed play. But there are also moments of sly humour and levity that help to temper it too, that round out the characters and add more pathos to both the highs and the lows. I’d never heard of Nottage before, but she really is an extremely accomplished playwright.

Ruined doesn’t present answers. But it does show the specific problems faced by Congolese women in a new and emotional light, and urges us as an audience to recognise that these are problems that require solutions beyond the hope expressed most by Sophie, the most recent addition to Mama’s ‘girls’ – that simply of escape.

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