Demarcating Violence in the Dramaturgy of Lisa McGee’s Girls and Dolls

Lisa McGee’s play Girls and Dolls was first performed by Tinderbox Theatre Company, Belfast, in 2006. At the centre of the narrative is a violent crime which closely resembles the murder of two-year-old James Bulger by two ten-year-olds, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, in 1993 — but for the fact that the two perpetrators, as well as the young child they kill, are female. McGee’s play was by no means the only response to Thompson and Venables’ crime which emerged from theatre in the United Kingdom. Rather, Mark Ravenhill has noted that the Bulger case provides the starting point for much notable British new theatre writing of the 1990s because of the particular ‘dramatic landscape’ it suggests: ‘the shopping centre, the video camera, the child-killers’.1 For Ravenhill, the level of creative and media interest in this crime — committed by children, and in which the victim was an even younger child — was a reflection of the fact that this case exposed the individualist and infantalised society associated with consumerism, ‘an environment of the infant “me,” where it is difficult to grow into the adult “us”’.2 Thus the Bulger case prompted immediate creative responses to the questions of morality, the nature of the penal system, education, and childhood which the case raised.3