There is nothing unequivocal about sexual assault, but time and time again, we are told that certain criteria must be met before that term can be bandied about. The caveats that dictate ‘proof’ invariably involve casting doubt on the woman’s testimony – whether her recollection is consistent, whether it can be argued she non-verbally ‘instigated’ it, whether she can be blamed at all… Written by Claudia Vyvyan and directed by Ellie Crouch, Permanent Marker is a complex and nuanced take on the aftermath of rape.  As the unnamed young woman, Flora MacAngus delivers a subtle, yet affecting performance as someone caught in the perpetual cycle of trauma.

Taking the audience into her confidence, MacAngus as the protagonist opens up about her life prior to the assault… As a 16-year-old girl who has lost her mother, she has the opportunity to progress from working in her father’s art studio to being employed in Italy. Her boss, Augustine, takes her ‘under his wing’, but his ‘charming, flirtatious’ demeanor escalates to using duress to ‘have his own way’. What sticks with the audience, long after she concludes her speech is the character’s vivid recollection of her emotions – every bit as incessant, real and triggering as PTSD. And just like PTSD phenomena caused by combat, accidents or domestic violence, what is ‘worse’ for the character isn’t the incident itself (as bad as it is) but the gaslighting – being told that the fear and negative experiences are imagined, a work of fiction.

At the core of the play is the reliability (or not) of memory – how its degree of clarity changes how the victim views themselves and conversely, how society views them.

MacAngus gives three separate accounts of being sexually assaulted – each with a slightly different emphasis.  Is MacAngus playing the same person over time (with a slightly different focus on the chain of events) or is she playing three separate people? Either interpretation ‘works’, but in the very first account, the protagonist’s aunt ‘T’ is a throwback to Jane Austen: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” – setting her niece up with a man because he has money, irrespective of his character. This being the case, the aunt’s oblique involvement with the rapist’s actions serves as a reminder of how money and privilege influences the ‘narrative’ in court proceedings, as well as how even some women give the affluent the ‘benefit of the doubt’, complicitly ‘enabling them’.

The other accounts show a greater degree of self-awareness on the part of the protagonist, though it could be argued that the ‘frank admissions’ would make her more liable to ‘guilt’ in the eyes of a prosecution counsel. And while the ‘seasoned’ protagonist is on the surface more ‘philosophical’ than her younger, ‘rawer’ self, we sense that it at the loss of her ‘innocence’ – a part of her that ‘died’ and will never get back.

At the end of the day, every woman who has ever been raped asks herself the same question: do I want to be ‘right’ and have my story heard (but at the risk of being vilified for months/years) or do I ‘suffer in silence’ – forever in pain, but at least not scrutinised and attacked by society at large? Not much of a choice, is it?

© Michael Davis 2023

Permanent Marker ran at the Bread & Roses Theatre from 24th to 26th May.