Loss, Violence, and Trauma in Debbie Tucker Green's Stoning Mary and Random

Abstract

Debbie Tucker Green (date of birth unknown- ) is a prolific black British playwright of the twenty-first century. In her plays, she explores the local and global problems of black people living in Britain, Africa, and the Caribbean without underlining racial identity. Her play Stoning Mary (2005) presents the issues of AIDS, child soldiering, and stoning punishment that primarily African people encounter; Random (2008) depicts the murder of a black teenage boy in London. Tucker Green mostly presents the effects of violence, trauma, and loss, which the above issues cause, on the characters‘ lives. Rather than discussing the reasons for these issues, she portrays their emotional aftermath. In addition, Tucker Green explores these issues by focusing on uncaring characters and their failure of communication in Stoning Mary, and the characters‘ inner voices and thoughts in Random. Therefore, this thesis analyses Stoning Mary and Random, in terms of both content and style, to examine Tucker Green‘s representation of loss, violence, and trauma, and discusses that these issues are given in a cause and effect relationship in the plays. The introduction of this study provides the historical background of black British drama in order to reflect Tucker Green‘s contribution to it better. The first chapter analyses the relationship between loss, violence, and trauma in Stoning Mary. In this play, the characters experience a traumatic loss because of violence, and this situation also leads to violence. In the second main chapter, the same relationship between traumatic loss and violence is examined in Random, in which traumatic loss results from violence, but it causes different responses of grief other than violence. Consequently, in the conclusion part, it is highlighted that the losses that the characters experience in both plays are quite traumatic because of their violent and unexpected nature, and they lead to various responses of grief. While loss caused by violence also leads to violence in Stoning Mary, traumatic loss resulting from violence produces other reactions such as numbness, anger, and avoidance in Random.