Anonymous, for Lemon Shakespeare, March 2026
On International Women’s Day, this writer felt she had a rough ride.
On this day, a Sunday, a relative and I went to a café for a chat and ended up arguing over my experience of Life. When I brought up an assaulting incident culminating in a mutual friend ending up in a police cell, my relative replied that he only ended up in the cell because I told the police. “But I only told the police because he assaulted me!”
The relative pursed his lips.
“You can’t be like that to me today, it’s International Women’s Day!” I said. But obviously my relative could be like that.
I do my best to be amusing.
The BBC have recently reported that over 100 women were killed in Britain in 2025 in domestic violence situations. “Hardly a week went by without…” reflected someone involved in collecting the figures over the year.
The term “coercive control” gets used.
I guess I know something about this. I’ve not only been involved in a mind-torturing relationship with an alcoholic in my life (it’s-an-illness-yes-I-know-it’s-an-illness-I-told-him-it-was-an-illness-and-eventually-he-got-help), I was once kidnapped by a man for a year, who blackmailed me into staying for a year, with him threatening to tell the authorities about some illegals I knew from the Philippines if I didn’t stay for a year. Hard-working people, they were, all women, who cleaned people’s houses and sent their money back to their families.
I counted the days. For a year.
Get this – he was a law student – and after the year was over and I said: “Well, I’m going now” he claimed he’d completely forgotten. But when I went as if to leave – as if I was serious – which I was – he beat me to the front door, locked it, treated me like Judy in the old puppet show and did a little more than assault me – that night.
That’s the way to do it.
Coercive control for just a little over a year…
I got away in the end. I was in my twenties. I’m a bit older now.
I went home after the café/relative incident and thought: I’m blowed if I am going to sit here and mope on International Women’s Day about young men who don’t think or believe in Women’s Experience. I’m going out to do something that makes sense to me today. I’ll go and see William Shakespeare’s ‘Measure for Measure’. More than a few women get abused in that play one way or another; more than a few men end up in prison cells. It’ll be cathartic.
A friend of mine was in a ‘cue script’ production of this play at a pub theatre near Oval tube (The Golden Goose). Not near enough for me to be on time, unfortunately, but curiously the text began just as someone let me in through a door to the shout: “Are you ready?”
‘Measure for Measure’ was written at the beginning of the Jacobean era in England, when the authorities, under James I, were commanded to come down hard on prostitution. There are a lot of legal/authority scenes in this play, and there is one nun, Isabella, who would quite like to stay a nun (actually). Trouble is, none of the men she meets agrees with her. It’s set in Vienna. It couldn’t be set in London because at that time neither nuns, nor any of the trappings of the Catholic faith, were allowed. There is also a duke, in disguise. He wants to see his realm as it is, not as he hopes it is. He wants to see the workings of his deputy. He sees both. The deputy takes a fancy to the nun, whose brother is condemned to die for getting his girlfriend pregnant. The deputy tells Isabella that he’ll let her brother go if she does a lot more than pray for him… Need I say more? I don’t want to have to issue spoiler alerts. You should go and see the play.
This production was only an hour and a half long. That was good for a Shakespeare play. Intelligently cut. But to tell the truth, I have never been sure about the ‘cue script’ theory. Everyone is given their ‘cues’ – the last words in the line belonging to the previous speaking character, and then their character’s lines, the ones they have to learn and say. So you learn your lines, and the words before, so you know when to start speaking, and then the production relies on the fun of that. But unless it’s very cleverly done, it just looks like a lot of people forgetting their lines. You can learn something funny when characters have the same cue as someone else, but I can’t say that happened here, only that it didn’t quite work for me. Valentina Vinci was good playing various parts including Mariana, the deputy’s girlfriend. The man who played the Provost was good, very prison warder-like, and the girl who played Isabella was also more than proficient. It felt as if all the women were pregnant, or about to be, except the nun.
Honestly, I shouldn’t be too critical as I understand many of the parts will be played by other people in the future, and it is in the nature of an original production experiment.
The website for The Golden Goose is http://www.goldengoosetheatre.co.uk
And here’s a link to a BBC article on Queen Camilla’s take on domestic abuse.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg37wj5ezpo
11/3/2026