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Rites | Introduction

Rites, by British playwright Maureen Duffy, was first performed in 1969, at the National Theatre Repertory Company in London. The play takes place in a woman's public restroom, and has an all-female cast. The characters are representative working class women of London, including the restroom manager and attendant, three office workers, and two widows in their sixties. The action and dialogue of the play reveal the anger and resentment the women feel toward men in their romantic and sexual relationships, and at work. The play finally erupts in a few moments of frenzied violence in which the women kill someone they believe to be a male spy, only to find that their victim is a woman.

Rites is very loosely based on The Bacchae, a play by the ancient Greek dramatist, Euripides, which describes the conflict between the largely female worshipers of the god Dionysus and the male representatives of law and order in the city of Thebes. Like Rites, The Bacchae culminates in a frenzied killing by a group of women.

Rites was written at a time when the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s was gathering strength. Like the women's movement, the play exposes the stifling effects on women of gender stereotypes at many levels of society.

Rites Summary

Rites begins with a procession of workmen dressed in white overalls, who construct the walls and cubicles of a public lavatory (the British term for restroom). They then bring in a large mirror, toilet bowls, and cisterns. They bang and hammer away, and this is followed by a sound of simultaneous flushing. The workmen then bring two large chairs, a notice about venereal disease clinics, a sanitary towel machine, and a perfume spray.

Two women enter. Meg begins cleaning, while Ada, the manager of the facility, sits at the mirror and begins putting on her make-up, admiring the results.

As she cleans, Meg complains about her job. She hopes that Ada will get her expected promotion and take her with her, but Ada refuses to promise anything. Ada discusses the man she was with the previous night; it becomes clear that by night she is a prostitute. She spends so much time at the mirror because she wants to make the best of what she has, so that she can charge a higher price.

Meg and Ada turn away an old woman who normally eats her breakfast in one of the cubicles because the woman is too early and they are not yet open. Meg admires Ada for being clever and Ada says she learns what she knows from the financial pages of the newspaper. Meg, however, is more interested in the daily horoscopes and persuades Ada to read some of them to her.

After the old woman returns and goes to the first cubicle to eat, three office girls enter, chattering about the date one of them had the previous night. After using the toilets, the second office girl and Norma complain to Ada about obscene graffiti on the walls. The three girls claim to be shocked and say that only men could have done it.

Meg takes up her knitting; the finished product will be a Christmas gift for a man, and Ada chides her for taking so long to complete it. The conversations continue in a disjointed kind of way. Norma announces that she wants to take the day off work; Ada reads some financial news out loud; Norma recites something from a romance novel she memorized, and Ada responds by talking to Norma about relations between the sexes in terms of assets and takeover bids. The office girls... ยป Complete Rites Summary