One Flea Spare
By Naomi Wallace
Naomi
Wallace is a playwright, screenwriter, and poet. In October of 1995, One
Flea Spare was first performed in the Bush Theatre in London. It made its American premiere in
February of 1996 at the Humana Festival of New American Plays. The play has gone on to win awards,
including: the 1996 Fellowship of
Southern Writers Drama Award, the OBIE 1997 best play award, and more. I found this play using the LSU
database, where it redirected me to the Twentieth Century North American Drama
website.
One Flea Spare is about a group of
people quarantined during the Great Plague in London in the 1600s. Mr. and Mrs. Snelgrave are prepared to
flee to an area safe from the plague when two people are found inside their
home. This discover forces
everyone in the household into a 28-day quarantine. The Snelgraves are then left with two intruders, Bunce and
Morse, to spend these 28 days. The
four of them are visited every now and then by Kabe who gives them information
on what is happening around them.
The play follows their struggles throughout these days. Wallace focuses on death, disease, social
classes, and social discrimination.
Wallace’s
dramaturgical choice to set the play during the Great Plague was really
interesting. After reading the
play, I determined that Wallace wanted to raise questions of class and social
justice. I liked the way she did
this. She did not put the play in
today’s time to show this, she put it in the high stakes time of the Great
Plague in London. By setting the
play during the plague and quarantining the characters, Wallace is imprisoning
them literally and metaphorically.
They are locked up in a house, but they are also locked into their
class. Wallace plays with the idea
of class and mixes up the relationships of the classes. She depicts children’s views on class
structure through her character Morse.
Since the characters are quarantined, they are forced to interact with
each other. They discover things
about one another that they would have never known or cared to know in a normal
situation. It creates an
interesting dynamic in the play.
The
dramaturgical choice to include the character of Kabe gives the audience a
little something to remember what the world is really like. Although the four characters
quarantined have to interact with each other, they do learn about one
another. It seems as though they
are breaking down social barriers.
But, Kabe, their connection to the outside world, is a constant reminder
that the real world is out there and in the real world they are social
classes. In these social classes,
Mr. Snelgrave and Mrs. Snelgrave would not socialize with Bunce or Morse. If Wallace had left Kabe out, then the
audience would not see the real problem.
The problem is the strict social order and how it can be unfair and Kabe
reminds the audience of that.
One Flea Spare is a play about social
class, epidemic, and bending gender roles. Wallace’s choices all emphasize these themes. Her choice of setting and her choice
for Kabe both add to the theme of social class and barriers. Even though the play is set in the
1600s, I can see its themes being relevant in years to come, which I believe
makes this play very intriguing.
Wallace’s choices led her to a bold play raising many questions for the
audience or reader.
Wallace, Naomi. One Flea Spare. Electronic Edition by Alexander Street Press,
L.L.C., 2013. Web. 6 Dec 2013.
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