Rethinking the Pamela controversy at the age of post-truth and #MeToo: Martin Crimp’s When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other (2019)

This article examines Martin Crimp’s play When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other (2019), arguing that the obscurity of its protagonists’ relationship and the unintelligibility of their motives for engaging in an ambiguous sexual power-play that blurs the boundaries between consent and threat revives the controversy surrounding its source material, namely Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1740). The debate as to whether Richardson’s heroine was indeed a virtuous character or a manipulative hypocrite acquires new currency in Crimp’s play, pointing to the difficulty of laying claim to the truth of one’s experience due to the barriers raised by established assumptions about gender roles. In this sense, the play aligns with the emphasis that the #MeToo movement placed on truth-telling as a means of exposing the menacing facets of imbalanced gender dynamics, yet also draws attention to the ways in which such an act may be compromised in a post-truth context that reinforces conventional power structures. The cryptic bond between its main characters, and the prospect of it resulting from harassment and in assault is never utterly discredited, illuminating the complexities of gender and sexual relations at a time that openly talks about but struggles to critically reflect on them.