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What We Want and What We Get: Renée's Jeannie Once
Dunedin, New Zealand, 1879: the voyage out to New Zealand from Scotland and Ireland has been longer and has taken more of a toll on the passengers than anyone expected. The jobs that were to be "hanging from every tree just waiting to be picked up"(1) prove to be a myth. Jeannie comments rather angrily about her new home that: "I'd expected the differences, [but] it's the similarities that've been the shock!"(2) The promised land is just the same as the class-ridden, poverty-stricken, and prejudiced home she tried to leave behind. This is the social setting for Renée's play, Jeannie Once (1991), which highlights the experiences of at least four women who are displaced from the relative comforts of `home' by economic constraints, grief, and prejudice. The obvious class, religious and cultural tensions of early migration and settlement create a palpable irony in the play's reprise of the Gilbert and Sullivan song, "Never Mind the Why and Wherefore," from HMS Pinafore:
Though you occupy a station
In the lower middle class
Ring the merry bells on board-ship,
Rend the air with warbling wild,
For the union of his Lordship
With a humble captain's child.(3)
The "lower stations" have no cause for celebration when many at this time faced high unemployment, a crisis in banking, and epidemics of measles and whooping cough.
The third of Renée's trilogy, but chronologically the first play, Jeannie Once is, in many respects, stronger and more complex than Wednesday to Come (1985) and Pass it On (1986). In being written last, however, Jeannie Once is constrained by having to establish situations for the rest of the trilogy: the opportunity for Jeannie to have a (new) family, Mary's departure, and Jeannie's commitment to social reform. More problematically, its feminist politics seem to be significantly more muted than in her early plays, like Setting the Table (1984).(4) Jeannie Once relates the stories of four women who all encounter difficulties with New Zealand's settler society. Jeannie,s work sewing shirts barely supports: her; Mary, with whom she shares a house, has abandoned her acting career to guard the safety of her lover's son; Martha ("Nineteen, part-Maori, part-European") feels that she doesn't fit in the strict...