Saucy Jack
Saucy Jack
By Doug McLauchlan
Tethersend Productions
Pink Venue, 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival</strong>
The irony of mass murder lies in its asymmetric fame. Kill a hundred people, and no one remembers their names, but yours goes up in stars on Wikipedia. Doug McLauchlan is down from Canada with an ambitious and slightly disjoint history of Jack The Ripper and the morality of unplanned death. Posing as the scourge of Whitechapel, McLauchlan begins by polling the audience – is Jack evil or just misunderstood? Evil wins by a landslide, and he charges forward, building a case that Society Made Him Do It. By drawing in dubious connections to war and religion, the argument runs along the general lines of “if a million deaths are a statistic, why are five dead hookers a tragedy?” A supporting lemma is that the Jack the Ripper murders were highly symbolic and increasingly gruesome, and after creating enough public outrage, he stopped, but his actions set the stage for World War One and Hiroshima. As a metaphor, it might make sense, but as for a Victorian crime drama, it’s ludicrous.
McLauchlan’s delivery moves forward haltingly, but he does give enough facts about the case and the controversy to keep my interest. The descriptions of the slums and desperate prostitute driven to the streets by well intentioned moralist who closed the brothels is fascinating: we tend to marginalize the marginal. There was and still is a cliff in society – fall over the edge and you are very unlikely to ever get back up. There’s material for debate lurking here, but killing prostitutes just because you don’t like them doing the only thing they can to survive is still pretty evil. A closing poll on the “Jack The Ripper: evil or misunderstood” question showed one man had shifted his opinion.
This event is part of the 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival. For schedule and ticket information, please visit http://OrlandoFringe.org
By Doug McLauchlan
Tethersend Productions
Pink Venue, 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival
The irony of mass murder lies in its asymmetric fame. Kill a hundred people, and no one remembers their names, but yours goes up in stars on Wikipedia. Doug McLauchlan is down from Canada with an ambitious and slightly disjoint history of Jack The Ripper and the morality of unplanned death. Posing as the scourge of Whitechapel, McLauchlan begins by polling the audience – is Jack evil or just misunderstood? Evil wins by a landslide, and he charges forward, building a case that Society Made Him Do It. By drawing in dubious connections to war and religion, the argument runs along the general lines of “if a million deaths are a statistic, why are five dead hookers a tragedy?” A supporting lemma is that the Jack the Ripper murders were highly symbolic and increasingly gruesome, and after creating enough public outrage, he stopped, but his actions set the stage for World War One and Hiroshima. As a metaphor, it might make sense, but as for a Victorian crime drama, it’s ludicrous.
McLauchlan’s delivery moves forward haltingly, but he does give enough facts about the case and the controversy to keep my interest. The descriptions of the slums and desperate prostitute driven to the streets by well intentioned moralist who closed the brothels is fascinating: we tend to marginalize the marginal. There was and still is a cliff in society – fall over the edge and you are very unlikely to ever get back up. There’s material for debate lurking here, but killing prostitutes just because you don’t like them doing the only thing they can to survive is still pretty evil. A closing poll on the “Jack The Ripper: evil or misunderstood” question showed one man had shifted his opinion.
This event is part of the 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival. For schedule and ticket information, please visit http://OrlandoFringe.org
