Helen Birtwistle
posted 13 March 2006

Taboos is the story of Harriet and Sally, a loved-up lesbian couple living in San Francisco who have decided to have a child together. Harriet, an accomplished urologist, is more than familiar with reproductive technology and has persuaded her partner, and herself, that her brother Max should donate his sperm to Sally for artificial insemination, thus ensuring that all is 'kept in the family'.

Sally and Harriet invite the donor and uncle-to-be Max for a champagne fuelled impregnation dinner. They also invite Sally's brother Cameron, an evangelical Christian from Mississippi, from whom she has long been estranged as a result of her sinful lesbian ways. Having had no idea of the reason for this surprise invitation, Cameron is horrified when he discovers that the squelching sounds coming from the other room are those of a turkey baster.

Cameron's initial mortification soon fades to sympathy, and he returns home to his disapproving wife Priscilla, not converted, but pragmatic. We soon learn that the pious couple are having reproductive problems of their own, and though they pray and repent daily, it simply doesn't seem to be doing the trick. Having convinced his wife Priscilla that medical intervention is Godly intervention, Cameron begins consultations with his sister's partner Harriet in the hope that she might help them.

Life in California is not however all that it is cracked up to be. Whilst Sally is basking in the idylls of biological motherhood, Harriet has found her own role increasingly problematic. Continually searching for the terminology by which to describe her situation to her once sympathetic partner, she can only borrow from the familial relationships she has been trying to efface. She does not want to be 'the father'; she too must be 'the mother'. Harriet persuades Cameron to donate his sperm so that she can begin an ISCI procedure of her own (Intra Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection). He, in return, can take the unused fertilised embryos they create for his wife Priscilla. This must be done in absolute secrecy and neither Priscilla nor Sally must ever know. Both Harriet and Priscilla fall pregnant and a complicated saga erupts.

There is clearly some political commentary in Djerassi's latest addition to the 'science-in-fiction' canon, with the Liberal America of West Coast Sally and Harriet rather typically pitted against the Conservatism and religiosity of the South's Cameron and Priscilla. And yet, whilst many commentators have suggested that our sympathies are supposed to lie with the tasteful and intelligent proclivities of the liberal household, I walked away feeling quite differently.

Djerassi once described science-in fiction as an 'an effective way of smuggling serious topics of scientific behaviour into the consciousness of the scientifically illiterate', it was also a means of exploring and exposing the narcissistic forces that propel the scientist to pursue discovery and innovation. Taboos, in contrast, seems to explore some altogether more pressing concerns. Whilst Harriet and Sally are undoubtedly the representatives of Liberal America they also represent Science. In one of the many monologues given her to describe ISCI to a bemused Cameron, Harriet, keen to ensure his removal from her planned parenthood, reiterates that the procedure is nothing more than a Petri-dish experiment, his emotional investment in a laboratory process nothing short of ridiculous. But Harriet eventually finds herself in the exact-same predicament, unable to explain the forces that tie her to an (almost) anonymous sperm donation and that motivate her to stake her claim to a child that is hers, and yet not hers.

Taboos is thus an attempt to cut across the polarisation of science and traditional ethics. What begins as a crude caricature of Priscilla and Cameron's bible bashing Christian fundamentalism becomes a more generous portrayal of a couple forced to bend their belief system to the modern world, their insuperable want to have a child of their own complicating the disdain with which they hold science as a sign of amoral progress. But so too is the liberalism and scientific distance of Harriet's consultation room called into question. The arrogance with which she treats Cameron's emotionalism is revealed when she too is drawn into the entangled web of modern parenthood that they create.

Djerassi's point is that science and society are co-dependent. Whilst Thomas Kuhn's theory of The Structure of Scientific Revolution argued long ago that the history of science is characterised by paradigm shifts, revolutions in thought and practice that the wider world periodically rejects and then accepts, Djerassi seems to be urging the scientific community to undergo a little bit of self-reflection. The revolutions brought about by scientific innovation do not happen in a vacuum, they are not only the product of their ambitious practitioners, but rather answer to a simmering and not yet resolved social desire. Harriet's denial of any ethical or emotional implications to the processes with which she is professionally involved results in a sorry saga of parental ambiguity. Underestimating what Djerassi portrays as the mystical power of motherhood, Harriet is left fraught and perplexed by the birth of the ISCI babies. Are the children she and Priscilla bear hers and Sally's? Priscilla's and Cameron's? Or even Max's? And are the feelings arresting her the work of genes, hormones, blood or something altogether more intangible?

Taboos really couldn't be more current, and despite the fact that the backdrop to the play is provided by the seemingly inexhaustible portrayal of America's liberal and conservative divide, this is not a piece of theatre devoted wholly to those terms of reference. As Djerassi suggests in his own introduction to the play, reproductive technologies have emerged at a time when the traditional institutions of marriage, family and politics have become destabilised by all manner of societal shifts. But with this destabilisation, Taboos seems to be saying, comes the possibility of redefining the anachronistic social and political structures which we impose upon ourselves, structures that both science and human need have eclipsed. The rather implausible suggestion made at the end of the play is that the new parents embark upon a kind of community parenting scheme, thankfully the shrill Priscilla has another of her 'over my dead body' hissy fits. The ambiguity on which Taboos ends is, in this sense, the most resonant of its messages. The changes we are witnessing in Djerassi's 'Sex in an age of mechanical reproduction' throw up serious ethical dilemmas, but they also offer exciting opportunities to renegotiate the social and political networks in which we operate.

Till 2 April 2006.

Between the matinee and evening performances on Saturday 18 March, there will be an Institute of Ideas panel discussion to explore the themes raised by the play. Carl Djerassi will be joined by Claire Fox, director of the Institute of Ideas, theatre critic Patrick Marmion, Helen Eastman (director of the similarly themed recent play The Gabriels), journalist Dea Birkett and social policy lecturer Ellie Lee. Tickets: 0870 033 2733.