Deserving? Press Release

She is refusing to be a prisoner of her past. Realising that if she doesn't tell her story, someone else might...and they might just tell it wrong...

Deserving? is concerned about standpoints towards rape in some sections of society, ongoing vitim blaming and the lack of understanding surrounding the subject.

UN statistics show that one in five women will suffer rape in their lifetime. Is it not bad enough to be raped? Should we really be made to feel responsible for it too? In an Amnesty International survey, one in three replied that a women was totally or partly responsible for being raped if she was drunk (64% in the Havens wake up to rape survey). The rapist will hopefully serve many years in prison for their act(s) (currently the conviction rate in Scotland is at 7%) but the survivor may well spend his/her lifetime feeling responsible for the theft of their bodily integrity.

With a subject matter as cruel as rape, the theories of Antonin Artaud's'Theatre and its Double' fit like hand in glove. The creation of Deserving? has followed his ideas almost religiously. The show features but one word meant to be understood, therefore avoiding what Artaud calls the "pitfalls in speech and words". It is based heavily in reality so as to "allow the audience to identify with the show breath by breath" and aims to attack their senses. Deserving? uses "violent, physical images" and adds "imagined horrors to existing ones" in order to do everything in its power to "wake us up heart and minds." 

Raped at 15 years of age, whilst on holiday in France, the creator of Deserving? feels she has been training for this piece most of her life. Hiding her pain through the wearing of endless masks she continued a keen involvement in theatre through to her time at Bretton Hall (previous students include three of the four League of Gentleman creators/performers,

Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith and comedian Mark Thomas) and has subsequently committed her life to using theatre and dance to create change.

Thanks to amazing support from the Rape Crisis Centre in Edinburgh, Emma Crews is now ready to fight against rape and use everything she has to help other women free themselves from their guilt. Deserving? is her thank you to EWRASAC and her call to stop us focusing solely on the victims when we desperately need to be paying more attention to the perpetrators and what makes them act so heinously.