a neat job: on sophie treadwell's machinal
I'm re-launching my newsletter, Lines' Lines. First up, we're discussing rest, redundancy, electricity, and the Expressionist, feminist classic, Machinal - by Sophie Treadwell
Contains brief discussions of disordered eating and sexual violence
When I was a child I hated the long summer holidays. There was nothing to do but think. I would become untethered, anxious, keen always for school to start up, even though I knew that within a week I’d be desparate to be anywhere but. I like to keep busy, is what I’m trying to say. And after the pandemic, another long stretch with nothing to do, I do not like to rest on my laurels. I do not like to rest.
The constant feeling of not doing enough, not creating enough, not making the most of every opportunity, is a feature of life in Cambridge. It is also a feature of coming from a background which does not provide you a means into a career in the arts. I have to build a portfolio now, put on shows now, while I still can. I’m terrified that when I graduate there will be no more chances, and my whisp of a career as a director will remain something I look back on with wistful fondness. I am very aware that I might be living through the best years of my creative life.
This anxiety - this, if we’re being honest with ourselves, ugly envy of those with the time and the money to focus on their creative pursuits - has driven me to have an extremely productive year.
In 2024, I directed the first run of my play The Book of Margery Kempe in Cambridge. I then fought tooth and nail to secure just enough funding to cover the cost of the rent of a theatre to take the play to Camden Fringe, a wonderful experience (we want to take the show to Edinburgh but can’t afford it.) I also managed a last minute production of the show at the Cambridge Festival of Drama in September, for which we won Best New Play. I also directed productions of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, As You Like It, and assistant directed a production of Macbeth - all while working full time and averaging a 75 in the first year of my Master’s degree. I’m really proud of myself. It’s been really hard. And I’m exhausted.
I was made redundant last week. I had been working as a content writer for a popular YouTuber since I graduated in 2023. In fact, I began my job just days after I graduated, which I was immensely grateful for, as it meant I had independence, money, and a foothold in an increasingly bleak job market. But that has come to an end now, and I have been lucky - I’ve been given a gererous redundancy package, meaning, for the frst time, I have time. At least for a little while, I have time to do my makeup and go for walks, read plays and write this newsletter. I can sleep and lift weights and work on my dissertation.
At some point soon I will have to go back to work - freelancing or tutoring or tour guiding or the 9-5 that is trying to find a 9-5, but for now, I have what I have always wanted. I’m in a brief window of freedom, and I intend to make the most of it. This means creative work, of course, but I think it also means rest.
I’m already finding it hard to give up the frenetic pace I have been working at. And it was in this unease at my own idelness that I read Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 play Machinal for the first time.
Machinal follows a Young Woman, whom we come to know by her married name Helen Jones, through a series of intense vignettes detailing how she came to kill her husband - the boss of the comapny she once worked for as a secretary. He takes a liking to her ‘pretty little hands’; he makes her ‘blood run cold’. But marrying him frees her from the souless machinery of the office, characterised by the robotic lines of her colleagues:
ADDING CLERK (in the monotonous voice of his monotonous thoughts; at his adding machine): 2490, 28, 76, 123, 36842, I, 1/4,37,804,23, 1/2 982.
FILING CLERK (in the same way - at his filing desk): Accounts  A. Bonds - B. Contracts - C. Data- D. Earnings - E.
STENOGRAPHER (in the same way - left): Dear Sir - in re  your letter - recent dale - will state Â
TELEPHONE GIRL: Hello - Hello - George H. Jones Company good morning - hello hello - George H. Jones Company good morning - hello.
Anyone familiar with corporate jaron will recognise the rhythm of these repeated beats of business nonsense. ‘The characters - Telephone Girl, Adding Clerk, Filing Clerk, and Stenographer - are not given proper names. Instead, they are identified by their tasks and machines; they have become mechanized, speaking and behaving in the same manner as the technology that assists them in their work’, writes Elizabeth Weiss.1
Treadwell also dramatises a sentiment that many women now share - that a boss is no different from a husband. I’m sympathtic to the idea often promoted by tradwives, that we have traded in the tyranny of a husband for the tyranny of a line manager. Many of them see the modern corporate world as a more opressive form of toil than domestic labour, which at least allows one to do tangible work - like growing vegetables, cooking meals, and raising children, as opposed to the the often meaningless work of data entry or auditing or, God forbid, AI prompt writing.
To that I would say that having one’s own income offers women a degree of freedom that the housewife never had, and which today’s tradwife seems, on the surface, happy to give up. (But, as has been observed by others, tradwives who make money posting about their lifestyle online, are not, in fact, finacially dependant on their husbands. Or are they? For tradwives, whose content relies on sharing their idyllic family lives online, a husband can indeed have an outsized influence on her ability to make her own money. If he refuses to play the part of the traditional husband, or shows himself up through blatant cruelty (yes, I’m thinking of the BallerinaFarm egg apron incident) then her ability to fend for herself online is compromised. He is both husband and boss once more.) Yet, by fusing the figure of the patriarch and the corporate president into one man, Treadwell illustrates how neither system truly offers women freedom and fulfilment.
Machinal is slick, stylised, and fast-paced. It’s clipped, line-to-line dialogue is matched in the structure of the play as a whole. The dialogue cuts conversation to its most representative state, collapsing down reality into a short, sharp simulacrum of real life. In turn, the scenes of Machinal speed-run a life, from Helen’s days a recpetionist, to a young mother, adulteress, murderer, and victim of the electric chair. Like the skeleton glowing beneath the skin of an electrified body, Machinal shows us the bright, spare bones of a life free from freedom.
One of Machinal’s principle themes is bodily autonomy - and it’s lack. This is best exemplified when Helen is in the hospital, post-partum. The doctor insists on feeding the ‘little lady’ solid food, even though it makes her sick (cleverly infantilising Helen as a baby to be weaned from liquids to solids.) The scene ends with Helen increasingly manic and distressed, insisting that:
I'll not submit any more - I'll not submit - I'll not submit Â-
I’m reminded here of Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian, which similarly depicts a woman who loses control of her body - not just it’s external freedoms and appearances, but it’s internal state, too. Her family force Yeong-hye to eat meat, and finally doctors force feed her when she refuses food entirely (she believes she is becomming a tree, and therefore does not require human sustencance.) The internal world of her body is something to be invaded, changed, and exposed against her will (and yes, both Yeong-hye and Helen experience sexual violence.)
In Machinal, this comes to a head when Helen is sentenced to death via the electric chair. This particular method of execution - the charge of electricity through the body, making the invisible visible, shaking and jolting the limbs beyond Helen’s control - is representative of the bodily violations which lead to her fragile mental state. But, I think it is the scene immediately preceeding Helen’s end which is the most heartbreaking:
YOUNG WOMAN (crying out): Not for this! Not for this!
MATRON. The rule.
JAILER. Regulations.
BARBER. Routine.
The BARBERS take her by the arms.
YOUNG WOMAN: No! No! Don't touch me - touch me!
They take her and put her down in the chair, cut a patch from her hair.
I will not be submitted - this indignity! No! I will not be submitted! - Leave me alone! Oh my God am I never to be let alone! Always to have to submit - to submit! No more - not now - I'm going to die -I won't submit! Not now!
BARBER (finishing cutting a patch from her hair): You’ll submit, my lady. Right to the end. You'll submit! There, and a neat job too.
JAILER. Very neat.
MATRON. Very neat.
Very neat indeed. ‘The shearing of women’s hair has a long history as a tactic for dehumanizing, humiliating, and setting women apart from the rest of the population’ writes Lauren Harrison2, (though this can, of course, can and has been the case for men also.) Cutting patches of Helen’s hair away for the electrodes is such a cruel, real, horrifying detail that I squirmed while reading it. Helen’s pain and terror is so palpable. Her moments on death row, characterisated by a loss of bodily autonomy, indifferent cruelty, and the dehumanising effects of institutionalisation, are no diferent from the experience of being a worker, a wife, and a mother.
I read Machinal while on a stepper in my living room, trying to lose weight and lower my blood pressure (too high for the pharmacist at Boots to represcribe me the pill), high most probably because I’d just been laid off and I’m terrible at taking care of myself. As I stepped in time to Treadwell’s staccato lines, I could feel the dull rhythm of the office which runs through the play, the dull rhythm of my own self-dislike. Before I was laid off, I had taken to stepping while I worked, my wordcount increasing with the count on my pedometer. As I read Machinal, I had to ask why I was stepping in time to the play. Was it because I wanted to - or because my pedometer, my doctor, the gentle pressure of my parents, told me to? Maybe, my hips, knees, and feet were electrified, moving of something else’s accord.
Welcome to my newsletter, Lines’ Lines. I’ll be writing about a new play each week from now on. Next week we’ll be saddling up for Peter Schaffer’s Equus.
Elizabeth Weiss, Sophie Treadwell's "Machinal": Electrifying the Female Body, South Atlantic Review, Summer 2006.
Lauren Harrison, Shame and Shearing: The Politics of Women’s Hair in Independence-Era Ireland, Nursing Clio.
Incredibly powerful review.
Beautiful piece, Nadia.