In 1902, aged just nineteen, Mary MacLane published a memoir that scandalised the world, openly documenting her bisexuality, rejecting social norms, and casually declaring she wanted to marry the Devil. No filter, no apology. Just pure, chaotic self-mythology from someone who refused to be contained.
Over a century later, she feels strangely familiar.
I’m A Victim of My Generation (The Resurrection of Mary MacLane) brings her back, not as a historical figure, but as a disruptive force dropped straight into modern culture. This July, she’s being summoned at The Divine in Dalston, a space that thrives on work that is bold, strange, and unwilling to fit the mould.
The show starts at a podcast recording. Rachel is a self-proclaimed white witch running a carefully curated show built on spirituality, therapy-speak, and digital intimacy. Every detail is controlled because otherwise, Rachel has a lot to lose. Opposite her is Jeremie, an academic obsessively researching MacLane, desperate to find a counterpart in Rachel that would help him unleash some dark realness and help him become MacLane in the flesh.
At first, it feels like satire. You’ve seen these people before. The language, the posturing, the quiet competition for authority over a narrative. But things unravel quickly as the interview spirals into something much darker. The performance cracks open. The boundaries between past and present collapse. And then, quite literally, something like the Devil arrives.
What follows is messy, funny, unsettling, and deliberately out of control. The structure breaks down along with the characters, and the safety of the “performance” disappears.
At its core, the play asks a fairly brutal question: are we actually searching for connection, or are we just turning confession into another form of commodity? Are we engaging with history, or are we using it as a backdrop to make ourselves feel more complex, more interesting, more damaged in an appealing way?
Both characters use the past and their identity to perform a version of themselves. When the façade cracks, they must deal with reality. To enhance that break from reality, we are using animation projected on stage, inspired by the drawings of Marlene Dumas and Francis Bacon. We want to capture the psyche of these characters, not just through words.
Set in one of East London’s most vital queer performance spaces, this is not polite theatre. It’s chaotic, uncanny, at times cerebral, and mostly fun! A collision between early twentieth-century rebellion and modern digital identity, where neither side comes out intact.
If you’re tired of safe, predictable shows and want something darker, sharper, and a little bit dangerous, this is your invitation/invocation.
I’m A Victim of My Generation (The Resurrection of Mary MacLane) runs at The Divine, Dalston, from 12–14 July at 19:30.
