Saucy Jack

Laila Abdalla is an associate professor of English at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, and former professor at McGill University.

In the playwright’s note to Saucy Jack, Pollock states that “women
are killed because they can be killed with relative or complete
impunity,” and uses one of history’s most notorious woman-killers,
Jack the Ripper, to bring all viewers into intimacy with the subject.
Saucy Jack is not about the man who killed the women, nor is it about
the women who were killed. It is a play that attempts to deal with
contemporary issues: violence against women, and the societal collusion
that allows it.

However, the author’s premise is undermined by two truths. The first
is that killers of women do not systematically go unpunished. The second
is that the title character and the setting of the play necessarily draw
attention away from the general to the specific. We are unavoidably
aware that we are in Victorian England, speculating on the identity of
the notorious killer.

Pollock provides us with three male members of the English aristocracy,
trying to implicate each other as the killer. Balanced against them is
Kate, an actress hired to play the murdered prostitutes. By becoming the
dead women, Kate becomes all women, but the three men remain very much
individual, localized, idiosyncratic characters. Pollock’s intention
is for Kate to gain power through her victimization; while the men lose
power and become “smaller than themselves ... [Kate] lives. They
die.” But if Kate is Everywoman, and the men are individual
personalities, how can it be otherwise?

This is an intriguing play, but it attempts to do too many (often
contradictory) things. There is too much subject for too short a play.
In attempting universality, Saucy Jack is neither about the plight of
modern women, nor about the triumph of Kate over corrupt aristocracy,
nor even, unfortunately, about Jack the Ripper.