Salient. Official Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 44 No. 5. March 30 1981

[Introduction]

The much-acclaimed Foreskin's Lament gets its impact from sound writing which enables it to take off as a play of ideas. Too few New Zealand plays to date have been able to achieve both these things; either they have been intellectually unsatisfying, or too theatrically or structurally weak to carry ideas. Not so with Foreskin's Lament - 1 rank it at the top with Jennifer Compton's Crossfire.

It is a play which, for once and for all, dispells the egalitarian myth - it affirms class differences in New Zealand and unashamedly looks at the bitterness which results from the differences. As Clean, an archetypal rugby player says to Moira, a lawyer, "The distance between me and you is a fucken world".

Like David Williamson's The Club, which has also been widely performed in New Zealand, Foreskin's Lament is set in a rugby environment, but McGee goes a step further and works in the physicality of the changing room rather than with the administrators in the clubroom. Seymour, or Foreskin, is a student who plays for his home team; he values both the more enlightened minds of the university, and what he believes is the more honest, down-to-earth, working-class mentality of the rugby players - that they are somehow more in contact with what it takes to be human. He says to Moira: "If you think they're pigs then you'd better look close and get used to the smell, because their smell is your smell", and of the university, "Sometimes up there I get the feeling that life itself is just an abstraction."