Introduction: rehearsing masculinities

Abstract

The phrase "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do" becomes, in TonyMcNamara's play 'The John Wayne Principle' (1996), the starting pointfor a theatrical exploration of changes in masculinity toward the endof the twentieth century. Popularly, though inaccurately, attributed to John Wayne in the movie 'stagecoach' (1939), this rhetorically incontrovertible statement has been used to justify a range of male actions by means of a circular logic from which there seems no escape. Some people may not like what men do but, according to this formulation, there's no alternative and the world will just have to get used to it. There is something irreducible and immutable about being a man: whatever the situation, to use Robert Burns's version of the same tautology, "a man's a man for a' that". Yet the commoninjunction, 'Act like a man!', recognises that some men may indeed act differently. This apparent contradiction throws up some broad questions. To what extent does acting like a man come naturally to (all) men? And what precisely is the relationship between acting like a man and being a man?