'The Flea' By John Donne

As a stimulus for a devising work we are using the poem 'The Flea' by John Donne. This poem is about a man trying to seduce a women, in the 1700s. He is doing this by convincing her that because a flea bit him and his blood, then bit her and has her blood, they have basically already had sex. She is unconvinced and kills the flea. This poem can be related to today. It has themes and truisms that are universal of men and women.

Themes and truisms:

• Men wanting sex, women saying no
• Wanting something you can't have
• No sex before marriage (17th Century)
• Religious Virtues
• Men bullshitting to get women into bed
• Men allowing their penis to control their brain
• Stereotypes of women as being innocent, and not wanting sex
• Sexual socialization of women; society viewing a women who sleeps around as a slut but not a man who does the same thing
• A mans power of conviction when sex is involved
• A person who won't admit when they are wrong

I think this poem can give us a lot of material to devise from. We could stick with this idea of sexual conflict between men and women and have lots of scenes within boy girl pairs. If we didn't have enough boys then create different types of scenes with girls. We could have people in different stages of relationships some married, just got together, been going out for years and the different conflicts they have regarding sex. We could show situations where men are taking advantage of girls and using them, and really talk about why that happens, who's fault it is, and how it feels. We could have these shown in different ways. We could create a physical section showing the conflict between a man wanting to seduce a women and the women saying no. Depending on the different issues we could decide on different ways of communicating it.