Writer Ruth Fowler introduces her new drama which examines sexual politics in the modern workplace.
Rules of the Game stars Maxine Peake as Chief Operating Officer Sam and Rakhee Thakrar as newly appointed HR Director Maya Benshaw. Maya and Sam clash from their very first meeting, and when Maya begins to unpick the toxic culture of the workplace at sportswear company Fly, dark secrets begin to emerge. Soon both she and Sam are asking questions about a young female employee, Amy, who died in mysterious circumstances after a company party some years ago.
Rules of The Game starts Tuesday 11 January on BBC One and BBC iPlayer at 9pm. All episodes will be available as a boxset on BBC iPlayer.
Seven years before the #metoo movement abruptly brought sexual assault into sharp focus, I had written a play about a young British woman who ends up in Manhattan without a work permit, and finds herself in the apartment of a New York banker who trades glimpses of her bare flesh in lieu of rent. The young woman wasn’t me, though I was all too familiar with the tangled economics of sex and money and power - and not just because I spent several years in my twenties swinging around a stripper pole in a dark club in midtown Manhattan.
I related to #metoo because of the tangled messages of consent and blame I’d grown up with as a teenager in the late 90s, because of the subtle, insidious career disappointments I’d faced in my twenties, watching the men around me catapult to success while I flailed blindly around in the corridors, staring blankly at locked doors behind which decisions were made without me. In my thirties I started writing about what I was experiencing - something which was quite hard to articulate. It wasn’t as clear cut as simply proclaiming that my life was screwed up because I was a woman, or that I wasn’t as successful as X, Y or Z because of my gender. I’d had a great education, I’d achieved some level of success, and I’d built up a hard sediment against the unwanted touches, the brutal assaults, the subtle slights, the drunken groping and the overt come-ons I’d experienced in every industry I’d ever worked in - catering, restaurants, publishing, journalism, TV, film. I suppose I felt jaded and deflated, a husk of a human. A male friend of mine who is an incredibly successful writer told me to confront it in my work. I did - and no one wanted to touch it. It was too dark. Too nasty. Too unpleasant. Too shocking.
Until 2017. The politics of being a woman in a man’s world had never really interested us until Harvey Weinstein went down for it, and then suddenly everyone wanted to know the gory details. What was too nasty, unpleasant and shocking in 2010 became hard currency in 2017, and it was OK to be a woman, writing about women and assault and that insidious place we all occupy when our gender defines our status, our power, our jobs, our roles, our identities and we must either play the game or let it destroy us.
When I was asked to write a drama loosely based on #metoo in a fictional British workplace, I was more than ready to write it. I’d spent my entire life waiting for this moment to create Sam - a woman who had clawed her way to the top, and had been used and abused as much as she had used and abused others.
The grey areas of complicity surrounding behaviour that had once been OK fascinates me. So many victims of Weinstein, Epstein and others had spoken out, but no one listened, or believed them, or wanted to stand up for what was right because power trumps truth. Who were those people who ignored those women? What were they thinking? What did they do? If they were women - had they not experienced the same things? Did they think it was OK?
Towards the end of writing Rules of the Game, the lead defence attorney in Harvey Weinstein’s rape and sexual assault trial, Donna Rotunno, responded to a question about whether she had ever been sexually assaulted on ‘The Daily’ podcast. “I have not because I would never put myself in that position. I’ve always made choices from college age on where I never drank too much. I never went home with someone that I didn’t know. I just never put myself in any vulnerable circumstances ever.” I took her words and gave them to Sam. Sam who thinks that what had happened to her as a teenager was OK, was normal, was just… what you had to do to get by. Sam who blanches at the idea that her own daughter may have to go through the same trial by fire.
Even now, when we are apparently more evolved and enlightened humans who can comprehend that the power differential between a boss and an employee, a male boss and a female employee, a man and a woman, a drunk man and a drunk woman - constitutes an abuse of some kind that makes any notion of consent murky and indistinct, our understanding of the rules of this game are still being formed. Still being learned. Still being rewritten. Still being profoundly misunderstood.
Power now cares about diversity quotas and cancel culture, about characters that are brown, and black, and queer, and trans, and powerless, and marginalised. Power now cares about the victims it previously ignored, and power now wants to examine those topics it once deemed too dark and too nasty and too shocking. The result is that the locked door has been cranked open just a tiny bit. Enough that those of us previously excluded can now place a foot in that crack and resolutely refuse to move it even when the door crashes down upon us.
Rules of the Game is a foot in that door.
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Read more interviews with the cast and crew on the BBC Media Centre website
