Key Quote
“"We went dancing"”
Mrs Johnstone · Act One (Song)
Focus: “dancing”
Mrs Johnstone's wistful song about her youth — before motherhood, poverty, and abandonment consumed her — uses dancing as a metaphor for freedom, joy, and the life she lost.
Technique 1 — SIMPLE PAST TENSE — IRRETRIEVABLE LOSS
The simple past tense — 'went' — places dancing firmly in the past: something that happened and is over. The simplicity of the sentence ('We went dancing') contrasts with the complexity of what Mrs Johnstone has lost. She does not need elaborate language because the loss is absolute: dancing belongs to a closed chapter. The grammar performs what it describes — the past tense shuts the door on the past.
The pronoun 'We' is poignant: it refers to Mrs Johnstone and her husband, before he left her. 'We' implies a partnership — a shared life, shared joy, shared movement. This 'we' was destroyed by the husband's departure, leaving Mrs Johnstone as a solitary 'I'. The shift from 'we' to 'I' — from couple to single mother — is the hidden catastrophe that precedes and enables the play's main tragedy.
Key Words
RAD — REGRESS
Mrs Johnstone regresses throughout the play from the dancing, carefree girl of this song to the grief-stricken mother of the finale. The song establishes a baseline of happiness from which all subsequent events are a descent. Dancing represents movement, freedom, and partnership — everything Mrs Johnstone loses. Her regression is from motion to stillness, from joy to grief.
Key Words
Technique 2 — DANCING AS METAPHOR FOR FREEDOM
Dancing functions as a metonym (a part standing for the whole) for everything positive in Mrs Johnstone's lost youth: physical vitality, sexual attractiveness, social inclusion, partnership, joy. When Mrs Johnstone says 'we went dancing,' she means 'we were young, free, happy, together, and alive.' The single activity carries the emotional weight of an entire lost life.
Dancing is specifically a physical activity — it requires a body that is free, energetic, and unscarred by labour. Mrs Johnstone's current body — exhausted by multiple pregnancies, domestic work, and poverty — can no longer dance. The metaphor thus connects class oppression to physical deterioration: poverty doesn't just limit opportunities; it damages bodies.
Key Words
Context (AO3)
DANCE HALLS & WORKING-CLASS CULTURE
1960s Liverpool dance halls were centres of working-class social life — places where young people met, courted, and built communities. They represented the brief window between childhood dependence and adult responsibility: a moment of freedom before the constraints of marriage and work closed in.
MARILYN MONROE
Mrs Johnstone compares herself to Marilyn Monroe — a glamorous icon who was also, like Mrs Johnstone, exploited, abandoned, and destroyed by the systems that claimed to value her. Monroe represents both the dream (beauty, fame, freedom) and its destruction (manipulation, breakdown, death).
Key Words
WOW — WOMEN'S TIME (Kristeva)
Julia Kristeva's essay 'Women's Time' distinguishes between linear time (historical, progressive, masculine) and cyclical time (repetitive, biological, feminine). Mrs Johnstone's song operates in cyclical time: she returns again and again to the memory of dancing, circling the same lost moment rather than progressing forward. Kristeva argues that women's experience is structured around biological and domestic cycles — pregnancy, childrearing, daily household labour — that resist the forward motion of historical time. Mrs Johnstone is trapped in this cyclical temporality: she cannot progress because the demands of motherhood and poverty keep pulling her back to the same point. The song 'We went dancing' is a moment of nostalgic rupture — a brief escape from cyclical time into the memory of linear time (when she could move forward, dance, progress). But the memory is fleeting, and reality's cycles reclaim her. Kristeva would read Mrs Johnstone's tragedy as the tragedy of women's time itself: imprisoned in repetition, unable to access the forward motion that men (like her absent husband) take for granted.
Key Words