Two shows at this year’s Edinburgh Festival left me feeling… well, strange. One was about a male ex-prisoner, the other about a female victim of rape. Light, cheery subject matters for me as always, but actually, intense and personal story telling abounded.

The first play was Doubting Thomas, created by multi-award winning director Jeremy Weller. The listings said: Thomas McCrudden, a man with a tortured and violent past but with hope for a different future, tells his own complex and moving story about abandonment and the stress of being forced to take on multiple roles, in Thomas’s own words, “…none of which were me! When I was growing up, I wasn’t able to accept love, and that created not just a man without a conscience or empathy. It created a monster.” 

I sat in the front row of the little theatre, on the same level as the actors. Extreme violence was played out at my feet – at one point I had to move them in order not to inadvertently become part of the script and another of Thomas’s victims. Then, at the end, Thomas faces the audience and tells us to ‘ignore people like me at your peril. If they are released without having changed, without having been really seen, they will come to get YOU’. And with a jab of his finger he pointed at me and a couple of others in the front row to emphasise his point.

To be honest he picked the wrong person to jab his finger at as, what he said has of course been part of my message for decades, albeit expressed differently. And “seeing” prisoners is an essential part of my work. But coming from him in the wake of his displays of all too realistic anger and violence, I found myself suddenly devoid of any feeling towards him or his story and was left with a sense of discomfort instead. Why though?

The next day I saw Fabric. A Guardian Review described it thus: Nancy Sullivan is completely engaging and utterly heart-breaking as Leah who grew up dreaming of marriage and who thought she had found her prince in Ben. Abi Zakarian’s script for this one-woman piece is beautifully observed and funny too. What initially seems to be a whip-smart contemporary version of an Alan Bennett Talking Head turns into something far darker as romance gives way to reality and Leah’s life is stained in many different ways. Clever set and sound design, too, in a show that brings dirty little male secrets out into the light.

Again I was in the front row. This time the violence inflicted on her was alluded to through brilliant use of the stage sets and story-telling by “Leah”. But I still felt like I was right there with her as she was anally raped in a filthy toilet by one of her husband’s friends. The people I was with left raving about both plays, and they were both genuinely good, but also after this one, I left feeling numb.

“… as romance gives way to reality”. Is a woman’s original vision of her life really so “romantic” and “reality” really so brutal? Maybe it is and maybe that is why now, on reflection, I realise I am full, like a Hoover bag that cannot take in any more. Like a brain that has fused through overload, a suitcase whose lid cannot close. All rendered useless. The violence of men that fills the news stories – from Isis and Boko Haram, to the war in Syria and terrorist attacks; the widespread rapes and treatment of women; the sexual abuse of children in the refugee camps… Then there are the stories of greed, egos and abuses of power – Philip Green, Putin and Boris Johnson; the counter-intuitive decisions on our planet, health and general well-being made by our largely (in this current government) male politicians…

I am tired of hearing about yet another cock-up or atrocity as a result of the largely patriarchal structures and values that exist in so much of the world. I am tired of seeing the on-going neglect and abuse of so much of what it means to be female. Of course I am not painting “men” per se as violent perpetrators, scammers and dickheads, nor “women” as delicate, innocent victims. And maybe my involvement with prisoners (95% of which are male) naturally exposes me more. But, as a woman who likes to keep informed, I feel a genuine sense of despair at being constantly confronted with the shadow side of the alpha male psyche as it is played out on the world stage, and the stages of our land, with women, children, the elderly, vulnerable and sick paying the price.

I clearly need a holiday…!