How does Maureen Duffy use imagery in Rites?

Duffy commented in her introduction that the play was deliberately "pitched between fantasy and naturalism." The public lavatory in which the play is set is "as real as in a vivid dream." The realistic elements in the play are many and include the setting. This kind of public lavatory, with its malfunctioning toilets, graffiti-covered walls, and lingering derelict, can be found in most cities. The relationships between the characters, such as Ada and Meg (Meg's admiration of Ada; Ada's slightly amused tolerance of Meg), form another realistic element. The three office girls, with their superficial banter, will be familiar to anyone who has worked in a London office. There is realism too in the mundane things the characters discuss, the clichés they use, and the fully believable kinds of lives they describe. The incident in which the girl slashes her wrists is also grimly realistic.

To that naturalism, Duffy adds some fantastic elements: the incinerator for the sanitary towels, for example, which Meg imagines she can hear roaring like a "great furnace, a wild beast." Fantastic too is how the women dispose of the body of the woman they have killed by cramming it into the steel flap that opens into the incinerator.

Another fantastic element is the toddler boy represented by a doll, the masculine looking woman who is attacked and killed, and the wild frenzy that takes hold of these otherwise very ordinary women as they commit their deadly act.