Female Playwrights

My job involves a minor amount of involvement in the NT's new writing process. The proposed scheme to achieve gender parity by 2021 is an excellent idea but is still in the very early stages, and realistically major changes will need to happen if this proposal is to come to fruition.


You have to remember that the NT does not operate an open submissions policy. Playwrights cannot simply "submit" a script to them. Unless you are established, you have to be invited to submit a script. Meaning playwrights need to either have some profile from work staged elsewhere, or have a connection, to get their script read there. The majority of scripts that make it out of NYS development to full production do not come about as the result of a playwright submitting a script, but via commissioning or a director taking a project to them. St George and the Dragon was commissioned and programmed before the script was written.

I am absolutely shocked that St G and the Dragon was programmed before he delivered a script I have never heard of such a thing. That places so much pressure on the writer to have a script ready in time. Writers just don’t work like that - unless they’re writing for TV.

That is a separate issue really, they daren’t revive any plays that won’t have a chance of filling the Lyttelton or Olivier and not many of the ones you list will. When they allowed revivals in the Cottesloe they DID programme Enchantment and Rutherford and Son as I mentioned above - now it would be impossible for them to stage those two. I don’t think The Rover would fill the bigger houses and anyway the RSC have done it twice. I saw The Lucky Chance years ago and it is worth reviving but again it is a Cottesloe show.

There are plenty of plays by women that could do well and it's bizarre to say otherwise. These Three was revived in the West End a few years - why shouldn't the NT give another Lilian Hellman a try? His Girl Friday and Once in a Lifetime have proved there's a market for pre-war Americana - maybe someone should give the original stage version of Chicago a punt. Or one of Mae West's plays. Dear Octopus was revived on a regular basis until the 1970s. Dodie Smith is just as much of a name as Priestley. There are loads of plays listed in this thread that I would love to see and I'm clearly not alone

And they do reach out to multiple writers - I remember Hytner saying that the infamous Greenland was a combination of bits from different scripts after they’d invited submissions.

National Theatre Wales has today put on-sale two productions (Pearson/Brookes' STORM.1 and STORM.2) with no writers credited. Maybe, found texts will be used or adapted?

You mean they are using found texts and assembling them without the assistance of a writer? Yes, probably.

Given the comment by oxfordsimon in the current discussion on the NT's 2019 programming, I thought it worth posting this excerpt from an interview with Deborah McAndrew who was interviewed for an article on Northern Broadsides' new touring version of a Dario Fo play, which she has adapted:

"There has been a lot of debate recently about an absence of new plays by female writers. What are your thoughts about this?

I feel a little strange talking about this, as I’m always busy. That said, the only way I’ve managed to write an original play (not an adaptation) in the past 4 years is through my own company – Claybody Theatre. There is a long way to go before women are commissioned on the same basis as men in the British theatre. The arts and culture writer Victoria Sadler’s work on this is most compelling – she has reviewed the top 6 London Theatres’ programming in relation to commissioning for the past three years. This is not conjecture, or anecdote, or opinion, but fact. I refer you to her article for the detail, but her conclusion is that female playwrights are not being platformed or supported on the main stages of London. I think the picture is better in the regional theatres, but it’s clear that the higher up the ‘food chain’ you go the fewer women writers you’ll find. A quick glance at the RSC’s new writing page shows 12 new recently produced works – 3 of which are by women."

(From the website now called The Reviews Hub but formerly The Public Reviews)

Here’s Victoria Sadler’s full article

www.victoriasadler.com/2018-theatre-in-review-challenges-for-female-playwrights-continues/

She’s done a similar exercise for the past few years

There is also more of an emphasis on youth and being a fresh voice for women. Think of all the female playwrights who has struck big when very young - sometimes even teens. Frequently they are writing about coming of age; sexuality or family (particularly mother/daughter relationships.) Which is great. But then it suddenly falls off - no developing into a middle-aged female writer with a wider range of subjects. Interesting quote from the playwright of Octoroon about this: “Well” — Jacobs-Jenkins slows down just a little — “when I talk to American playwrights, there is a sense that the plays you’re writing over there are formally conservative. You seem to have a lot of first plays written by very young women who then disappear, and by a few youngish men who write very quickly and get all their work produced, but their plays are like New Yorker articles.”

I've read some female playwrights of note comment on this. One said she said, only partly in jest, that she thought there could only be three successful female playwrights at any given time - when a new one came along one of the older ones had to bugger off. Another said she had been told by a literary manger or artistic director that his ideal new playwright would be someone who had not only never written a play before, but never seen one. The playwright as found object rather than craftsperson/artist. I suspect so that the director could then play a Svengali role, until he lost interest. Another said there was was more interest in depicting attractive young women's stories (both as writer and as protagonist.) Putting Caryl Churchill to one side because she is the genius who proves the rule, Britain has very few examples of female playwrights who have been able to extend their careers through middle-age - though with some of the brilliant writers coming up I hope that will not be the case (though they may all be snapped up film or tv.) Lastly, I think there is a lack of creative partnerships between powerful directors/artistic directors with female playwrights, which is probably the most important thing for sustaining a career in major spaces.

But I will also put in one caveat. I have heard from more than one female director that they receive many more unsolicited plays from men and that women are more apologetic when approaching them.

foxa. I suspect the same thing will happen to the bright young women you mention as happens to most women unless they are championed by powerful men. Timberlake Wertenbaker wrote brilliant plays as a young woman. Remember,Churchill had longevity because she was championed by Max Stafford-Clark as AD of the RC not because of her genius - that only became apparent later on, even though she had written some extraordinary plays from the start. Sadler’s statistics demonstrate just how bad things are. Young women do not just write plays about mothers and daughters and even if they did so what? The theme of fathers and sons is the central focus of Shakespeare’s Henry IV and of Hamlet. Nobody dismisses those. You make it sound as though the “falling off” is their fault but what if they are not given the chance to write other sorts of play?
Edit: it is even worse for women of colour. If there can only be three white women at any one time there can only be one British woman of colour at any one time at each institution. Check out the RC and the NT to see the truth of this. Some theatres have never produced plays by British women of colour in their whole existence.
Oh, and women are more apologetic about handing over plays because evidence proves that they are unlikely to be produced no matter how good they are. No wonder they have no confidence. Men at the top should be ashamed. A lot of theatrical innovation is driven by women who have not been rewarded for their efforts.