Female Playwrights

I don’t believe that women submitted plays that were poorer than those submitted by men. Most plays are produced because they are championed through the system by directors. And Even if you are correct in this (and I honestly don’t think you are) the Theatre has a duty to develop those writers. We can and should continue moaning on about it in support of female writers whose work we would really like to see produced.

I wasn't aware that I had been 'keeping moaning'. However the National isn't just about new plays. Why isn't a revival of The Little Foxes or Susan and God or Dear Octopus or The Rover or  Sex or Steaming or many others just as worthwhile a project as Damned by Despair or The Kitchen or From Morning 'til Midnight or The Captain of Copernik or many of the others less than successful revivals they've had in the last few years. You surely can't claim there is nothing listed here worthy of a revival

Lurve this thread and yes, why not revive a few of them, o NT?

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