Plowman / Hussain / Stuart Fisher Plays for Today By Women

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-906582-96-8
Verlag: Aurora Metro Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten

Plays for Today by Women
A wide-ranging collection of plays by women dealing with contemporary subjects such as sexual abuse, recession, war, poverty and the complexity of modern women's lives.
Many roles for women and girls provided. Suitable for study or for performance or as part of courses in Women's Studies or Feminist Theatre Studies.
All the plays have been produced and performed in the UK to acclaim and are written by commissioned playwrights.
 
'The expanse of subjects this short collection covers shows that women are not just writing about the kitchen sink, the claim so often levelled. This collection (provides) a snapshot of an exciting time for female writers' @17percent
 
The Plays
For A Button by Rachel Barnett: comic two hander about two friends and the lengths one will go to, to remain best friends.
Yours Abundantly, From Zimbabwe by Gillian Plowman: a middle-aged woman decides to leave her comfy life in the UK and work in a school in Zimbabwe.
Welcome To Ramallah by Sonja Linden and Adah Kay: two Jewish sisters are forced to confront the reality of what their forefathers have done to the Palestinians.
From The Mouths Of Mothers by Amanda Stuart Fisher: a verbatim drama detailing the distressing stories of mothers who learned that their child has been abused.
The Awkward Squad by Karen Young: a three-generational drama involving Northern women who are trying to live and work in recessionary Britain.
Sweet Cider by Emteaz Hussain: In a rundown park, two teenage runaways Tazeem and Nosheen hang out, chatting to the boys and an old bag lady, trying to reconcile being British with their Pakistani cultural traditions.
 
About the editors
Cheryl Robson is an award-winning playwright and publisher who founded Aurora Metro Books over 20 years ago to develop and publish new writers in drama and fiction. She also established The Virginia Prize for Fiction in 2009 to promote emerging women novelists. Previously, she worked for the BBC, ran a theatre company and taught in higher education.
Rebecca Gillieron is an editor and musician with various releases on independent labels in the US and UK. Keen to raise the profile of women and the arts, she has worked in publishing for fifteen years moving from Virgin and Penguin Books into independent publishing via The Womens Press, Marion Boyars and now Aurora Metro Books. 
 
 
 

Autoren/Hrsg.

Plowman, Gillian

Hussain, Emteaz

Stuart Fisher, Amanda

Linden, Sonja

Kay, Adah

Young, Karin

Barnett, Rachel

Robson, Cheryl

Gillieron, Rebecca

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION
Why do we need collections of plays by women? With numerous plays by women transferring to the West End, notably Polly Stenham’s That Face, Lucy Prebble’s Enron, Laura Wade’s Posh and April de Angelis’ Jumpy, we might be led to believe that women dramatists today are at the forefront of contemporary theatre. But what all of these plays have in common is that they were produced by a single theatre – The Royal Court, in London’s Sloane Square. With the first female artistic director, Vicky Featherstone now in place, we hope that the Court’s long tradition of developing and commissioning plays by women will continue. But the high-profile success achieved by these few women playwrights belies the difficulties facing the majority of those trying to get their plays produced in the ‘shrivelling’ cash-strapped theatres which struggle to survive around the country. There are few theatres in the UK today which can claim to be offering equality of opportunity to women playwrights, despite the fact that nearly all of them are in receipt of local municipal or Arts Council funding. In fact, over 80% of all plays produced in the UK are written by men. Some theatres, like Richmond’s Orange Tree or Birmingham Rep are aware of the issue of under-representation and regularly programme seasons of plays by women to try and redress the balance. Others, like The Liverpool Playhouse, are operating a blind reading policy whereby the author’s name is removed from the manuscript, to try and ensure a fairer evaluation process. While these kinds of strategies are to be welcomed, there has been a steady decline in the number of plays by women produced since 1987 when a study entitled ‘What Share of the Cake: the employment of women in the theatre’ was first published by the Women’s Playhouse Trust. A subsequent study in 1994, conducted by Jenny Long, showed that little had changed with women still controlling only 8% of Arts Council funding, and writing only 20% of all plays produced (this figure includes plays by men adapted from books by women). In 2009, with the percentage down to 17% (quoted at Sphinx Theatre Company’s ‘Vamps, Vixens and feminists’ conference), playwright Sam Hall set up 17% (http://17percent.wordpress.com), an organisation to support and promote UK-based female playwrights. However, Sphinx Theatre Company has been arguing the case for over twenty years for more women to be employed in theatre as directors, actors and writers, with little success. With little buy-in from the theatre industry at large and no initiative for positive action from the government, male dominance and nepotism look unlikely to change. The slow increase in the number of female artistic directors employed at regional repertory theatres who tend to commission women playwrights provides a glimmer of hope. While around half the plays submitted to theatres are written by women and 65% of the audiences attending theatres are women, women are still not getting the same opportunities to develop their writing as their male counterparts in these publicly-funded organisations. It seems that women playwrights are more likely to be offered a workshop or reading of their play instead of a full production. Many plays are developed due to an existing relationship between a writer and director, and often that means a collaboration between men on a piece of work they feel represents their world view. There are many justifications given for not producing plays by women, along these lines: ‘We mainly stage classics and revivals.’ ‘There just aren’t enough good plays by women submitted.’ ‘We don’t want to put on plays about women’s issues… so 1970s.’ ‘We commission new work from writers we know and like.’ ‘We produce the best play; it doesn’t matter if it’s by a man or a woman.’ ‘We did a women’s season once.’ ‘Plays by women aren’t muscular enough.’ Although there were few women having their plays publicly produced before the 20th century, there are exceptional instances of women’s voices breaking through, as evidenced by the plays of Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre and Joanna Baillie. To help theatre programmers look beyond the usual suspects (Shakespeare, Ibsen, Pinter), we collected some of the funny, tragic and popular plays by women which have survived and been revived for subsequent generations and can now be regarded as ‘classics’. We published them in an anthology titled Classic Plays by Women, from 1600 to 2000, edited by Dr Susan Croft, to demonstrate that plays by women have been produced for hundreds of years. Moreover, there are many modern classics by women which would benefit from further production. Plays by female writers such as Caryl Churchill, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Sarah Kane, Pam Gems, Bryony Lavery and Moira Buffini offer rewarding opportunities for actors and directors. They explore a wide variety of subjects such as cloning, colonialism, cannibalism and psychosis which can hardly be considered the sole domain of women. The need to find the next ‘new voice’ prevents many theatre programmers from revisiting the recent past and reinterpreting significant dramatic pieces for a younger generation. If theatre programmers were really keen to offer plays that appealed to the ticket-buying public (most of whom are women), logic would dictate that more plays by women would be produced than those by men. The fact that only around 17% of plays produced in the UK each year are by women suggests that there needs to be a national strategy for challenging the bias within the theatre industry which sees plays by men given preference. What has changed since the 70s and 80s, when the proponents of women’s theatre were breaking new ground, is that the subject matter being tackled by today’s female playwrights is broader, without the limitations of a pre-defined feminist agenda. Laura Wade is quoted in The Telegraph as saying: ‘We are able to have the confidence to write about whatever we want, and there’s no reason why the work we produce shouldn’t be any less epic or political or brutal or beautiful than the stuff male writers produce. For most of us in our working lives, [being a woman] doesn’t even feel like an issue, and that’s probably because of a debt to feminist writers in decades past who had to fight a lot harder to have their voices heard. We are coming into a world where the door is absolutely open.’ [‘Angry young women: the new generation of young female dramatists’, The Telegraph.] While there may now be a few doors opening, more needs to be done to level the playing field. This anthology Aurora Metro has published dozens of drama anthologies and single plays by both men and women, recognising that without publication, playwrights are rarely able to achieve further productions or international recognition for their work. Our numerous published collections and single plays by female playwrights offer a fine body of work with strong central roles for women and girls to perform. Female students make up over half of those studying drama in the UK and they need challenging contemporary parts which they can relate to. Although these plays are available for study, educationalists are slow to create courses exploring this alternative material, preferring to focus on plays with a male world view. All of the plays included in this volume have been produced in the UK to varying acclaim. Some have been performed on tiny stages, others have toured nationally or been produced internationally. The plays differ in form and style. Whether comic or tragic, they confidently explore intimate family issues as well as wider political issues. A unifying aspect is that they all offer complex roles for women to perform. Ambitiously exploring the difficult issues involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Welcome to Ramallah co-written by Sonja Linden and Adah Kay, has received several productions in the UK and the USA. We’ve previously published Linden’s work in two single volumes dealing with the plight of refugees – Crocodile Seeking Refuge and I have before me a Remarkable Document. A debut play by Emteaz Hussain, Sweet Cider, was commissioned and produced by Tamasha Theatre Company. It explores the conflicted world of young Asians in Britain today and provides a large cast contemporary play for young people to perform. Amanda Stuart Fisher’s disturbing verbatim play From the Mouths of Mothers was recently made available also as a single volume to coincide with a highly topical production at The Pleasance Theatre. In the light of the recent and on-going national child abuse scandal, this play is essential reading. Gillian Plowman’s thought-provoking play Yours Abundantly, From Zimbabwe began as a piece for radio, and uses the narration of letters by different characters to challenge our ideas about Western charity in response to poverty in Africa. It was produced at The Oval House Theatre in Kennington. Bafta-winning television writer Karin Young’s sharply funny play The Awkward Squad...