Gender and art

Only 29% of directors in big theatres are women – major theatres develop plans to tackle problem

Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth at Chichester Festival theatre.

"No Hamlet. No Willy Loman. No Jimmy Porter. Male characters have always been centre stage. So what are the great parts for women? We asked Britain's leading actresses to tell us."

"The National theatre's recent 50th-birthday celebrations, which culminated in a star-studded gala screened live on BBC2 last Saturday night, have won near-universal praise. But a few voices, notably blogger and critic Catherine Love, have been asking a difficult question: where were the female playwrights? The reason they were almost entirely absent from the televised broadcast is an uncomfortable one: they have largely been absent from the NT's schedule altogether."

Image: Josephine And I: Cush Jumbo.

British theatre is in a golden age and women  are at the forefront of this boom – writing, directing and producing  exhilarating new drama. Women like Cush Jumbo.

The 28-year-old actress made an instant  impression when she strode into the office of producer Matthew Byam Shaw and  demanded he stage her one-woman show Josephine and I, about the celebrated jazz  singer and political activist Josephine Baker. [...]

It’s a national phenomenon, stretching from Birmingham, Liverpool and Glasgow to London’s West End and spanning both small fringe venues and mainstream theatres.

Women are more prominent than ever in the  engine room of British theatre and increasingly are being appointed as double  acts, not on stage but upstairs in the management offices.

In the past year, several key  theatres have come under female management.[...]

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/event/article-2433856/West-End-girls-Enter-stage-left-The-new-stars-British-theatre--woman.html#ixzz2gJci9ClX

The Royal Exchange stages an adaptation of Orlando, Virginia Woolf's novel of love, history and gender swapping.

"Orlando, directed by Max Webster, is the adaptation of the semi-autobiographical novel written by Virginia Woolf, thought to be an ode to her lover, Vita Sackville West. It tells the tale of a young, irrepressible nobleman, who lives implausibly through four centuries, in many different disguises. Orlando is page to Queen Elizabeth, beau at the Court of James and Ambassador to the pompous palaces of Constantinople. It is at this point in the story that Orlando undergoes an unexpected transformation.

“Orlando has become a woman”, Woolf writes. “There is no denying it”. No indeed, for whilst revolution explodes around him, Orlando sleeps, awakening as a beautiful, sensuous woman, whilst maintaining his previous masculine charms and persona. Forever youthful, the ‘wits’ of the eighteenth century bore the female Orlando to tears before the crinolines of the nineteenth threaten to engulf her."

Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

20 February - 22 March 2014

http://www.royalexchange.co.uk/page.aspx

"When Lucy Kerbel was putting together her 100 Great Plays for Women she bumped into a literary manager for a leading London theatre. “I told him I was looking for plays with mainly female casts,” the 31-year-old director says. “He asked, ‘Are there any?’”

Eventually, he half-remembered one. “That Lorca,” but it took his partner to name it: The House of Bernarda Alba. “In his mind,” Kerbel recalls, “that was the beginning and end of the conversation. And I was thinking, ‘You are the literary manager of one of the capital’s most prestigious theatres, and you have to rely on your partner to name one play with a majority female cast’.” [...]

But that literary manager isn’t alone in overlooking women in theatre. At the weekend, the National Theatre’s sparkling 50th anniversary gala was criticised by some for the paucity of female playwrights represented: only one of the more than 30 scenes featured was written by a woman (Alecky Blythe’s London Road). [...]"

Lucy Kerbel’s 100 Great Plays for Women is published by Nick Hern Books on November 14.

Calm Down, Dear at  Camden People’s Theatre’s is a three week season of theatre, performance, comedy, and conversation – featuring some of the most talked about shows of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe – about what it means to be a feminist.

In an effort to consider what feminist theatre might be in contemporary performance culture, I spoke to Kate Craddock, Amanda Monfrooe and Adrienne Truscott about the ways in which they position their work in relation to feminist discourse, the nature of their work and the shows they are presenting as part of the festival.

Calm Down, Dear: a Festival of Feminism

http://www.cptheatre.co.uk/event_details.php?sectionid=theatre&eventid=732