Feminist Theatre: Putting Women Centre Stage

Abstract

Sue Parrish traces her experience of the second wave of feminism in English theatre from her apprenticeship at the Half Moon Theatre in 1977/8, through the emerging consciousness and organising of women in English theatre to the current Sphinx Theatre project: Women Centre Stage. Sue was a co-founder of the Women’s Playhouse Trust (with Sue Dunderdale, Pam Gems, Rosemary Squire and Jules Wright) and an early member of the influential Conference of Women Theatre Directors and Administrators, producing the first women in theatre conferences, editing their collected papers, and commissioning the first survey of women’s representation in English theatre in 1982/3. Sue re-launched the Women’s Theatre Group (WTG) as Sphinx Theatre Company in 1990, partly as a feminist think-tank, and produced the Glass Ceiling and Vamps, Vixens and Feminists conferences at the National Theatre. She has commissioned, produced and directed many new plays by women writers, including April de Angelis’s Playhouse Creatures, Pam Gems’ The Snow Palace and Bryony Lavery’s Goliath. With the aim of re-drawing the cultural landscape in favour of parity for women’s representation in theatre, Sue has been engaged in the social, psychological, political and aesthetic development of feminist creativity for over forty years.