Mrs Worthington’s Daughters: Drama

Abstract

Women’s engagement with drama and performance has a long tradition but it was in the 1970s that this tradition, shaped by the emergence of second-wave feminism, gained new urgency and drive, leading to an explosion of theatre and performance work by women which has continued unabated until the present.1 As feminist playwright Caryl Churchill has stated: [E]ven in the spring of 1973, when a group of us were meeting to plan the first Women’s Theatre Festival (at the Almost Free Theatre in London in the autumn of 1973), we weren’t short of plays from which to choose for the three-month season. The submerged women playwrights were there — as they appear always to have been.2