Waiting for Spring to Come Again: Feminist Theatre, 1978 and 1989

Abstract

Most of the heavily-quoted interviews available on feminist theatre are in serious need of updating. A current account is needed of ‘feminism and theatre’ as experienced by feminist theatre practitioners, and as perceived by feminist theatre students, critics, players and their audiences. To meet this need, NTQ plans a series of interviews with women involved in the British feminist theatre movement today, whose career paths trace developments and shifts in the feminist theory and practice of the past fifteen years. The first interview is with Gillian Hanna, who worked with the 7:84 Theatre Company and with Belt and Braces from 1971 to 1975, before co-founding the Monstrous Regiment feminist theatre group in 1975. Hanna worked exclusively within the Regiment from 1975 until 1981–82. and is one of the three original members who still actively participate in Regimental management, production, and performance, though she now works extensively outside the group as well, having acted in repertory at the Liverpool Everyman and in Newcastle, Sheffield and Derby. Recently, Hanna spent the best part of a year playing in The House of Bernardo Alba. which opened at the Lyric. Hammersmith, and ran in the West End, and in the Spring of 1989 she played in Caryl Churchill's Ice Cream at the Royal Court. Her acting credits include work in TV and film, and her interests extend to translation of playtexts from French and Italian: she translated Dario Fo's Elizabeth, and is currently on a commission to translate (and re-translate) the complete oeuvre of the one-woman plays of Franca Rame and Dario Fo. Three of the Rame/Fo plays – under the joint title A Common Woman – were recently produced at the Sheffield Crucible and at the Half Moon in London, for which performance Hanna won the 1989 Time Out ‘01 for London’ Award. Projects currently under way within the Regiment include an adaptation of a Marivaux play (The Colony), and possible plans to tour both A Common Woman and Beatrice. She is interviewed by Lizbeth Goodman, originally a New Yorker, and currently a junior member and scholar of St. John's College and a graduate researcher in the English Faculty of Cambridge University, where she is working on a doctoral thesis on feminist theatre since 1968, and a book on the politics of theatre funding.