Charlotte Jones, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Tanika Gupta, and more playwrights are calling time’s up on UK theater’s exclusion of women writers. According to The Stage, they are demanding the theater world take tangible action in addressing its exclusion of women playwrights, including commissioning more women-written plays and adding more women’s works to the drama canon. The writers are also insisting the industry stops considering plays from women “a commercial risk.”
Referencing the most recent British Theatre Repertoire report, published in 2016, the source notes that of new plays staged in the UK, those by men outnumber those by women two to one. Women-written plays tend to be staged in venues that are 39 percent smaller than those hosting men’s plays.
Gupta (“Sugar Mummies”) thinks this discrepancy comes down to women’s plays not receiving the support they deserve from the theater establishment, or to women playwrights not having the confidence to champion their own work.
Jones (“Humble Boy,” “Airswimming”) spearheaded the call for better inclusion for women writers in theater, which has received support from playwrights from all over the UK. Jones told The Stage that only now, after two decades of playwriting, is her work being judged and critiqued on its own merits, instead of being compared to male writers’ work.
“When I started writing 20 years ago I was always compared in reviews to male playwrights – ‘a touch of Ayckbourn’, ‘Stoppard-esque,'” she revealed. “The theatrical canon, let’s face it, is mostly male. But we are constantly being judged according to a male paradigm by both male and female critics.” She added, “This has been a wonderful year for female playwrights: Ella Hickson’s sublime ‘The Writer,’ Laura Wade’s ‘Home, I’m Darling.’ There is strength and depth in us. And none of us is trying to be Arthur Miller.”
Wertenbaker (“Our Country’s Good”) believes there needs to be more conversation about theater’s gender gap, and research illustrating this reality need to receive more attention. “The statistics need to be out there, [made] public and widely circulated and refreshed again and again,” she opined. “Theaters need to come clean. ‘We can’t find plays by women’ isn’t quite good enough.’”
The general consensus among the playwrights is that, if there will ever be equality in theater, the theater itself needs to commit to being a more inclusive environment, and then actually make it happen.
“There’s a much greater awareness of gender parity, but I don’t think that has manifested itself yet in actual change,” said Jessica Swale (“Blue Stockings,” “Nell Gwynn”). “Theaters must take responsibility for [diversity] in their programming. There are too many excuses and I don’t buy them. It’s just not that hard. There are great writers out there of color, great women, great regional voices, great gay writers, working-class writers. Make it a rule that a percentage of your programming will be from some of these pools. Just do it.”
