JUDE ALDERSON
Sadista Sisters first show at the Hard Rock Cafe
Jude: The thing at the Hard Rock wasn’t a show, the thing at the Hard Rock was a sort of event… it was a happening. The first show was…the opening, the set was a pair of female legs and a heart shape, in the centre, which I don’t need to tell you what that was, with a cellophane covering, and Teresa and I in pink cat suits with these amazing masks that were across here [indicates across face], that were like with cheeks and dummies on them and we had pink swimming hats on. So we looked like babies or foetuses or whatever, and we tore our way out of this heart, and then we sang this song ‘Baby Doll’, so we turned immediately into…desirable… nubile, Barbie doll baby women.
SHEILA ALLEN
Pam Gems’ Queen Christina at the RSC
Sheila: All sort of shenanigans went on, which were very painful. The men objected to it…one of the women who had really wanted to do it …somehow she thought that she could get it [the role] from me. Luckily I was warned about this little move in time and wrote to Trevor [Nunn] and said, ‘I think something is going on here, what’s happening?’ and it was all reassembled. And – ‘cos one of the young male directors wanted to do it, and Pam had said, ‘I would like to have a female director’. And so that was re-established, and then we got together, and then some of the men decided that this was old fashioned writing and that the women’s movement had finished, and really what was all this about? And it was kinda quite difficult, but… so we became fairly factious, which was not comfortable for me, it was very uncomfortable, especially since I joined the company late because I had to finish my filming of the second series of Bouquet of Barbed Wire…and… you know it was very difficult, but the thing worked!
TONY COULT
Ed Berman Dramascapes
Tony: The form that Interplay picked up directly from Ed Berman, was what Berman used to call the Dramascape. Essentially what the Dramascape is, is a street-theatre procession to get the kids together, street drama within that procession to tell a story, perhaps to create a problem that needs solving over the next two weeks, out of that comes the building of the play site, usually a big structure, spinning of all kinds of arts and crafts and mini drama projects, based on the drama that’s done on the first days processional work and then it all comes together on the last day, which traditionally I guess usually involved a bonfire, and usually involved the burning down of the structure. I have horrendous terrifying photographs of those bonfires with a child sitting on top of the bonfire just as the fire was beginning underneath. Health and safety was not a priority, but no-one got hurt. I don’t think you’d be allowed to do it, I don't think…you couldn’t do that now. You’d be so hedged around with rules that you couldn’t do that kind of work. But the basic Dramascape form was very, very effective.
KATE CRUTCHLEY
Touring with Gay Sweatshop
Kate: When we went on tour with Any Woman Can, we asked people – Nancy Duigiud was in this tour, and she actually was asking people at the talk out, ‘What would you like to see representing your lives?’ Cause you know, Sweatshop was to hold a mirror up to its audience, to reflect their lives which was not represented on stage. And two things came out, job discrimination, and… at work, discrimination at work I should say, and also custody cases. And it seems like there were more incidences of heartbreak over custody cases than anything. So then we started to do the odd interviews after the show, and then once we’d finished we’d go out and meet other people and do tape interviews. And then we got a company who improvised together and then Michelene [Wandor] came in and we stuck all the interviews on the wall and we’d say, ‘Oh that can go there, and that can go there…’
ANNE ENGEL
Equity Women’s Committee
Anne: People just met. They discussed local issues, and they sent…I mean it was really good, and I mean it now has a branch movement, because there were no branches, Equity was so centralized and autocratic. There was no…there was no devolution or discussion, there was no debate, there was no information, you know…. and we started branches in
Susan: And was that unauthorized as well, you say?
Anne: No no no, I think that was authorized pretty quickly, it might have been unauthorized very briefly at the start, but I remember it was…because by then…
Susan: I guess you took it to AGM and…
Anne: Yeah – no, no it was….I think it was unauthorized for a bit, you know we did just start it, but it was sanctioned. I do remember, which is interesting, that we were heavily involved in promoting more roles for women. We commissioned research, that’s right, we did commission research into you know, women’s work, women’s Equity members and pay differentials, and all that, so we were concerned with that, but we were concerned with the wider issue of representation and women writing and all that.
MICHELE FRANKEL
NY New Cycle Theatre Radiation Anonymous
Michele: That came out of the first play they commissioned in New York, that was New Cycle Theatre, Karen Malpede. And, I read… it was basically, they wanted me to do something about nuclear power and they wanted it to be a street theatre piece. And I decided that a woman’s street theatre piece – there was lots of street theatre then – would not be sort of aggressive in your face, lots of noisy banging sort of, you know stop and look at me, but could be something that was much more, sort of quiet, longer, and you could linger and watch, or not. That was the version actually in Notting Hill which we had a natural set under the flyover before it was done up. And the images were about people getting contaminated with radiation, and certainly when… and now, I see the kind of staged rehearsals for what happens if we get contaminated by anything, terrorists or whatever and there’s always this kind of you’re going to be washed down by men in suits. Actually this play was very much like – well, women in suits – this play was very much like that, the actresses spent a long time kind of washing and rubbing their hands and trying to get rid of the invisible radiation.
NOEL GREIG
Remembering Gerald Chapman, co-founder of Gay Sweatshop
Noel: Well, as I said, he was one of the founders of it [Gay Sweatshop] and I think he was involved in that Homosexual Acts season at the Almost Free, and then when they did Mr X and Jill Posener's play, Any Woman Can, he was there. But then he went, quite soon after that, he went to work at the Royal Court to run the young people's programme there, hugely successfully and taking/bringing his…you know,,,taking all his philosophy and ideas from Gay Sweatshop into that arena. So he was…I think he personally was involved in the development of youth theatre in this country and then he particularly in the area of working with young people, mm, yes.
JIM HAYNES
How it all began at the Paperback Bookshop
Jim: It was my first production in the bookshop in 1960, and I date the Traverse [Theatre,
ALBERT HUNT
Creative goals of the Bradford College of Art School Theatre Group
Albert: When we were doing plays, I always looked for two things to start with. One was, and this goes back to, a little bit to what you were talking about subjects earlier and propaganda you know, I always looked for what was the subject we wanted to tackle and felt it urgent to tackle, and what form were we going to tackle [it in]. And the form was important you know, because, and that’s what most political theatre groups ignored…I think – I’m probably being unfair, but I mean I have seen so many political plays where the message was obviously there, but the actual drama was so boring that nobody was going to take any notice of it anyway, you know, and you knew what the message was from [the beginning]. So, whenever we began a piece of work we always began with an idea that we wanted to approach and a form that would approach it in and The Cuban Missile Crisis was a very good example of that.
Susan: Were you then… you were trying to start working as a playwright?
Bryony: No not at all, no, because I simply didn’t know I could. I didn’t know people earned a living that way.
Susan: So you were trying to find a direction at that point?
Bryony: I guess so, yes, and I didn’t really have one. I went into teaching, but it was simply to earn some money, and once in teaching I discovered how much I loved it. And so I did…I did teach for about five years. When I left teaching that’s when I thought, ‘Well, I might try and write.’ But it wasn’t until I became the administrator of Incubus, which was then a small fringe theatre, that I suddenly thought, ‘There’s this whole world I didn’t know about, of little groups living on people’s floors…’ and that’s when I started doing theatre.
RUTH MACKENZIE
Challenging definitions at the Arts Council
Ruth: But I remember as theatre writing officer, one of my big triumphs was giving Ken Campbell, Ken Campbell money to commission Heathcote Williams to make a play, quotes ‘play’, underwater, which was going to use revolutionary speakers and take place, the performance was going to be in swimming pools where the audience had to come in with their snorkels. And it was about endangered whales, and I remember sending the then Arts Council officers to go to the trials in the swimming pools in Liverpool, and the Theatre Writing Committee, who included actually Steve Gooch, taking me to task and refusing to accept this as a proposal because it didn’t have enough words. And me writing a furious defence, about Beckett…I mean this fantastic tradition of drama, and how many…how many words did you need? Anyway, it turned out that it became a poem by Heathcote Williams, a very famous poem about whales [Whale Nation]. We did fund it and I’m pleased we did and he rightly thanked me. And we redefined what a play was for the Theatre Writing Committee which I think was probably a very good policy moment actually.
Susan: Absolutely
Ruth: ….yeah, but in all seriousness I guess another theme, you know, for me has been, well let’s push at some of these definitions.
JULIE PARKER
Action Space to the Drill Hall
Julie: The building here [Drill Hall] was run, as I said, by a company called Action Space, who were artists, which would have been Mary Turner and Ken Turner and various people who were connected with…
Susan: So what would they do normally then?
Julie: What they did, they were artists who did site-specific work. So they would build huge outdoor structures and the performance would be created, and they would also do lots of alternative music things, and they used this space to make, what you now would understand as, what you would call the…what’s sadly become things like the kid’s bouncy castles. These were huge art structures that would be used effectively as scapes and landscapes and spaces to create movement, performance, music, art, so it was effectively, if you like, you were seeing a Live Art performance. They would tour out to all kinds of festivals both here and all over
Susan: Yes, yes.
Julie: And…I’m trying to think of who else is still going…I mean it's sort of, the heritage of that work is based, probably most closely these days in the sort of stuff that Arts Admin houses and looks after. That would be its natural successors.
EILEEN POLLOCK
Bloomers 3 Women in Crime
Polly: But then we went on to do a third one which was Women in Crime, and there was, there had been a book published at the time called Sisters in Crime about women criminals. And we did this, and it’s a laugh, we were invited to do this for a women’s conference on criminology at the University of Chichester or something out there…or…Colchester, Colchester. And so we just, all we did was research it and we had little bits of mini crimes that we’d committed ourselves you know. But at the end of it, and of course we, it was Thatcher’s time, at the time as well, so we were able to present her as a criminal, and also stories that we got from books that we read and women that we talked to. And at the end, because it was quite entertaining, that was our job, we had all these criminologists…asking us questions in order to enlighten them as to women in criminology!
NATASHA MORGAN
That’s Not It No Longer Dream
Natasha: It started with a wardrobe, I was very interested in wardrobes and I remembered lying in bed at night as a kid and watching – I was a bit scared of wardrobes. I didn’t… I mean I was born in 1945 and I didn’t like the word ‘war’ any way, and there was something about the fact the word ‘war’ was in ‘wardrobe’. And…I knew that when …when car lights, streetlights moved down the road or whatever the wardrobe sort of appeared to move, because of the light. So I invented this sequence in which, which would open the show with the wardrobe and the light from…and Rick Fisher, who is now one of the best lighting designers in the country, who was working at the Oval as a lighting designer…and we created a way for the wardrobe to appear to dance…and it danced to Edmundo Ross playing 'Fernando’s Hideaway'…and it was great.
JACQUELINE RUDET
Imani-Faith black women’s theatre company
Jacqueline: I had a love for the theatre, and I just felt I had to express myself, you know, and I had a very close friend called Helen….I don’t recall her name – Helen Dallington – and we had an extremely great relationship. It wasn’t nothing physical, just a very, you know, sisterhood relationship and it kinda inspired me, and I find myself involved with loads of women, very supportive, and I just had a deep love for women, and that was it. And I wrote Friends Like You. I founded Imani-Faith, the black women’s theatre company and it had ten black women in there, and it was just simply awesome. It was like, you know, we were all, I suppose being healed to a certain extent, where everyone had a freedom to express themselves, you know, their pains, and we could understand one another. I suppose it was like having a therapy, one would say counselling now, but it was women just releasing themselves and talking about their hurts, and no-one could judge them.
ADELE SALEM
Existing drama school expectations
Adele: One of the first things I had to do was try and get rid of my Leicester accent because I used to say “uhs”, I didn’t quite say ‘grass’ and ‘bath’. But I remember when I went home on the holidays, my friend’s mother said, “Oh God! listen to her, you know, who does she think she is?” because my accent had started changing, because of course, in those days you had to speak with a middle class voice if you wanted to work in theatre.
Susan: When was this?
Adele: Well, it was 1976, so, you’d think by then we’d moved on but actually we hadn’t. And again, at that drama school, there were only two…two, no three non-white people in a class. It was a class of about 30. So, again, I was in a minority, and it was still that kind of thing of, spread over the expectations, that really you had to try and fit into what was already existing rather than make theatre based on your own experiences. You were trying to fit in, to be able to play Noel Coward or Checkov or this or that, and there wasn’t this idea that you could play those characters from your own background, race, class, heritage, whatever that was. You had to fit in with the main …
Susan: Existing expectations?
Adele: Exactly.
NABIL SHABAN
The naming of Graeae Theatre Company
Nabil: I said, we need a name. We need a product, a mark, a trademark, and we need a logo in order to sell it. So he [Richard Tomlinson] says, ‘OK, what name?’ So we discussed what the name should have, what kind of meaning behind it and I said, ‘Well look , you know, we are in… theatre as we know it today has its origin in Greek traditions, Greek theatre. Also perceptions of disabled people is mainly created through mythology and legends. So, therefore, we should have a name that perhaps comes from Greek mythology. And as we’re in the business of myth breaking, we should definitely have something like that. So what disabled characters or deformed characters are there in Greek theatre er Greek mythology whose names we could use to encapsulate what our theatre company is about?’ So we came up with things like Centaur, Cyclops, Hephaestus, and so on, but none of them really worked. I said, ‘What’s the name of those three sisters that had one eye between them and got cheated by Perseus of their eye?’
Susan: And one tooth.
Nabil: I didn’t know about the tooth, I only knew about the eye. So I said, ‘If we could find out what their names was maybe that’s the name for the company. So Richard went back, did a search – in those days we didn’t have the internet or Wikipedia, so it took him a bit longer. Eventually he came back and said, ‘They’re called the Graeae or the Stygian Sisters. I said, ‘Graeae, I think that could be it.’
LILY SUSAN TODD
Women’s Street Theatre Group
Lily: So we pranced off to Trafalgar Square with a cartoon, doing a little sort cartoon of … I was the Church and Buz [Goodbody] was Capitalism, and we had this big chain, and a woman pushing a pram along, inside the chains.
Susan: How were you dressed as the Church?
Lily: I had a long sort of surplice and a dog collar and all that, and Buz was probably dressed in a top hat and a dress coat, you know. And Michele Roberts was pushing the pram, a sort of suburban house wife chained in by Church and Capitalism of course, you know, into subservience and depression. And the placard read, ‘Fuck the F**ily’, in other words the obscene word was not fuck but family, so it was a kind of protest against family values, the sort of family values being promulgated by the likes of the Festival of Light – and we promptly got arrested.
MICHELENE WANDOR
Documentation and publishing
Michelene: But what I’m saying is I had this absolute certainty, conviction, that documentation was vital. Not just…not consciously for archives actually…I think I was probably thinking about it from two slightly different angles. One was the professional angle, that if you were a playwright having good work published and available for other people to do again was vital, but the other thing was also the proselytising, the feminism, the influencing, the spreading the word kind of stuff, and documentation is very important for that, publication is important. So it was for those two reasons. So there was The Body Politic - I didn’t do another collection like that. Then there was wanting to see the plays published, the Red Ladder and all the others, that was eventually published by Journeymen [Press] under Strike While the Iron Is Hot…and then there were the plays by women. So I was always convinced that that was important to do, and I enjoyed the editing and I enjoyed the selection and I enjoyed writing the introductions. And for all those plays by women, I instituted an afterword, I asked each playwright to write a brief afterword to her own work. So their voices as the writers were in there a bit saying whatever they wanted to say.
HILARY WESTLAKE
Working Inter-Action and Naftali Yavin
Hilary: The first show that he’d done was The Pit which I did, I took over when it was done again. What that was, it was a pit, it was square, walled area. The performers were inside, four performers, and there were three sections to the enclosure and they had little holes on the mid-section, so you could have thirty two audience looking in. And a number of sort of master-slave type, psycho-analytical games, and the relationships were played by the two men and two women inside, and as the performers opened themselves up to each other, so the walls came down. So eventually you’d just have the audience sitting on chairs with all the walls taken down, and then after that we would do a workshop with the audience. So this is sort of ’69 quite early, and then after that he did a show called The Journey which was more political in relationship to what was happening in the world. We did it at the Oval and it was divided into different areas and audiences would go in, at one at a time, they’d go a cubicle to be questioned, and they’d go on to somewhere else, and then something else would happen to them, so it was quite experiential as they went through, hence the journey…I can't remember. I think we probably did a workshop with them at the end. So it was quite a small audience, I think we had an audience of 14.
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