In Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone, a Belfast Catholic woman is harassed for moving into the 'neutral,' university area of town. Her socialist roommate, however, does not believe she is being victimised until a brick flies through the window of their flat. In Christina Reid’s The Belle of Belfast City, a carefree woman exacts a joking revenge on her Protestant, ultra-loyalist brother by serving him 'Republican' sausages she had smuggled out of the Republic of Ireland. A Belfast Protestant man in Marie Jones’s A Night in November overcomes his sectarian anger as he cheers for the Irish team in the 1994 World Cup with Irish people from the Republic and the USA in a New York sports bar. These three instances from contemporary Northern Irish drama reflect one of the constant dilemmas facing people in Northern Ireland: the negotiation of identity in a region crossed and recrossed by a web of geographical, religious, cultural, economic, and political fault-lines. With the range of national identities co-existing in Northern Ireland’s borders, each person in Northern Ireland finds her

himself on shifting political and cultural sands, negotiating her

his own identity through relationships both within and without that area’s borders.

For Northern Irish writers, writing in the interstice between Eire and the UK, and finding their work influenced by both British and Irish cultural traditions and politics, the notion of national identity becomes complex indeed. Many Northern Irish playwrights have received funding from the Arts Councils both in Great Britain and in the Republic of Ireland, and their works are regularly anthologised and critiqued as Irish, rather than British, dramas. Since many Northern Irish writers are generally considered (and consider themselves) part of an Irish cultural tradition, discussing Northern Irish women playwrights in an anthology of British rather than Irish writing is a problematic, and even volatile, endeavour.

Theatre outside the mainstream has tended to be a director’s rather than a writer’s theatre. This is not to say that experimental theatre has not offered new opportunities to writers, or that it has stifled the writer’s voice. On the contrary, over the past two or three decades theatre has functioned as one of the most important cultural spaces for writers to experiment with form - and this has been especially important for women. The opportunity to collaborate with artists from other disciplines and to find new ways to explore the limits of stage language has generated a new kind of writing for the theatre, outside the confines of the well-made play; writing which is linked to developments in film and the novel and is conversant with the visual arts and dance as well as the language of television and film. Political theatre, physical and visual theatre, small-scale and fringe theatre, and collaborative work with the visual arts and dance have all created a contemporary theatre scene in Britain which is highly interdisciplinary, and which has functioned as an experimental arena in which the relationship between image, speech, and action has come under scrutiny.

It is outside the mainstream that women have been able to create new work informed by debates in feminism about the body, identity, and representation in particular. In the 1970s radical political and artistic feminist theatre companies helped to create the conditions for exploratory work by commissioning the work of women theatre-makers and writers [see pp. 60-1]. Of the many groups producing innovative work with writers were the visual and physical Blood Group, Scarlet Harlots (renamed Scarlet Theatre in the 1980s) and Monstrous Regiment. Certain key venues, often with women directors, also helped to create a climate open to experimentation.

Early in 1998 both stages at the Royal Court, arguably England’s most high-profile venue that supports new playwriting, were occupied by women playwrights: the late Sarah Kane’s Cleansed played in the main house, Theatre Downstairs, while Rebecca Prichard’s Yard Gal was premiered in the Theatre Upstairs studio. An outsider might be forgiven for thinking that the tables had finally turned: that women playwrights had at last achieved a significant presence at the close of the century. However, like several other 'stages' in our twentieth-century history of women’s playwriting, the contemporary situation for women dramatists is far less propitious than one might at first suppose. Looking briefly at the 1998 productions of Kane and Prichard offers us a way into our fin-de-siècle moment of women’s playwriting, and a way back to the different historical contexts of twentieth-century playwriting presented in this Companion.

Kane and Prichard were contemporaries: both born in 1971; both from Essex; both university-educated (although Kane confessed that her experience of the Master’s degree in playwriting at Birmingham University 'nearly destroyed her as a writer'), and both were fortunate enough to launch writing careers through the Royal Court. There, however, the similarities end. Kane’s playwriting career began in controversy over her first full-length play, Blasted, staged at the Court’s studio venue in 1995, which outraged both the serious and the tabloid press for its scenes of horror - most particularly the cannibalism of a dead baby.

Women and drama: the Welsh context

It is no exaggeration to state that women have been 'hidden' from historical, cultural, and literary production in Wales. It is also not an overstatement to maintain that Welsh cultural experience in Britain has tended to be strait-jacketed into a small repertoire of imaginative possibilities. These possibilities usually foreground masculine activity - male-voice choirs, rugby playing, mining, bardic proclamations, chapel ministry, and political radicalism. Although there is no denying that these behaviours existed (and are still resonant in Welsh cultural life), recent academic work in the social sciences and humanities in Wales has attempted to illuminate our clouded female past and to indicate new ways of representing 'Welshness'.

In Welsh historical studies, with their strong tradition of local and labour history, there has been a flourishing of work on women’s lives, often supported by community publishing ventures. This interest in female experience, centred in particular on women’s work and domesticity, was prompted in part by women’s increased visibility in the public sphere, as shown, for example, in the miners' support groups during the strikes of the mid-1980s, and the establishment of agencies to promote women’s presence in the workforce, such as Chwarae Teg (Fair Play) founded in 1992. From the late 1950s onwards, changes in the Welsh economy - specifically a gradual and eventually seismic shift away from the heavy industries of coal, steel, and slate to service and light industries - have served to make women more prominent in public life.

Caryl Churchill is arguably the most successful and best-known socialist-feminist playwright to have emerged from Second Wave feminism. Her plays have been performed all over the world, from the UK and the United States to Korea and Japan. She is routinely included in anthologies of contemporary drama and her plays regularly appear on student reading lists. Within theatre studies, her work has provided the basis for five books and numerous articles. Often linked to theoretical debates about representation in feminist performance, Churchill has stimulated and provoked some of the most important feminist thinking about the theatre since coming to critical attention in the mid-1970s. She came to prominence concurrently with the development of Second Wave feminism in Britain, both its activism and its academic thrust; and at the time when Marxism was being re-thought in the academy in light of Althusser and Lacan, and challenged by feminists for ignoring gender and, later, sexuality. She is still writing in the so-called 'postfeminist', 'postsocialist' nineties; while not abandoning her commitments, she has reflected the historical transformations of the eighties and nineties in plays which stage the central preoccupations and contradictions of these movements as they have shifted and changed.

Her theatre practice similarly mirrors a series of challenges and changes in hegemonic producing modes over this period. She began as a solitary writer who only came to consider herself a woman writer belatedly: 'For years and years I thought of myself as a writer before I thought of myself as a woman, but recently [1977] I've found that I would say I was a feminist writer as opposed to other people saying I was.' She started writing radio plays in the 1960s [see Chronology] while she was house-bound with young children.

Editors’ note

In this fourth and final section of the volume we bring together three chapters which indicate some of the multiple concerns and directions of women’s writing for theatre at the close of the 1990s. For these contributions, 'The subject of identity' seems an appropriate title because it suggests the way questions of identity continue to dominate women’s writing and further indexes the postmodern emphasis on the problematic of identity: its limitations as a concept, its fluctuating and elusive formations and re-formations, and its dispersal within contemporary hybrid, nomadic, cyber experience. While the second section on 'National tensions and intersections' explored the limitations of the concept of 'British' in the light of shifting notions of location and place, here we take up the limitations of the concepts of self, home, and political certainty in the situation of contemporary writers as subjects and as subject.

Much of women’s writing as discussed in this volume has been anchored in what is called 'identity politics'. Although we have charted historical shifts from an all-inclusive definition of woman to a carefully parsed articulation of difference among categories of women organised by race, class, sexuality, nationality, and sometimes religion, these identifications have also been surpassed or, to be less reductive and linear, interwoven and complicated by the questioning of subjectivity itself, its formations, positions, and articulations with other simultaneous ones. One of the perplexing issues for late 1990s feminism is the relevance of a claim to a political and artistic voice based on gender in light of the instability and inadequacy of any formal content for such an identity.

Introduction

Representations of the abuse of and violence against women are central to the plays of Sarah Daniels. This she shares with Andrea Dworkin, American radical feminist activist and campaigner against violence against women, whose work has informed Daniels’s writings. In her introduction to Plays 1 Daniels states that she wrote her perhaps best-known play, Masterpieces, in part as a consequence of having read Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women, and she also mentions Dworkin’s Letters from a War Zone. Both women have been attacked for their work which has been regarded as man-hating. Significantly, talking of her first play, Ripen Our Darkness (1981), Daniels wrote that 'nobody, except women, thought the men were drawn with any accuracy' (Introduction, Plays 1, p. x).

The notion of any form of 'extremism' on the part of women, 'extremism' here meaning simply a critique of women’s domination by men, has always been a source of recrimination against women. This is demonstrated in Daniels’s Byrthrite (1986), for example, which centres on women’s persecution in the seventeenth century. Daniels herself has not escaped this fate. It is to her credit that this has not deterred her from addressing what remain abidingly serious issues: the oppression of women and their exploitation by men. Her most recent play, Blow Your House Down (1995), for instance, deals with the case of the Yorkshire Ripper, a figure of great terror for women in Northern England during the second half of the 1970s when he murdered and mutilated many women in a gruesome manner.

Now in her seventies, Pam Gems’s life-time almost coincides with the time-line of this volume. While she has a prolific output - Gems is the author of some twenty plays and has adapted a number of European classics by writers such as Duras, Chekhov, Ibsen and Lorca - her life in the theatre spans a much briefer period, with her work for the stage not gaining recognition until the 1970s. Hers is not a success-glamour-story, but - similar to the narratives of so many of the 'great' women, and occasionally men, whom Gems explores in her revisionist style of biographical theatre - is one of hardship and struggle; of a life, in and out of the theatre, disadvantaged by both class and gender.

Born in 1925, Gems was raised by her widowed mother in harsh material circumstances. She left school at fifteen, held a variety of jobs, and served as a Wren during the Second World War, which entitled her to a university place. Like so many women in the 1950s, Gems gave up work (she had a research job with the BBC), and was kept busy raising a family of four children, which, like Churchill, she combined with writing for television and radio. Only when the family moved back up to London from the Isle of Wight in 1970 was she able to begin writing for theatre, as the move to the capital brought her into direct contact with the Women’s Movement and with fringe theatre.

The emergence of angry young theatre

In the ten years that followed the end of the Second World War, Britain instituted a wide range of social programmes commensurate with a general pattern of economic growth and development. The decade of the 1950s brought several key events: the return of a Conservative government in 1951, the coronation in 1953 of Queen Elizabeth II (described inevitably as the dawning of a new Elizabethan Age) and, in 1956, military crisis at the Suez Canal. In brief, these key events indicate some of the important characteristics of British social life at this historical moment in that this was a time of more or less general social and ideological stability (captured in adoration of the new Queen and her own young family), undercut by specific tensions brought about by external factors (such as the dismantling of the British empire, especially when it was forced through events such as Suez) and internal factors (a new wealth and mobility for a generation of young people who had been the first beneficiaries of the 1944 Education Act offering secondary education for all). It is against this social backdrop that the theatre of the decade must be read.

Histories of twentieth-century British drama have generally pointed to 1956 as the watershed year in theatrical production after the Second World War. The reason for 1956 receiving such especial attention, of course, is the première of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger on 8 May. The play centres on Jimmy Porter, a twenty-something lower-middle-class man, and his life with Alison, his wife, whose parents are decidedly upper-middle-class. For much of the play, Jimmy rails against everything - the classes above his own, women, culture.

It is over thirty years since the most important change in British theatre this century took place: the abolition of censorship in 1968. Without that significant development, it is arguable whether this book could have been written. The changes in the relationship between feminism, theatre, and women playwrights since then were predicated on two phenomena: first, the rise of a new theatre movement, variously called 'alternative', 'fringe', or 'political', which exploded in the late 1960s and generated an energetic debate about the relationship between theatre, society, and politics; and second, the development of a vigorous feminist movement.

Controversial ideas about the relationship between art and society were being widely discussed at the time, and many of us argued for a transformation in the gender balance and perspectives of theatre. The theatre industry, we argued, was dominated by men; most directors and writers and stagehands were male, most casts (and therefore theatre companies) consisted of more men than women. The 'classical canon' of plays were written from a male-centred point of view, unthinkingly considered 'universal' and the 'norm'. The stage world was generally male-dominated - the action driven by, and seen from, the perspective of the male protagonists - as was journalistic reviewing and academic criticism.

Editors’ note

Each of the chapters in this part is concerned with theatre history, and the histories of women’s playwriting within it: with understanding the changing social, political, economic, and cultural contexts in which women have been writing for theatre during the twentieth century, and assessing how their work has been both forgotten and remembered.

Feminist theatre history has been primarily concerned with the recovery of women’s playwriting previously 'hidden' by the canonical values which, for example, enshrined Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Brecht, but left out Aphra Behn, Susan Glaspell, and Marieluise Fleisser (see also our introduction to 'The Question of the Canon'). The values of an alternative, 'feminist canon', however, may also risk the elision of certain kinds of writers or writing. Thus, while feminist scholarship has been quick to claim the period of suffrage theatre at the turn of the century as a 'high point', it has, in consequence, paid far less attention to women’s writing in the 1920s and 1930s, which is de-valued as less interesting, politically (viewed as conservative rather than radical) and formally (as playwriting in the dominant realistic, rather than alternative, experimental, tradition).

'Lesbian' as an identificatory term has come under scrutiny from within a variety of debates. Each debate has offered a correction to the term, appropriate to the concerns of its critique. For example, sex radicals proffer the term 'dyke' to supersede the association between lesbian and the anti-pornography movement, and a younger generation has invented the term 'grrls' to mark a new form of sexual

gender identification. Yet nowhere is the term less stable in its referent, or more complex in its resonances, than when it circulates within the international context. This chapter seeks to formulate the question: 'Is it possible to frame a lesbian identification within and across national and cultural borders?' Specific to the concerns of this volume, the question might be: 'Is there a way to understand something called lesbian performance, which might apply across national and cultural differences?' These questions raise issues of forms of performance address and reception. Yet they also rest on a sense of how lesbian identities are structured within and through national and economic agendas. So, considerations of performance production and reception will intertwine with formulations of national identities to create a notion of how to recognise and respond to lesbian performance in the international arena.

Editors’ note

As we began to plan this volume - what and who to include, how to present the material, what categories would be most workable - we kept stumbling over what we came to refer to as the 'question of the canon'. Defined as the 'indispensable' works which must be included under the subject matter of the title, one way of understanding canonicity is to ask what plays simply could not be excluded from this discussion of modern British women playwrights. However, that approach already begs the question of the canon because it presupposes an established and undisputed authoritative list of such works that has widespread consensus. As the Women’s Movement has been militant in pointing out, 'canons' are highly questionable constructs, historically set by men and power elites to ensure repetition and perpetuation of works which reinforce the dominant ideology of a given culture. One of the early tasks, therefore, of Second Wave feminism’s academic women has been to challenge received notions of the canon. They worked to recover, and to insist on the acknowledgement and study of, women’s history, literature, art, and other accomplishments that had previously not enjoyed prominence or even discovery because of the emphasis on 'great works' by famous men (see Bennett, chapter 3, for an extended discussion of this point). Of course, the notion of 'great works' is no less fraught, since taste is as much a matter of fashion and power relations as it is of inherent value. In fact, as this book has argued as one of its premises (see our main introduction), value is a constantly changing matter, negotiated between the work and the historical moment from which it is viewed, not a fixed, timeless quality.

The plots of Restoration drama begin, develop, and end in concerns about gender, sexuality, and marriage. The demarcation of masculine and feminine domains, the desire of one sex for the other, and the institutions charged with legitimizing both, become the amusing foils or dire impasses that comprise the action and envelop the characters of the plays of this era. Other cultural concerns are neither ignored nor dismissed; rather, the social, political, historical, and personal are imagined and played out primarily through this narrow dramatic focus. Gender, sexuality, and marriage emerge as comically or tragically disordered states whose permutations must be worked through in order to achieve personal goals, to consolidate families, to re-establish social order, to restore political stability, and to secure cultural cohesion. The reliance on such constricted and redundant dramatic tropes is rare if not unique in English theatrical history.

Although all of Restoration drama is preoccupied with gender, sexuality, and marriage, the comedy of manners is perhaps the most exemplary. A type of drama that observes with satiric amusement the deportment, wit, and morality of contemporary society, the comedy of manners flirts with a number of developing and unresolved social tensions. In comic fashion, the plays broach and endeavor to resolve serious cultural concerns, such as the definition of gender roles, the regulation of sexual behavior, the characteristics of class, and the compatibility of marriage partners.