2016 November

Harriet Walter appealed (again) for more women’s leading roles in theatre and film – roles which do not involve women only talking about men, are not simply domestic or love interest and show women leading fully rounded grown-up lives.   The Guardian ran this interview with her.   She writes an ‘open letter’ to Shakespeare saying, ‘despite the fact that the world has changed enormously since your day, the stories we tell about ourselves still tend to follow your template’.

Women are wiser then men

I agree.   Women are wiser than men, there are more women than men, we have just missed the opportunity of a triumfemate of women’s leading roles the US, Germany and the UK that might have shone light onto some of the darker elements of the world’s story to come (although Marine Le Pen will hold us back).   Shakespeare’s leading women are all defined by their men, however powerful they are.   We have all been borne by women.

Maybe the Greeks knew more about the fundamental power of women’s leading roles (for good or ill) – Medea, Antigone, Electra, Clytemnestra.  However much women were formally second-class citizens in the Greece of 450BC, the dramatists could not avoid expressing their power.

My response

I try to respond to the issue addressed by Harriet Walter in my plays.   In the current one, Scapegoat, the leading roles are all played by women, older and younger.  The cast has four women, three men.   The women have big jobs – President of a European country, investment banker, charismatic politician, archetype.   They are all more than equal to the male characters.   The play is directed by Abigail Pickard Price, a young director never out of work.   The forthcoming workshop production will tell us whether the dynamic of the play works and the characters live off the page.   If so, I hope it will add a tiny weight to the female end of the see-saw.

Yesterday America elected Donald Trump President.   Brexit, now this, next year Marine Le Pen.   The rhetoric of Farage and Trump has allowed visceral rage, racism and fear to burst the bounds of public debate.   People are once more being divided openly between ‘us’ and ‘them’.   Education, context and parental boundaries have faded.

The 70 years since the Second World War have been progressively more easy for the rich countries of the world.   Schools and families have relaxed their vigilance over understanding and respect for every human being.   For too long all of us have fought only feebly against ignorance and the dilution of awareness of who we are and where we come from, so that lives are lived in a thin crust of daily soundbites and thoughtless responses.   Beneath is roiling appetite, addictive satiety, forgetfulness surging around a core of cooling iron – a planet dying, humanity suffocating itself in plastic cotton wool and bilious excretions.

So we have to go again.