Recording Women

<p>First Published in 2000 <i>Recording Women </i>documents the work of three leading feminist theatre companies Sphinx Theatre Company Scarlett Theatre and Foresight Theatre through a combination of interviews with theatre practitioners and detailed descriptions of productions in performance. Each of the six productions is innovative in content and style.</p><p>Scarlett Theatre’s <i>Paper Walls</i> and Foresight Theatre’s <i>Boadicea: The Red-Bellied Queen</i> employ a skillful mixture of text music physical performance humour and seriousness to explore respectively domestic abuse and rape (of women and community). Scarlett Theatre’s <i>The Sisters</i> and Sphinx’s <i>Voyage in the Dark</i> adapt existing texts. <i>The sisters</i> is a ritualized re-enactment of Chekhov’s <i>Three Sisters</i> in which only the female characters from the play appear. <i>Voyage in the Dark</i> uses film-noir-like theatrical effects and the insistent rhythms of the tango to evoke the rootlessness and sense of alienation that characterizes Jean Rhys’s novel. <i>Slap</i> (Foursight Theatre) and <i>Goliath</i> (Sphinx) are both one woman shows. <i>Slap</i> performed by Naomi Cooke explores images of motherhood including lesbian motherhood and the concept of virgin birth. <i>Goliath</i> performed by Nicola McAuliffe is a dramatization by Bryony Lavery of Beatrix Campbell’s powerful study of the 1991 riots in Cardiff Oxford and Tyneside. This is a must read for scholars and researchers of theatre studies.</p>