In 10 years nothing has changed for female playwrights – it’s time to act
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Version 0 of 1. “It’s not a conspiracy by men to keep women off film or stage, it’s just they don’t notice if we’re not there,” said director Phyllida Lloyd talking on 25 April at the conference Cutting Edge: British Theatre in Hard Times, which explored how theatre in the UK had fared under the coalition government. It was a fascinating day, often presenting apparently contradictory findings: there have been significant cuts to funding which are damaging to theatre’s long-term infrastructure, and increasing reliance on volatile lottery funding, yet audiences are holding up and in some cases growing significantly. There’s lots of activity, but much of its goes unpaid or barely paid, which is making it harder to sustain careers, because people work long hours for low pay in high-stress environments. Co-productions have brought financial advantages, but may have made work less distinctive. We are clearly not all in it together, when £70 per head of arts funding goes to London and only £5 outside of the capital – nor, as the Warwick commission on cultural value found, when arts are being cut from the school curriculum and the wealthiest, best educated and least ethnically diverse 8% of the population are its most culturally active segment. Related: A stage of their own: why female playwrights are still marginalised We’ll return to some of these issues in future blogs, but in the meantime check out Chris Goode’s searing contribution on the role of the artist in society (“If it isn’t dissident, who is it for?”). For now, I’m going to concentrate on gender, which was a recurring theme at the conference. Lucy Kerbel of Tonic Theatre, which has been in the forefront of trying to instigate change, noted that she had never been to a theatre gathering that was not specifically about gender where the issue was raised so much. But of course it’s only right that it is. If we’re going to bring about real change in theatre then gender equality and diversity have to be part of the conversation all of the time, not just on specific occasions, otherwise we are only ghettoising it. In fact it was no surprise that gender was to the fore on Saturday, given the findings presented by Dan Rebellato from the report on British Theatre Repertoire of 2013. The report’s interim findings, published earlier this year, were fascinating as they indicated that for the first time new work had overtaken revivals and classics in the repertoire. However, what the latest research demonstrates is how little progress has been made in the last 10 years on gender and play production. A decade ago, 30% of new plays produced in UK theatres were written by women. In 2013, it was 31%. The statistics for length of runs and auditorium sizes also show that male writers were significantly favoured. Perhaps the most telling figures concerned adaptations, which tend to be commissioned out, so are within the gift of a theatre. In 2013, 87.5% were by men and 12.5% by women. The only area where women writers came closer in equality to male writers was in work for young people and children – an area which is consistently undervalued – where 40% of shows were written by women. The question is why do female playwrights continue to be offered fewer opportunities than men and what can we do about it? The quote from Phyllida Lloyd suggested that it happens not necessarily by design but by default, because many – myself included – simply hoped and believed that equality would come in time as a result of the changes in theatre in the 1970s and 80s. But those advances in visibility and work opportunities became part of what playwright and academic Julie Wilkinson referred to as “organised forgetting”, in which previous gains are lost because there’s no long-lasting change of culture that ensures that individuals and arts organisations act differently over the longer term. The Tonic initiative sees some leading theatres committing to 50:50 male/female opportunities including for actors on main stages. But it is also, as Erica Whyman of the RSC suggested, time for all arts organisations, directors and those casting and commissioning to question every single decision that they are making. As Lucy Kerbel observed: “In the past there has been an over-focus on output and until you really change process, the output is always the same.” And the only way to change that is to make those running our theatres see issues of gender and diversity not as a problem of those who are under-represented, but a reflection of their own working practices and the structures of their organisations. Only by changing those practices and structures will long-term change come about. Otherwise in 10 years’ time nothing will have really changed. Again. |