Free Thinking Essay - Women's Theatre
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 13 November 2014
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Naomi Paxton from the University of Manchester explores the international movement for a Women's Theatre from the 1890s to the start of the First World War, and considers how their ideas may have changed how theatre is experienced today. This event was recorded in front of an audience at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage, Gateshead on 02.11.14.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.4 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music |
| 0:27.0 | when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.9 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.2 | The first actress, a play produced in 1911 by Ellen Terry's daughter, Edith Craig, |
| 0:45.1 | one of the most prolific theatre makers of her day, tells the story of the first woman on the British stage. |
| 0:52.3 | Set in 1661, in a dressing room at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, we see Margaret Hughes, |
| 0:58.8 | immediately after making her stage debut, racked with anxiety and excitement. |
| 1:04.2 | In the play, the arguments against the appearance of women on stage are detailed at length, |
| 1:09.1 | and each time countered by Hughes. However, having experienced |
| 1:13.7 | a mixed reaction from the audience and worried she has ruined the prospects for women in theatre |
| 1:18.6 | forever, Margaret Hughes falls asleep, exhausted. Eleven famous actresses of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries |
| 1:27.0 | appear to her in a dream to thank |
| 1:29.2 | and encourage her, among them Nell Gwynne, Sarah Siddens and Madame Vestris. The last |
| 1:35.2 | to appear is named only the actress of Today, played in the original production by |
| 1:40.4 | actress manager Lena Ashwell. The actress of today approaches the sleeping figure of Hughes |
| 1:46.2 | and says, when I am born, people will have quite forgotten that the stage was ever barred to us. |
| 1:53.9 | They will be incredulous that the pioneer actress was bitterly resented. Yet they will be as busy as |
| 1:59.5 | ever deciding what vocations are suitable to our sex. |
| 2:04.0 | One of the reasons the play is fascinating is that it looks at the history of sexism in the theatre |
| 2:08.6 | full in the face, unpicking the arguments against women on stage and exposing them not only as |
| 2:14.1 | blinkered but damaging to the art form they most wish to protect. Nearly all the |
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