Old myths die hard. One of the greatest in theatre is that the large-scale play that unites public issues and private lives is the special province of male dramatists. Watching Beth Steel’s The House of Shades at the Almeida, I was reminded that this is a ludicrous fallacy: seeing The Father and the Assassin by Anupama Chandrasekhar shortly after at the Olivier, it struck me that female writers are, if anything, currently in the vanguard when it comes to recording social divisions, political antagonisms and questions of national identity.
You can trace the growth of this commitment to public issues back to a work such as Votes for Women by Elizabeth Robins, which in 1907 passionately advocated female suffrage. In our own times Caryl Churchill has explored the inter-connection of socialism and feminism, Lucy Kirkwood in Chimerica (2013) examined the complex relationship between the world’s two greatest powers and Lucy Prebble’s A Very Expensive Poison (2019) exposed British vacillation in the face of Russian corruption. Beth Steel herself probed the unhealed scars left by the miners’ strike of 1984 in Wonderland (2014) .
