ABSTRACT
Discourse around hormonal contraception and ‘the pill’ is contradictory: it is both hailed as an unqualified good liberating women from the institution of motherhood and criticised as a patriarchal imposition regulating their reproduction and causing harmful side effects. This chapter reveals how these side effects are represented and explored within feminist ‘fringe’ performance, responding to the fact that, between 2018 and 2023, no less than eight performances on this topic were staged in small-scale venues across the UK. In January 2023 the authors of this chapter held a roundtable with the creators of these works, and here we report three key themes that emerged from our discussions about the motivations, messages and dramaturgical choices of the performances. The chapter thereby provides an insight into how the emerging generation of female-identifying theatre-makers is responding to a medical development that has had far-reaching social and political impact. Through this, it seeks to enlarge our understanding of how performance practice can help us make sense of one of the knottier aspects of medical invention into women’s lives.
