ABSTRACT
Because of the scarcity value of women playwrights, and of plays which take either a female-gendered perspective, or which are largely or entirely about women, it is all too easy sometimes for them to be casually labelled with one of the many new clichés which have sprung up during the 1970s: ‘feminist theatre’, ‘women’s theatre’, ‘plays for women’—all these convey some important clue as to the bias or content of a play, but they are not analytical. They are useful signposts; but they can be used by misogynists in order to sneer at and ghettoise new work by and about women. Or they can be used in a blanket sort of way to imply support and approval (nothing wrong with that) and to forestall any criticism or comment. It seems to me both exciting and important to try to understand precisely the way in which the ideas generated through political feminism have affected (or not) the work of women and men playwrights. We are, after all, talking about the complex ways in which imaginative work is both a product of its own time, and a response to it, and writing a work of fiction (in this case, a play), even if it has documentary sources, is an engagement with the relationship between the conscious knowledge and ideas of the writer, and the way s/he then digests that knowledge and creates a fictional, imaginative world. This imaginative world cannot simply be ‘checked off’ against ‘reality’. It is an act of illusion, since it creates its own internal rules, it is part of a traditionor traditions-whether the writer is aware or not, and it constantly alludes to empirically verifiable bits of the real world, and to the imaginations and emotions of its audiences. There is no simple way in which neat correlations between politics and art (feminism and theatre) can be made; but it is
essential that some attempt is made, in order to understand the plays better. It is not a game to pass abstract value judgements; after all, we all tend to like what we agree with, and we will all continue to be inspired and moved by different things. We are all familiar with the experience of going to the theatre with someone and then finding that we have diametrically different views about what was good, what was moving, or even, sometimes, what the play was about.
