Director Lucy Kerbel discusses women on stage

More females study drama and buy theatre tickets yet their lives are under-represented on stage. In her new guide to plays that put women in the limelight, director Lucy Kerbel hopes to redress the balance, she tells Rosamund Urwin
6 November 2013

When Lucy Kerbel was putting together her 100 Great Plays for Women she bumped into a literary manager for a leading London theatre. “I told him I was looking for plays with mainly female casts,” the 31-year-old director says. “He asked, ‘Are there any?’”

Eventually, he half-remembered one. “That Lorca,” but it took his partner to name it: The House of Bernarda Alba. “In his mind,” Kerbel recalls, “that was the beginning and end of the conversation. And I was thinking, ‘You are the literary manager of one of the capital’s most prestigious theatres, and you have to rely on your partner to name one play with a majority female cast’.”

Kerbel, whose book is published next week, can reel off scores of them, everything from the well-known — James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner (which has just had a successful run at the National Theatre) — to the more obscure: Crooked, a play about religion and sexuality by American writer Catherine Trieschmann.

But that literary manager isn’t alone in overlooking women in theatre. At the weekend, the National Theatre’s sparkling 50th anniversary gala was criticised by some for the paucity of female playwrights represented: only one of the more than 30 scenes featured was written by a woman (Alecky Blythe’s London Road).

Even Kerbel, who graduated from University of London’s Royal Holloway in 2003, confesses she was once in a similar position. “In my year there were 90 girls and 10 boys, which is probably pretty standard for drama.” Yet all the plays were male-heavy. “The few boys in the year would be fought over, and all these girls would pitch up for audition and there’d be bugger all for them. If they did get cast, they’d have to tie their hair back in a ponytail and pretend to be a man.”

Hearing the moans of his female counterparts one day, a male student suggested they pitch a play with a female-dominated cast. “The conversation went: ‘There’s [Caryl Churchill’s] Top Girls, and that’s it.’ We’re studying drama at degree level and, between us, we can only name a single female-heavy play. If drama students can’t name them, if top literary managers can’t, how can we possibly get more on stage without an intervention?”

The book is Kerbel’s second intervention — the first was founding Tonic Theatre in 2011, which works with theatres to achieve greater equality by attracting and retaining women. Kerbel hopes 100 Great Plays will be a catalyst, challenging the view that drama is an “inherently male form, telling male stories” and “getting more plays with brilliant parts for women into the bloodstream of theatre”.

The plays range from the ancient, The Trojan Women by Euripides, to the recent It felt empty when the heart went at first but it is alright now, by Lucy Kirkwood, whose most recent play, Chimerica, has been widely lauded. Plus some for vast stages, others for tiny studios. Some are considered female-focused plays (Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is but Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit is not).

Some explore domestic life (Kerbel kept being asked, “Are they all set in kitchens?”) but war (Welcome to Thebes, a modern re-imagining of the legend by Moira Buffini), science (The Woman in the Window, a play set partly in a dystopian future, by New Zealander Alma De Groen) and politics (The Assemblywomen by Aristophanes, about women taking over parliament) also feature. About half are penned by men. “That happened naturally,” says Kerbel. “That’s what makes the book so rich — the mixture of male and female voices telling women’s stories.”

Kerbel, who now lives in Earlsfield, south-west London, grew up in a non-theatrical household in Epsom. When she was 16 she “stumbled into” the BRIT School in Croydon. She initially intended to specialise in costume design before realising she’d rather “work with human beings, not fabric”. Her most recent show, The Planet and the Stuff at the Polka Theatre, ended its run last week.

Her career kicked off with a role as resident director at the National Theatre Studio and English Touring Theatre but it wasn’t until 2009, when she visited the Riksteatern headquarters in Stockholm, that she had her epiphany about gender diversity in theatre.

“I realised that if you get on a plane and travel for an hour-and-a-half, you step into an industry that is so much more equal than ours,” she says. “In the past 10 years, Sweden has changed the face of its theatre. And both men and women call it a golden age for theatre, saying it’s opened the floodgates for new artists and creativity.”

A fear that she had been part of the problem made Kerbel act. “I glanced down at my directing CV and realised that only one play had been written by a woman, and only one had a mainly female cast. I thought, ‘I am a card-carrying feminist. If I don’t do something, who is going to?’”

She points out that theatre should be a female-friendly industry — more women study drama at school and university, and more buy theatre tickets. Yet female life is under-represented. “If you’re only putting the stories of half the population on stage, you’re only putting half the possible stories out there. I think artistically that’s disappointingly narrow.”

She is ready to admit that progress is being made and that theatre leaders want change. The problem is that progress is coming too slowly because there are so many other demands. “Running a theatre in the UK now, you are flat out. If you spend most of your days fighting fires, it’s understandable that you never to get around to making those bigger shifts in the culture of your organisation.”

Recently, there’s been a new wave of female directors including Lyndsey Turner and Polly Findlay, and playwrights such as Polly Stenham and Anya Reiss. While Kerbel celebrates this, she warns against believing the work is done. “The risk is that having a few female faces around the table can let us off the hook. Only when we can say, ‘Roughly half the people here are female’ will we be representing broader society. We’ve seen a wave of young female writers before but they haven’t moved on to the next step — from small studio spaces to main stages — like their male counterparts.”

She puts these problems down to theatre’s roots being in a time when women weren’t in the workplace. “The way we work, our decision-making processes and the structures around which we operate were mostly created before women were expected to be present, let alone to play an equal role. That means it is harder for some people to access opportunities than others.”

Kerbel’s great hope is that the next generation will realise the wealth of female-dominated plays that exist. “At the moment, they experience a very limited number of plays with heavily female casts. They’re the theatre-makers of tomorrow, the audiences of tomorrow. If their expectations aren’t shifted, nothing will change. The cycle has to be broken.”

Lucy Kerbel’s 100 Great Plays for Women is published by Nick Hern Books on November 14.

She is in a Platform at the National Theatre’s Shed, SE1 on November 20.

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