National Theatre All Season Announcements

Women make up 50% of the population. It's insane how much of a disparity there is, and the idea that gender equality is a one-off thing, that they can cart a load of "lady writers" in for one season before returning to business as usual shows how deeply entrenched sexism is.

But that's simply not true. The argument that "if women playwrights are being overlooked it's obviously because they're just not writing decent plays" is absolute, total tosh.

There are many, many wonderful plays that never get read because female writers are so overlooked. Female-authored plays that are massive hits on the fringe or festival circuit struggle to get transfers, where half-decent middling male-authored plays get snapped up. Male playwrights with a couple of okay fringe productions get offered large spaces, commissions, screen deals and agent representation far more and far faster than female playwrights with more substantial records (who are usually marginalised to studio spaces). And God knows there's plenty of utter dross by male writers that go straight to the Olivier or West End simply because of the name and status of the person involved.

If you'd sat in on as many literary department and artistic director meetings as I have, you would not be so dismissive in your certainty that there is no agenda or quota.

This is not a specifically female thing, but last year I personally witnessed a DepAD say, "This is a fantastic play, but the playwright is disabled and we've already fulfilled our minority quota with [play from an Asian writer]". Making explicitly clear that they would not programme more than one play by someone they perceived as "a minority" in one season, regardless of quality.

I don't get why people want Norris to step down, it's like hoping for someone to lose their job which is not on at all. 

Yet half the country is hoping the Prime Minister loses hers!

It’s not about wanting someone to lose their job, but someone being the right person for the job. People in high profile roles will always be scrutinised as to their ability to do the job without it ever actually being personal.

I cannot comment on individual cases, but I am sure the National Theatre literary department would just judge the hundred of scripts they get on just one criteria. Also scripts are subjective, because a play might appeal to you, it might not appeal to others. There is a small niche of female playwrights who are generally fantastic and have had the vision to write stuff that comes straight from the top draw, I don’t need to name them, we all know who they are. Sure stuff written by men are also subjective and I can vouch I have sat through some rubbish, where are Martin Crimp and David Hare 2 recent offenders!

Then again I sat through Top Girls this week at the National both done by female writer and director, and suffered a great deal as did most of the audience and then the argument for ladies is a hard one to make out! I have nothing against lady playwrights or creatives but as I have said it would be wrong to have a quota system and the benchmark has to be quality.

Females being under represented in arts is argument raging going across the board in the art world, of the 2300 paintings in the National Gallery only 21 are by ladies, the National this month have dedicated all their 10 minute talks to lady artists. I managed to go to two by French artists Rosa Bonheur and Elizabeth Louise Viglee Le Brun (Self Portrait and one of my favourite in the whole collection the hat, hair and the lace on the dress are mind blowing brilliant.) Chances is that if I wasn’t so ill earlier this month I would have attended all 4. The National have just purchased a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi a Self Portrait As Saint Catherine, to address the imbalance, but in reality this imbalance will never be addressed as all the famous painters are men and are more likely to be purchased/inherited/Loaned/Gifted in the future. The Self Portrait As Saint Catherine is quite wonderful.

Going to the Art of the Artistic Director talk at the National next week where Rufus is one of the guests, it will be interesting to see if this issue is raised.

He's not been a huge success but few of the previous incumbents got of to a great start and there were questions about their position for most for the first couple of years of their reigns.

The writer was good and I agree dance nation was excellent.

Primarily subconscious bias I think.



You are wrong. You seem very "sure" about things you have zero experience of.

Great promotion for both and meets the National equality targets.

Scripts are not chosen based on merit, and the well-studied and researched concept of "subconscious bias" is neither nebulous nor unverifiable.

Your posts are very sweet, but incredibly naive.

The chance of a script by an inexperienced female writer even being read is slim. Only a handful of theatres have truly open submission policies (the Court does, of course) but generally they won't programme work by a writer unfamiliar to them, regardless of quality. That's simply not how programming works.

To be fair to the Bridge, the best thing I've seen there was written by a woman. Or rather, adapted by a woman from a novel written by another woman.