First Published in 2000, Recording Women documents the work of three leading feminist theatre companies, Sphinx Theatre Company, Scarlett Theatre and Foresight Theatre, through a combination of interviews with theatre practitioners and detailed descriptions of productions in performance. Each of the six productions is innovative in content and style.
Scarlett Theatre’s Paper Walls and Foresight Theatre’s Boadicea: The Red-Bellied Queen employ a skillful mixture of text, music, physical performance, humour and seriousness to explore, respectively, domestic abuse and rape (of women and community). Scarlett Theatre’s The Sisters and Sphinx’s Voyage in the Dark adapt existing texts. The sisters is a ritualized re-enactment of Chekhov’s Three Sisters in which only the female characters from the play appear. Voyage in the Dark uses film-noir-like theatrical effects and the insistent rhythms of the tango to evoke the rootlessness and sense of alienation that characterizes Jean Rhys’s novel. Slap (Foursight Theatre) and Goliath (Sphinx) are both one woman shows. Slap, performed by Naomi Cooke, explores images of motherhood, including lesbian motherhood and the concept of virgin birth. Goliath, performed by Nicola McAuliffe, is a dramatization, by Bryony Lavery, of Beatrix Campbell’s powerful study of the 1991 riots in Cardiff, Oxford and Tyneside. This is a must read for scholars and researchers of theatre studies.