A woman's place: three playwrights reflect on the Traverse's female-fronted Fringe programme
Women’s voices are more prominent than ever in this year’s Traverse Theatre Fringe programme, Susan Mansfield brings together three playwrights at different life stages to compare experiences
This year, the Traverse’s Fringe programme has coalesced around female voices, including three important commissions by Scottish women playwrights at different stages of their careers. I sat down with them to talk about their experience as women in theatre, what has changed, what hasn’t, and why a Fringe season which foregrounds women’s writing is as important now as it ever was.
THE PARTICIPANTS
Zinnie Harris’ first play Further Than The Furthest Thing won a Fringe First at the Traverse in 2000. Since then, she has forged a career as an acclaimed playwright with plays like The Wheel and This Restless House and as a director for the Traverse, Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre of Scotland. She is Professor of Playwriting and Screenwriting at St Andrews University. Her new play, Supposing, is a reimagining of the Cassandra myth.
Morna Young won two CATS awards for her debut full-length play, Lost At Sea. She has been writing for the stage ever since, and for television since 2020. She won a Peggy Ramsay/Film 4 Award in 2024 with the Traverse, and was the theatre’s first Scotland-in-Japan resident playwright in 2019. Her new play, After Party, is a co-production with Paines Plough and the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry.
Eilidh Loan is a playwright, actor and director from Glasgow who has a burgeoning acting career in film and television, as well as in writing and directing theatre and short films. Her first full length play, Moorcroft, played to sell-out audiences at the Tron and on tour with National Theatre of Scotland. Her new play is Cathy, which she also directs, starring Elaine C. Smith as a character inspired by her grandmother.
How do you feel about being part of a Traverse season which celebrates women’s writing?
Morna Young: It doesn’t feel like an almost all female season should be significant, but it really is. Particularly at this moment in time when our world is dominated by male power, this feels like an incredible time for the Traverse to be making a programme like this.
Zinnie Harris: It’s always great when theatres recognise women’s work and women’s voices, but it’s also indicative of the fact that it still has to be a thing, that women’s work needs that extra support. I remember doing similar interviews about being part of a group of women when Further Than The Furthest Thing was on at the Traverse 26 years ago. At the time, I didn’t understand why it would be harder to be a female playwright. Now I have a bit more of a sense of what that’s about!
Eilidh Loan: It’s still quite shocking that, 26 years later, we’re still fighting for our voices to be centre stage. But that being said, it’s a brilliant thing to be part of. Let’s celebrate it to the highest heavens!
Statistics tell us that around three-quarters of plays staged in the UK are by men, while theatre audiences are 70 per cent women. What are the barriers to women making careers in theatre?
Eilidh: As an actor, I still get role descriptions that are “she’s pretty!” or “she’s thin!” or “she’s a working-class single mum from Paisley with no hopes and ambitions”. I put a spin on this stereotype in Cathy because the youngest character is 17 and pregnant and she can’t wait to be a mum! Unfortunately, it’s across all aspects of the industry. I’ve experienced a female director walk into a space, hear the way I talk and think I’m not capable of handling a room. If I was a young working-class boy going into a room with confidence, would they trust that opinion more? Probably, yes.
Morna: I’m nodding enthusiastically. I’m remembering walking into rooms, speaking Doric and getting no response. Also, when you look at awards, the award for Best New Play at this year’s CATS Awards (Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland) went to Milly Sweeney’s Water Colour (also in the Traverse Fringe programme), but Millie is only the third female winner of that award since 2003, one of the others being you, Zinnie!
Eilidh: That’s shocking!
Zinnie: It’s similar with the Olivier Award for Best New Play. In 49 years, they’ve given seven to women. We are still seeing really appalling statistics on numbers of plays written by women on the West End going on to second or further productions, which is one of the ways you sustain a career. That’s also been my experience, watching me and my peers. That said, I think one area where things have shifted a bit is with regard to caring responsibilities. When I first had children, I rarely mentioned them at work, I just tried to muddle through. Now I think there is a slightly greater tolerance of the fact that children might have to come too or childcare has to be thought about.
Why do think women’s work isn’t winning those big awards?
Zinnie: I think, in our unconscious archetypes, a playwright is not a woman. We haven’t got that many female antecedents, we’ve got Ibsen and Shakespeare. There is something I think we have to understand about us as a society, which is that we find it very difficult when women raise their voices in public. And what are you doing when you are writing a play but raising your voice in public? The more women who write plays, teach playwriting and talk about playwriting, I think we can slowly start to shift that.
Eilidh: And it’s not like we’re skulking in the corner. Everybody’s saying: ‘We just don’t have enough female playwrights’. It’s not as if we’re in the shadows of waiting for our moment, we’re all here, going ‘Hi! My play’s here!’
Who have been your role models? Would you have liked more female role models?
Eilidh: I’m really lucky that I’m getting to work with mine! I’ve watched Elaine C. Smith on stage and on screen since I first went to pantomimes. I grew up with Scottish comedy being the thing that brought us all together as a family. Now I get to be in a rehearsal room with her every day hearing stories about how her experiences coming through in the industry, fighting for her place.
Zinnie: It’s harder with writers, though, isn’t it? Everyone talks about Caryl Churchill, who was the generation before me, but it was hard to have access to her as a role model. I always wanted to be a writer-director and I couldn’t really see any women who were directing their own work. Some people said: “What do you expect, you’re a woman, of course it’s going to be harder!” Other people said: “You’ll be okay because you write like a man”, none of which is helpful. Rather than finding a mentor, I think I found people with a similar attitude, who would keep believing in me when there were blocks in the path.
Morna: Bold Girls by Rona Munro and Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off by Liz Lochhead were both on the curriculum in the drama department at school. I loved Bold Girls because the characters reminded me of my aunties and cousins. I think Rona opened the first door for me. As a native Doric speaker, reading Scots language in Mary Queen of Scots was so important. Also, after I wrote my first play, I remember going to Playwrights Studio Library and borrowing everything of Zinnie’s - so thank you Zinnie!
Eilidh: Actually, one of my first experiences of the theatre was seeing This Restless House, when I was about 16. My dad and I still talk about it. Also one of my first jobs out of drama school was playing Mary Shelley in Rona Munro’s adaptation of Frankenstein. There was so much of Rona’s personal experience of being a writer in that show. When I started writing myself a few years later, I realised: this is the struggle that you have trying to get your voice heard. It’s always been around!
Are you consciously looking to explore female experience in your work and put that centre stage?
Zinnie: Sometimes I consciously say I’m going to take a part of the canon or a classic and turn it round, often so that some misunderstood or misrepresented female character is centre stage. But with original work, I think it’s more that there is a preoccupation with something that is going on in the world or something that I’m experiencing. Looking back on many of my plays I can see that they are almost a notebook to my life. The female lens is the easiest way to explain the experience. It’s not ‘this must have a woman’ so much as ‘it has a woman because I’m a woman’. In Supposing, the Cassandra story is a perfect analogue for a woman who feels she has a clear vision of what’s ahead but can’t be believed. It’s exploring this sense that the world is somehow spinning out of control, a feeling that capitalism has completely failed us, the patriarchy has led us to this place.
Morna: I don’t think I’m ever consciously thought: I’m going to write a big play and it has to have a woman at the front of it. I think it’s just something I do, I think I’m interested in women. I’ve always been quite conscious of putting working class women’s voices at the forefront in all my plays. After Party is interesting because in some ways it’s the most middle class environment I’ve set something in, but my protagonist is still from a poorer background.
Eilidh: I find myself fighting for a real representation of the female working class voice. We’re not a side character, we’re not just the maid that comes on, does five lines and we’re a bit funny, and then goes away for the rest of the show. That’s what I’m trying to do with Cathy. We never see people who are from where I’m from taking centre stage in a play which is - hopefully - funny, but also has moments of grief and incredible darkness. The big thing for me is write for people who don’t normally go to the Traverse or who have never been to the Fringe. It’s about people being able to see their own experiences reflected back to them.
Zinnie: Also, because women’s writing is still unusual, there’s a feeling that it has to be emblematic of all of womankind, somehow, rather than just be a play. There’s an inherited idea of what sort of thing you should be writing about, which personally I try to not pay any attention to!
Eilidh: I’ve certainly felt a hesitancy around what women are allowed to write. The first play I wrote (Moorcroft, about her dad’s amateur football team) was all about men, and there was a lot of criticism around the fact that I was using my female perspective to write about men. There was a sense that what women should be writing about was reduced down, instead of being allowed to observe a multitude of things in the human condition.
Supposing, After Party and Cathy are all at the Traverse Theatre until 30 August, various times, see www.traverse.co.uk for details.
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