In terms of landmark moments, this has got to rank up there with the likes of Barak Obama’s appointment as the first black US president, the 1918 and 1928 women’s vote reforms and my decision to stop letting old ladies have my seat on the tube on sex and age discrimination discrimination grounds. OK, so the last one isn’t exactly true, or relevant, or that funny, but it is a bit mental that it’s taken 13 years of the modern reconstruction of The Globe for a female playwright’s work to see the light of day at the riverside theatre. Maybe they were just biding their time to make a big deal about it.
From 5th September 2010 to the 1st October, The Globe will host Bedlam, a comedy about a beautiful women’s incarceration in the 18th Century London hospital for the insane. Written by Nell Leyshon, apparently a former television commercial writer (I wonder if she wrote the old Milky Way ad, with the red car and the blue car, racing and stuff), and her previous work includes Comfort me with apples, which won her the Evening Standard’s most promising playwright award this year.
Since the first Globe theatre was built in 1599, not a single women playwright has had her work aired there. When it was burnt to the ground in 1613 due to stage cannon fire igniting the thatched roof (the fools), it was rebuilt with a tiled roof, but still did not feature a single female playwright. In fact even the women’s roles in plays written by men weren’t even offered to ladies, for as we all know, women back in the day had more facial hair than men and had deep baritone voices (source to be verified). Anyway, the theatre lasted until 1642 without a lady playwright and when it was demolished for tenements in 1644, it sort of sealed the fate, until 1997 when the late Sam Wanamaker’s dream of rebuilding The Globe theatre was completed. However, we still have to wait until the summer for the gender breakthrough to be completed by Nell Leyshon’s Bedlam.
