The theatre world is good at commemorations - we are knee-deep in them this year with the centenary of Samuel Beckett and the 50th anniversary of the Royal Court. And yet the ground-breaking theatre produced by a generation of women who are now in their fifties has been quietly forgotten.
Women's theatre groups mushroomed during the 1970s and 1980s, reflecting the socialist and feminist spirits of the age. Issues they tackled ranged from the gender-based (reproductive rights, domestic violence) to the cultural and political (mental health, the nuclear threat, equal pay). The watchword was collaboration, the emphasis on devised work. These groups were determined to demolish the restricting stereotypes of what women should be and how they should behave. Their names said it all: Bag and Baggage, Cunning Stunts, Female Trouble, The Hairy Marys, Hormone Imbalance, Les Oeufs Malades, ReSisters, Scarlet Harlets, to name but a few.
Now, with a few notable exceptions - Sphinx (formerly the Women's Theatre Group) and Clean Break are two groups still going strong - women's theatre as a genre has all but disappeared, its radical contribution to theatre history rarely acknowledged.
One historian who hopes to stem the tide of amnesia is Susan Croft, a former curator of contemporary performance at the Theatre Museum. "There are so many unknown heroines whose names deserve to be recorded and written into history," she says. Croft is committed to retrieving and collating achievements that are as yet unrecorded or scattered between various archives. Having already produced . . . She Also Wrote Plays, a guide to 400 women playwrights, Croft is now at work on an even larger bibliography.
This month, she brought together some of the leading practitioners from the 1970s and 1980s for an evening of debate. The participants, including the psychotherapist Susie Orbach, the actor/director Michele Frankel, the National Theatre's Jenny Harris and the Film Council's Sheryl Crown, were asked to discuss the influence of the women's theatre groups on their lives. The aim was to examine the relevance of that era on the current generation of young women theatre workers, performers and directors.
The event proved a vivid reminder of the bubbling, devil-may-care energy of those times. But the contrast with today was stark. Crown said that dreams of changing the world are scarcely relevant in an industry so concerned with money-making. Gillian Hanna, a founder member of the Monstrous Regiment theatre group, argued that the long-term structures needed to consolidate such hard-won freedoms and ideals were never secured.
Orbach, whose book Fat is a Feminist Issue was the inspiration behind the Spare Tyre theatre company, was shocked on a recent visit to a drama school to find the female students so preoccupied with their looks that they refuse to take "unflattering" roles - a far cry from their pre decessors, who delighted in playing the grotesque, the foolish and the ugly. "How are we going to find a way to keep artistry separate from celebrity?" Orbach asked.
So what happened between then and now? As Hanna pointed out: "We came in on a golden age of funding. We were able to pay 13 people at full equity rates." That would be unheard of in today's climate. The movement was also held back by Margaret Thatcher, whose corrosive blend of philistinism and individualism was antithetical to the attempt to reconstruct communal bonds between women.
Divisions within feminism may also have played a part. Different companies had distinct philosophies, particularly on the vexed question of whether the aesth etics of theatre or its political message should come first. This finally impeded the collective action that would have secured the revolution.
Perhaps Croft's meeting, as well as providing some much-needed generational bridge-building, will encourage a few of today's young drama students to rediscover the joy of anarchy. Public funders also need to be reminded of theatre's continuing gender disparity and the wealth of talent lying untapped. Croft's mission, in other words, should be seen not as an indulgent exercise in nostalgia, but as a signpost for the future.
