Campaign to address under-representation of women in theatre secures ACE meeting

Campaigners fighting to tackle the under-representation of women in theatre have secured a meeting with Arts Council England.

Shakespeare’s Globe chief executive Stella Kanu and former Equity president Maureen Beattie are part of a team to secure the meeting with Nicholas Serota, announced ahead of International Women’s Day on March 8.

Figures including Jude Kelly, former artistic director of London’s Southbank Centre; Lesley Gannon, deputy general secretary of the Writer’s Guild of Great Britain; and chief executive of Parents and Carers in Performing Arts, Cassie Raine, will attend the meeting with Serota, alongside ACE’s director of strategy Michelle Dickson and director of theatre Neil Darlison.

Kelly Burke, previously chair of Equity’s women’s committee, will also be present, alongside Cheryl Robson, the managing editor of Aurora Metro Books, core researcher Jennifer Tuckett, and co-founder and director of ERA 50:50, Polly Kemp.

Raine said the meeting represented a "real opportunity" for ACE to "drive this agenda forwards" for an equitable future, while Tuckett said the meeting felt like a "significant step".

Kelly added: "Women often feel a sense of permanently auditioning for credibility, apologising for their maternal role if they have children, and the easy confidence born from standing on others shoulders for centuries just isn’t there. Despite that, women make tremendous, strong, vivid work in all art forms, but still need support in sustaining an artistic life and building a critical mass of women at all levels of creative practice. Seeding the network and building committed gender-focused content and projects needs the Arts Council to recognise the importance of women-led work and support it unequivocally."

Despite hopes to secure a meeting with culture secretary Lucy Frazer, the group say they are yet to receive a reply to their request, sent in early December.

The meeting, which will take place on March 20, will be the first time representatives from leading organisations researching gender disparity in theatre will meet with ACE to discuss the topic. It follows five years of research led by Tuckett, which found that only 6% of women feel there has been an increase in opportunities for women in the sector since 2021.

The forum will platform the results of Tuckett’s Women in Theatre survey update, released in October last year, which found that some 84% of female theatre workers would welcome specific funding for women in the industry due to the continued impact of the pandemic.