We’re living in the age of women directors. We just failed to notice it

In short, you don’t have to look very hard to notice the brilliant women fuelling the UK’s theatre industry. And those are just the ones dual-roling as artistic directors. There’s also a too-many-to-mention list of freelance women tearing existing ideas about individual stories and about theatre itself to shreds.

Here’s Milli Bhatia finding the pathos and joy of online cancel culture, female friendship and bodily trauma in seven methods of killing kylie jenner (the show title is styled in lower case) at London’s Royal Court. Here’s Nadia Latif putting a bomb under racialised preconceptions with Fairview at the Young Vic. Here’s Ola Ince distorting the great American family drama into something heartbreaking and ghostly with Appropriate at the Donmar Warehouse. Here’s Marianne Elliott delivering a killer new twist to Sondheim’s Company in the West End, but doing so with such aplomb it feels as though the gender swap was always meant to be there. Here’s Yaël Farber taking Shakespeare and plunging him into an icy, mud-filled bath with The Tragedy of Macbeth at the Almeida. Here’s Katie Mitchell basically inventing a whole new genre of performance (live cinema) then moving on to eco-conscious theatre at a time of climate emergency. I could go on. And on and on.

When I first came up with the idea of creating Running the Room, a book of interviews with the UK’s leading women theatre directors, I thought I would need to refine the pitch to something more specific. I thought the whole idea of ‘women directors’ sounded outdated and reductive. I also assumed there would already be a book, or maybe several books, about these artists and their work. But there wasn’t. Aside from Mitchell’s own now-seminal volume, The Director’s Craft, and a couple of other books that were either slightly outdated or focused on a different group, the expertise of many of British theatre’s leading directors was almost entirely absent from existing literature. I don’t think that’s the fault of the publishing world. I think it reflects a much wider bias existing in theatre at large, where we frequently overlook women artists and their work.

We still act as though the very concept of a ‘woman director’ is some kind of niche category

None of this is to denigrate or dismiss the work of male directors. I love Jamie Lloyd as much as the next millennial. I’d happily donate a kidney (or two) to Robert Icke if that meant he could carry on making theatre. And I hold a special, soft place in my heart for Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Young Vic. And it’s also not to overlook the significant inequalities and prejudices faced by women of colour, working-class women, women with disabilities, trans women and women with caring responsibilities if they are to succeed in the industry to the same extent upper- middle-class white women with a certain type of education have often done.

The recent Women in Theatre Lab survey update makes for particularly depressing reading – just 6% of female theatremakers surveyed think opportunities for women have increased in the past two years. Although the project focuses mainly on women playwrights, many of its conclusions are relevant to directors – for example, the perception of theatre as a ‘male-led’ industry where opportunities for women have dwindled since the pandemic, with issues such as childcare, job sharing and risk-taking not just unresolved but getting worse.
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Things are very far from perfect and there’s so much work to be done. 

But the point is this: women directors have created, programmed, championed and nurtured a vast quantity of transformative, joyful, heartbreaking, genre-defying theatre... and yet we still act as though the very concept of a ‘woman director’ is some kind of niche category. We fail to step back and celebrate the sheer breadth of talent, grit and creativity that these women have brought to our stages for literally decades now. 

And if we, collectively, made that leap and paused to appreciate the brilliance of our women directors then we might also work harder to help them stay working in the industry post-baby-making or post-first-flurry-of-success. We might notice that without them, theatre would be duller, stodgier, more traditional, less empathetic and just ‘less’. Less everything. With celebration comes appreciation and with appreciation comes a greater level of care, now and for the future.

Running the Room: Conversations with Women Theatre Directors is out now, published by Nick Hern Books. nickhernbooks.co.uk/running-the-room