It is only appropriate that a play about suffragettes should be the first play written by a living woman to be presented in the National Theatre in London. Her Naked Skin, written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, appeared there last year in the Olivier auditorium to high acclaim from both critics and the theatre-going public.
While Lenkiewicz had written several other successful dramas prior to her debut at the National, there are a lot of new female voices being heard in the theatres, and Her Naked Skin will undoubtedly be only the first of many to appear on Britain’s most venerable stages.
Playwright Polly Stenham is only 22 years old, and her second hit play, Tusk Tusk, ran to sell-out crowds at the Royal Court in London this spring. Stenham’s first play, That Face, was written when she was 19, and that one got the 2007 award for Best New Play.
Lucy Prebble reportedly has commissions from the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Court Theatre. Her first full-length play, The Sugar Syndrome, won the Best New Play award for 2004 and her second, ENRON, about the great financial scandal and the people who perpetrated it, has been hailed as a “major theatrical event”.
Another woman in the impressive line-up is Ella Hickson. Her offbeat play Eight has been picked up by Nick Hern, the most respected theatre publisher in the U.K. Hickson, at 24, is the youngest playwright ever to have that honour. Eight won the Fringe First at Edinburgh in 2008, made a smash hit in New York early this year and will be opening in Trafalgar Studios in July.
Look for Atiha Sen Gupta’s What Fatima Did . . . among other great new offerings at the Hampstead Theatre’s autumn season.
