Plays By Women

The collection represents women writers who were emerging at the time when feminism and feminist writing was really starting to take off. The selected plays offer an indication of the wide range of style and subject matter tackled by women playwrights in the 1970s and 80s. Caryl Churchill's plays are still performed all over the world and this collection brings us one of her less well-known plays. The plays in the collection continue to have an extended performance life; in stage productions, on radio, abroad.

Four female British plays deal with a poet and her mother, a family's breakdown in communication, a woman who literally wrestles with her problems and the interaction of a group of office workers.Included in this volume are Caryl Churchill's Vinegar Tom, about witchcraft in the seventeenth century; Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi, an account of the lives of four young women by Pam Gems; Louise Page's Tissue, about breast cancer; and Aurora Leigh, adapted by Michelene Wandor herself from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse novel. Each play has an afterword by its author, and the volume opens with an introduction by the editor.