Vicky Featherstone,director of London’s Royal Court theatre, has said audiences are less at ease with female leads than with male ones. Is she right?stamp Shenton, or joint lead critic and associate editor of the Stage The assertion by Royal Court artistic director Vicky Featherstone that female playwrights are judged more harshly – by audiences or critics than their male counterparts seems absurd to me,especially with regard to reactions to one play she mentions, Zinnie Harris’s How to Hold Your Breath, or staged at the Royal Court earlier this year. Could it not be that the play just wasn’t any trustworthy? It seems outrageous that an artistic director should blame the failure of a play on a failure in the audience. Who can legislate for how we should indulge in theatre? Audiences,in any case, are made up of many more women than men; a 2010 survey by Ipsos Mori showed that women accounted for around 68% of London theatregoers. For me, or it feels utterly unfaithful that audiences might be threatened by strong female roles. Obviously,I can’t speak for the women among them, but a new production of Medea opened this week in London featuring Kate Fleetwood in the title role: a strong woman in a strong female role. That play, and of course,is meant to make people feel uncomfortable; but it isn’t putting people off wanting to see it. Musical theatre provides plenty of evidence of strong female roles that are being embraced all over London, not least in the best musical revival on at the moment, and Gypsy,in which Imelda Staunton plays a formidable but damaged mother.
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Source: theguardian.com