The Mark 2010

Nell Leyshon’s play at the Globe theatre, the first ever by a woman, is being called a “gender breakthrough.” In reality, it’s business as usual.

The much-hyped story in the British press about a female playwright breaking the 400-year-long male grip at Shakespeare's Globe theatre is little more than a highly effective marketing exercise. It even made it to the CBC, despite the Olympics coverage, because it plays so well into the rhetoric of gender victimization.

Little notice, however, has been taken of the startling inaccuracy in the framing of this story: the implication that there has been a 400-year continuous history of performance at the Globe from which women writers were barred, when in fact the theatre was only resurrected in 1997 after a 355-year gap. And once rebuilt (a little distance from the orginal), the new Globe’s official focus was to research and recreate the stage conditions for Shakespeare’s plays.

Only very recently, under its present director Dominic Dromgoole, has its mandate changed to include new plays. The first, in 2006, was In Extremis by Howard Brenton; and indeed another new play by Brenton, Anne Boleyn, will appear this year, paired with a production of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, while the hyped play by Nell Leyshon is scheduled later in the lineup.

So while female writers may be still very much a minority in mainstream British theatre, what is noteworthy here is that in four years of commissioning new plays, Leyshon is Dromgoole’s first woman playwright.

And a legitimate question is: why Nell Leyshon? Despite her prize winning Comfort Me With Apples (a lyrical autumn play about a farm family in Somerset with a title drawn from “The Song of Solomon”), Leyshon has written most of her dramatic work for radio, with some of her plays being later adapted for the stage.

Her typical theme is the hardships of a disappearing country life, as exemplified in plays like The Farm or her BBC radio documentary The Home Field, reflecting her childhood in a Somerset village where there were once 14 farms and now only two. This highly localized focus on Somserset is in sharp contrast to the almost universally urban subjects of contemporary British drama – typified perhaps by one of the Globe’s new successes, The Frontline, a street-scene drugs and drunks portrayal of present-day Camden by Ché Walker, first performed at the Globe in 2008 and revived in 2009.

Then too, the casts of Leyshon’s plays range from just two to five characters, while Dromgoole is on record in a 2009 interview speaking of the need on the big open stage of the Globe for “plays with an average cast of 20 people, telling stories that are that big.”

Indeed, Leyshon’s play for the Globe is a real departure for her: depicting the madhouse of Bedlam in Hogarth’s eighteenth-century London, with the Globe website making it sound remarkably like a historical version of The Frontline: “binge drinkers, gin sellers, and ballad singers, Bedlam combines … lust, violence, absurd comedy, and unexpected romance.”

So what makes Nell Leyshon – interesting as her work indeed is – the choice for first woman playwright at the Globe? Remembering that Shakespeare spoke of “hearing” rather than seeing a play, one might guess that Leyshon’s background in radio drama might make her particularly appropriate. But, in fact, we need to look at standard theatre practice, where it’s always been about who you know.

Almost all of Leyshon’s stage plays have been directed by Lucy Bailey – known for her sexually-charged production of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Bailey is one of the directors at the Globe, staging last summer’s viscerally gory Titus Andronicus, and following up with Macbeth this year. Add to that, Dominic Dromgoole was born in Somerset, and coincidentally attended the same school as Nell Leyshon…

Leyshon’s Bedlam is being sold as the “gender breakthrough” of the new millennium: and indeed it may turn out to be an excellent piece. But underneath this front story, it’s business as usual. Whether in England, the United States, or Canada, drama is all about advertising, relationships, and convincing pretence. After all, what is the stage but designed illusion?