Rogues Gallery of Restoration Actresses

From the Guardian:

The emergence of the actress on the Restoration stage was revolutionary. As every pupil of Shakespeare knows, it was men in drag who took the ladies' parts before. Imagine the frisson, then, when Nell Gwyn first showed herself aged 14 to a packed house at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, in 1664. This unprecedented female exhibition provoked salacious frenzy, which theatre companies hoped to harness to their profit.

The showcasing of beauties in "breeches roles" exploded ideas of decorum. Actresses welcomed the chance to demonstrate the virtuosity demanded by parts such as Viola and Rosalind. But the display of their shapely legs was condemned as an exercise in "brazenness" which confirmed the shameless immodesty and sexual availability of the actress. That both theatre-land and prostitution had their metropolis in Covent Garden was not lost on the press. From the first, the "actress" of popular imagination was a shimmering mixture of whore, coquette, talent and celebrity.

A new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons, investigates the concept of the "actress" in all its troubling contradictions. The artists include Reynolds, Gainsborough, Hoppner, Lawrence, Zoffany and Gillray.

The exhibition is the brainchild of Gill Perry. When she was writing her book Spectacular Flirtations: Viewing the Actress in Eighteenth Century Art and Culture, she realised that the NPG had an exceptional collection of early actress portraits – "And not only that they are in Covent Garden," she says.

When modern critics rate a female performance on whether it's theatrical Viagra or doubt that a woman is thin enough to play Juliet, they invoke a long and dishonourable tradition. "Modern actors should see the first actresses as trailblazers, fighting prejudice and innuendo," Perry concludes. Certainly women today might take comfort that so many of their forebears managed to seize the public relations initiative and shape the culture that so objectified them.

Nell Leyshon - First Women of the Globe

From the Independent:

As the first play penned by a woman opens at Shakespeare's Globe today – breaking a 411-year tradition – top theatre directors report a surge in prominent female playwrights, with a wave of talented women coming to the fore in Britain's male-dominated theatres.

Nell Leyshon will make history at the Globe in central London with her new play Bedlam, which chronicles the goings on at London's notorious Bethlem psychiatric hospital in the 18th century. Following the story of a young country girl admitted to the asylum, the dark comedy looks at the terrible treatments administered to unfortunate inhabitants, and the gin craze that was sweeping London.

That the 48-year-old Leyshon, who is also a successful radio playwright and novelist, has cracked the Globe is seen as a symbolic breakthrough for women theatre writers.

Dinkum Assorted

From ABC North Queensland:

It's 1942. The men have gone to war and the women of a small Australian town called Warrabadanga rally together to... make biscuits ?

Townsville's Little Theatre's first production of 2010 is Dinkum Assorted.

Set against the backdrop of the Second World War, the play centres on the women who work in Jamieson's biscuit factory and the plan they are cooking up to save their jobs and keep their group together.

It also addresses the issues of isolation and uncertainty that those left behind by the war were facing.

Director Karen Vane says she was keen to present the human stories of war.

"A lot of the battle stories have been told, but when Linda Aronson wrote this for instance there was a great dearth of stories about the other people, the people who stayed at home".

Dinkum Assorted is bright, cheerful and musical, but Ms Vane says behind the upbeat Aussie larrikinism, there's a real poignancy to the play.

"Interspersed with that are stories about (little touches about) the fact that they are without their men and some of them they don't know where their men are".

The season of Dinkum Assorted starts on Wednesday the 7th of April.

Pearl Cleage: Song for Coretta

From Freep. com:

She was watching television when the women came to her.

The news program showed thousands of people, mostly women, lined up in the rain to pay their respects to Coretta Scott King after her death in 2006.

Pearl Cleage wondered about those women, from all walks of life, united by that moment in history. So Cleage (pronounced cleg) did what she's done since childhood: She made up a story.

That story, about five fictional women whose lives intersect in the damp funeral line, became a play called "Song for Coretta," which is being presented at the Detroit Repertory Theatre through March 21.

Helen Lewis

From BBC News:

A Belfast-based choreographer who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp has died aged 93.

Helen Lewis, who had a long association with the Lyric Theatre, settled in Northern Ireland after WWII.

Born in Czechoslovakia, she trained as a dancer and having made a new life in Belfast became involved in dance teaching and choreography.

In 1992 she published a widely acclaimed autobiography A Time To Speak which recounted her time in the camp.

Theatre: Women of Substance

From the Manila Times:

Sheer beauty that can soften the most hardened of hearts. Will power and strength that can transform an entire nation. Pure love and wisdom that create a strong foundation of a home. Resilience through life’s difficult passages. These qualities and more make a woman of substance. Thus, four literary masterpieces featuring passionate, extraordinary, complicated, “women of substance” will come alive on stage as Tanghalang Pilipino opens its 23rd Theater Season 2009 to 2010 starting in August.

Featuring:

• Apples from the Desert / Mansanas ng Disyerto
• Mother Courage and Her Children
• A Streetcar Named Desire
• Three Sisters

Founded in 1987, Tanghalang Pilipino is the resident theater company of the CCP. It aims to promote Philippine theater that is rooted in centuries-old Filipino culture and history while being responsive to evolving contemporary society.