Strong female leads, gender-blind casting and female directors with vision are challenging a misogynistic status quo in theatre, says Caroline Criado-Perez.
As the final strands of the Captain’s sanity unravel towards the close of August Strindberg’s The Father, the titular patriarch takes us on a grand tour of literary female infidelity. “It’s all here. In these books. They prove it. I’m not mad. Look. The Odyssey. Book One, page 6. The Upsala translation. Telemachus talking: ‘My mother swears he’s my father. But how do I know? No man knows for sure.’ That’s Telemachus talking. Talking about Penelope. The most virtuous of women. Wonderful. Or the prophet Ezekiel. Harken to old Ezekiel: ‘The man who says, “Here’s my father” is a fool. Who can tell – whose loins he comes from?’ Couldn’t be clearer. More? Pushkin. Alexander Pushkin. Russia’s greatest poet. I quote: ‘The cause of his death was the rumour that his wife had been unfaithful. Not the bullet that pierced his chest. He swore on his deathbed – she was innocent.’ End quote. What an arsehole. How could he swear that?”
The Captain is by no means the first man to believe that woman as drawn by male writers is woman as she truly is. Indeed, so commonplace is this assumption that it had already been satirised by Jane Austen nearly a century earlier... Keep reading on The Independent
As the final strands of the Captain’s sanity unravel towards the close of August Strindberg’s The Father, the titular patriarch takes us on a grand tour of literary female infidelity. “It’s all here. In these books. They prove it. I’m not mad. Look. The Odyssey. Book One, page 6. The Upsala translation. Telemachus talking: ‘My mother swears he’s my father. But how do I know? No man knows for sure.’ That’s Telemachus talking. Talking about Penelope. The most virtuous of women. Wonderful. Or the prophet Ezekiel. Harken to old Ezekiel: ‘The man who says, “Here’s my father” is a fool. Who can tell – whose loins he comes from?’ Couldn’t be clearer. More? Pushkin. Alexander Pushkin. Russia’s greatest poet. I quote: ‘The cause of his death was the rumour that his wife had been unfaithful. Not the bullet that pierced his chest. He swore on his deathbed – she was innocent.’ End quote. What an arsehole. How could he swear that?”
The Captain is by no means the first man to believe that woman as drawn by male writers is woman as she truly is. Indeed, so commonplace is this assumption that it had already been satirised by Jane Austen nearly a century earlier... Keep reading on The Independent