• "Coming and Going at Sundown" a monologue both written and performed by Gil-cha-Hur which was based on the Korean playwright's grandmother's experience as a comfort woman enslaved by the occupying Japanese soldiers. The horror and the degradation of the experience which was so powerfully conveyed was acknowledged and absolved by a religious ceremony integrated into the end of the performance.
  
• Red Fiery Summer by the Vietnamese American playwright Le Thi Diem Thuy This again was a one woman show which dealt with war and the impact it had upon her own immediate family .
  
• Maija from Chaggaland by Sheela Langeberg. This piece of work started off life as an extract but at the end of the festival was given as a full blown performance This tracked the life and death of the performer's mother in a more triumphant celebratory mode vividly brought to life with music and dance and humour.

In short, these pieces were dramatic monologues performed by the playwrights themselves about their mothers, their grandmothers, themselves and injustice. So their viewpoint and their subject matter was certainly subversive enough for any government to wish to make" their bodies bloody as for rogues!"

Set against larger events...

However, these particular stories and, in two cases, their settings in wartime China and Vietnam gave these personal dramas an epic quality which set them well apart from the kind of psycho drama which can give therapy, never mind drama, a bad name . Bearing this in mind, these enacted stories were in complete contrast to another play which completely failed to rise above the obsessively personal though performed as an ensemble piece. This was a piece which seemed most stuck in the one mode: boring the audience to not care .... with its relentless anger and myopic cultivation of personal hurt.

TONE

How to skin the cat? The tone of many of the plays I saw was often serious, grown up and responsible and to my mind, eminently sensible. But, on occasions, I struggled with the question as to whether these admirable qualities sometimes make it harder to create good theatre?

Does serious intent sometimes get in the way of engaging those defiant mischief making elements inside us all as audience members. What are those subversive qualities of drama which cast dread into the Puritan consciousness or was it just a reaction to the 17th century equivalent of sex, drugs and rock and roll ?

Making mischief? An observation.....One night, some of us played hookey to go and see a male playwright ..... the Martin McDonagh piece "Skull in Connemara". McDonagh's pseudo realistic setting is only part naturalistic. His apparently naturalistic language is heightened both because of his use of the rhythm and structures of Irish/English language and the intensity obtained through stylised repetition and exaggeration . The comic but also emotionally intense set piece of the two main protagonists bashing human skulls into smithereens is played with all the gusto and panache of a playwright unafraid to risk irreverence and bad taste.. Like many women , I suspect, I certainly spend much of my other life in " let's sort things out sensibly" mode so it was a real reminder to me on how there are more ways than one to skin emotional and psychological truths.

PURPOSE

Truth seekers versus....Showing off? Many of the extracts I saw were clearly concerned to explore psychological truth, events and interactions.....to tell stories that helped make sense of things. Some of these struggles connected with my own and I recognised many of the blocks and false turnings I am constantly discovering for myself . Any triumphs I will happily leave for the authors to claim !

However, in the readings as opposed to some of the performances, there was very little of that sometimes exasperating but often liberating "look at me showing off " set pieces which can lift a play's energy level into the stratosphere. This, I am sure, was partly due to the difficulties directors had in obtaining and preparing their actors for the workshop sessions. One of the honourable exceptions being our own Liz Wainwright's piece 'Mixed Company ' which had the actors playing the subtext with as much energy and verve as in a fully rehearsed performance.

The world on whose shoulders? Perhaps, another element which perhaps weighs some of us down is the perception that we are somehow carrying a flag for women playwrights as a minority group. I don't know the answer to this. However I do know that as soon as someone mentions the need to subvert the world, however much I might agree with the intellectual construct, my heart sinks at the thought of another duty to pop on "my jobs to do " list.

Tickling Atlas However if somebody suggests that it's time to tickle Atlas under his arms, and treat the world as a beach ball, my creative imagination is immediately charged up ready to go into silly images super drive.

STYLE AND METHOD

Different forms In this spirit of subversion, I had hoped to see some work from the Magdalena project which specifically explores some of the different forms and content of dramatic work by women ....deliberately not choosing to follow established " male" dramatic pathways . Sadly the show was cancelled though we did manage to see a video of extracts some previous performances. I was sorry to have missed this opportunity to see some of their work live I would have liked to have compared their sense of the difference with other experiences of "alternative drama"

WOMEN'S NEW WRITING

Problems? What problems! We were constantly reminded of the difficulties which faced new writers of either sex. However, it is still the case that women playwrights are under represented especially on the stage. Our key note speakers tried in their various ways to address this issue. ....Peregrine Whittersley, a literary agent from New York, reminded us of the dangers of a now well established industry in the States devoted to running workshops with the sole purpose of rewriting other people's plays that you never ever produce! On the other hand she reminded us of the importance of the network of theatres in the States of good amateur and small scale professional regional theatre companies hungry for new plays.

CONCLUSION

It was impossible to participate in everything . Choices had to be made about which workshops and forums to go to and all the evening performances were at extra cost. However, I found the week invaluable in giving me the following opportunities :

1. to meet other women playwrights and to experience directly what their pre occupations might seem to be. And how they might be explored in drama

2. To try and see if there was anything different about women's dramatic writing, which I valued or recognised in my own writing or for that matter, anything apart from domestic commitments which might explain the relatively meagre representation of women playwrights on the stage.

3. To find out if there were any other self help playwright organisations out there Yorkshire Playwrights might connect with...Well, yes, there are self help organisations out there. ...not entirely on Yorkshire Playwright lines, but I'm not sure yet how we can best connect. There were a large number of conference delegates many of whom were representing just themselves. I will list the possible link ups separately and I have also "commissioned " Susan Croft to access her data base for a wider list of similar organisations. The main problem, as we know, is that arranging for work to be performed in a meaningful way on a international exchange basis is just as difficult as getting the home grown product on. The only advantage seems to be that national funding bodies can look a little more favourably on performances abroad!

4. To be in Galway itself. ..... To be refreshed and stimulated by another place.... to spot that gentian by the roadside in the most magnificent limestone scenery in Western Europe, to work on the revision of one of my own plays sitting inside a hill fort on massive cliffs which are the last land fall between Europe and America.

(c) Jackie Everett Oct 4th 1997