Gender bias on stage - Shared Experience Theatre Company

Director Polly Teale's theatre company focuses on putting women's stories centre stage. As they face an uncertain funding future, she explains why the gender bias is now more important than ever.

My company Shared Experience is currently touring a new play based on the true story of black identical twin sisters who refused to talk, their only relationship being an intense and turbulent bond with each other. Speechless has had excellent reviews and won awards, and yet it is to be the last show funded through Shared Experience's Regular Funding Agreement with Arts Council England.

Shared Experience is a company led by two women that creates plays and productions which explore the female experience in all its complexity. I am particularly worried about what our funding cut will mean for the future of our company at a time when it seems to me to be more important than ever for women's voices to be heard.

I recently read a blog that claimed that gender inequality was still prevalent in theatre. The blog was illustrated by a photograph of Legally Blonde, the show that is the biggest employer of women in British theatre - women who are mostly wearing six-inch heels and pink boob tubes. The high point of the evening is a song about how, if you bend over in aforementioned outfit and wriggle your bottom, you can get a man to do virtually anything, except, I hasten to add, take you seriously as a thinking human being. The fact that this show is such a success speaks of a bigger change that has happened over recent years: to dress girls in pink and encourage them to be princesses with all that implies has become so prevalent as to be normal (with Jordan cited as most popular girls' role model). A friend recently gave in to her nine-year-old's entreaties to shave her arms and legs because of her shame at not having the silky smooth skin of a Barbie doll. My own 10-year-old is already craving the vertiginous heals that are worn not just by models on the catwalks, or even women on a night out, but by ordinary women every day of the week. What more potent symbol could there be than the wearing of shoes in which you can hardly walk, let alone run?

Despite a few startling exceptions, it remains the case that fewer than one in four theatre directors is female, although lists of aspiring young theatre directors are dominated by women. The welcome appointment of Josie Rourke as artistic director of the Donmar (when Michael Grandage steps down at the end of the year) is pointed to as evidence that women are thriving in theatre.

However, this appointment comes at a time when other venues and companies, such as Josie's old venue the Bush, Soho Theatre, Paines Plough (places where women came through the ranks), have lost female directors with their positions to be taken over by men.

Seventy-five per cent of applicants to drama schools are women and yet the profession continues to employ far more men both on and off stage. This is partly because it has ever been thus. The canon of plays favours men over women. Look at any Shakespeare and it has four times as many parts for men as women. His plays were, of course, originally performed entirely by men (a tradition that Propeller continues to this day). They reflected the times in which they were written; in many great plays women are wives, mothers, lovers, maids, but rarely the centre of the story.

Nancy Meckler and I, as artistic directors of Shared Experience, have produced a body of acclaimed plays that provide meaty female parts placing women centre stage. We promote the work of female writers, directors, designers, producers and most visibly, actors.

If we want women to thrive in theatre, don't we need to create a culture that encourages the kind of deep questioning and creativity that Shared Experience exemplifies? In a world where little girls are increasingly encouraged to wear pink and dream of becoming princesses, isn't it more important than ever to encourage work that is deeply probing, challenging women's (and men's) assumptions about who they are, and more importantly, who they could be? If Legally Blonde tells young women that being a Barbie is nothing to be ashamed of, surely we need something that tells the world another story.

I heard last week that our spring tour, Mary Shelley, has received production funding from the Arts Council. I am hugely relieved that this will make the production possible but know this grant does not begin to cover our core costs or assure our future survival. I only hope we can find a way to keep creating our work, telling the stories we want to be heard, and providing the opportunities that we do.