Inter Alia Arrives in the West End — But Where Are the Other Female Playwrights?
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When **Suzie Miller**’s [*Inter Alia*](https://www.londontheatredirect.com/play/inter-alia-tickets) arrives in the West End at [Wyndham's Theatre](https://www.londontheatredirect.com/venue/wyndhams-theatre-london) this week, it will, at a stroke, double the number of plays written by women in the West End. [*The Mousetrap*](https://www.londontheatredirect.com/play/the-mousetrap-tickets) by **Agatha Christie** (whose [*Witness for the Prosecution*](https://www.londontheatredirect.com/play/witness-for-the-prosecution-tickets) also continues to thrive over the river at County Hall) will no longer be the only play written by a woman in the West End, although a trio of thumpingly successful musicals do boast female writers: [*Hadestown*](https://www.londontheatredirect.com/musical/hadestown-tickets) by **Anais Mitchell**, [*Six*](https://www.londontheatredirect.com/musical/six-london-vaudeville-theatre-tickets), which is co-written by **Lucy Moss**, and *Operation Mincemeat*, co-written by **Natasha Hodgson** and **Zoe Roberts**.
Female directors and other creatives, particularly designers of all kinds, are no longer in short supply in the West End, and there are plenty of female theatre producers (**Sonia Friedman, Nica Burns, Eleanor Lloyd** and **Ellie Keel**, to name just a few), but women writers are still the exception rather than the rule. For decades there have been great swathes of time when **Christie** has been the only female writer represented in the West End.
It appears we have forgotten that gender equality needs to be as much a part of theatre’s ongoing conversations around diversity as skin colour, disability and socio-economic factors, all of which can be a bar to access.
How is it possible in the 21st century, when women have cracked so many of the top jobs in politics, medicine, law, journalism and other professions, that they are still so ill-represented in the West End? Particularly when women purchase more theatre tickets than men. Could it be that women are just less good at writing plays?
Or are other factors at play? Why do plays by men enter the canon so much more readily than those by women? Could lack of opportunity (plays written by women are seen as a harder sell, so they never make it through the hoops required for a play to make it to the West End) be preventing women from achieving equality in the commercial theatre sector? Is it that their plays are judged on different criteria or that when women playwrights write about female experience, that experience is perceived as narrow or dismissed as being somehow smaller because it often encompasses the domestic?
It puts me in mind of a quote from director **Marianne Elliott**, who was once told by a top theatre executive, "Oh Marianne, you just like stories about women having a hard time.” **Elliott** recalls laughing with everyone in the room at the time but says that afterwards she thought, "Isn't that what *Hamlet* is about? A man is having a hard time, isn’t he? So, what’s your problem with that?"
It’s a point magnified recently by **Kristin Scott Thomas** talking in The Stage about her experience of being in **Penelope Skinner**’s *Lyonesse* in the West End back in 2023. "The play was mostly hated by the critics. So why did people flock to the Pinter to catch it before we all vanished? A clue might be that many of the reviews were written by men who really didn’t understand what it is to be a working mother or a child-free actress."
Unconscious gender bias in the critical response may well be at work (an academic research project between the University of St Andrews and King’s College London is looking at the question, and it will be interesting to see what its findings are), but I suspect that it is not just male critical responses which limit our exposure to female voices, but something far more fundamental. Some years ago, I heard director Phyllida Lloyd speaking at a conference, and she said, "It's not a conspiracy by men to keep women off film or stage; it’s just that they don’t notice when we are not there."
So maybe when women start talking about their vaginas like they do in *Lyonesse* or *The Years*, or about the sweat and emotional labour of motherhood as happens in I*nter Alia*, they are noticed, and it leads to discombobulation.
But ignoring female experience and keeping it absent from the West End means that commercial theatre is only offering half the population’s story. So, the arrival of *Inter Alia*, which centres female experience in intriguing and layered ways, is welcome. **Miller**’s play, which perhaps might be seen as the flip side of her hit *Prima Facie*, sees a welcome return to the stage by [**Rosamund Pike**](https://www.londontheatredirect.com/news/who-is-rosamund-pike), who gives an all-guns-blazing performance as successful judge Jessica Parks, a woman constantly spinning plates as she tries to balance her professional and personal life.
But like a modern Greek tragedy, everything comes tumbling down in a tense scenario when a girl accuses Parks’ teenage son of sexual misconduct. Inter Alia comes with shades of **Jack Thorne**’s *Adolescence* in its examination of online influences, peer pressure and parenting, but what makes it so effective is the way it so neatly delves deep into a woman’s domestic life and maternal guilt and reflects it back through the prism of wider societal responsibility.
At its beating heart, *Inter Alia* is a play about justice of many kinds, not just in how law interprets it. At a time when more and more information is uncovered in the **Epstein** files and questions about who evades justice and who is denied it cannot be ignored, *Inter Alia* reminds us that women’s experience can tell us as much about the world as *Hamlet*'s. Because unless those women’s voices are heard, we are only hearing half of the story.
[*Inter Alia*](https://www.londontheatredirect.com/play/inter-alia-tickets) plays at the Wyndham's Theatre until 20 June. Book your tickets today.