Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own by Lizbeth Goodman, and: A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era by Sheila Stowell (review)

424 Book Reviews Any book about Britain's most popular and prolific comic dramatist is bound to be of interest to those of us who deplore his present neglect by the majority of academic critics, but this one is frustrating because the author's knowledge of the subject sug· gests that he could have done much to draw morc critical attention to Ayckboum's work. Lack of foc'us and depth together with an awkward and convoluted prose (certain passages are nearly incomprehensible) stand in the way. We still do not have a major critical interpretation of Ayckboum's work. STUART E. BAKER, FLORIDA STAlE UNIVERSITY LIZBETH GOODMAN. Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own. London and New York: Routledge 1993. Pp. 313, illustrated. $49.95, $17.95 (PB). SHED..A STOWELL. A Stage o/Their Own: Feminist Playwrights ofthe Suffrage Era. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press 1992. Pp. 170. $34.50. These two books obviously share a common focus on feminism and theatre yet their titles evocatively suggest an intriguing difference: StoweU's "stage of their own" points to a sense of inclusion while Goodman's "to each her own" indicates individuality and difference. In the broadest of terms these distinctions can be applied to the first and second waves of feminist theatre about which Stowell and Goodman respectively write. Stowell concentrates on playwrights who utilized their craft for the suffrage cause. Her interest is in genre, the ways in which the feminist playwrights manipulated the theatrical fonns they inherited and "the symbiotiC relationship between such form and its content" (6). To this end she has selected four landmark plays as representat.ive of the important theatre work of this period: Elizabeth Robins's "dramatic tract" Votes for Women! (1907), Cicely Hamilton's romantic comedy Diana of Dobson's (1908), the gritty realism of Elizabeth ~aker's lower middle class world in Chains (1909), and the grim realities of the business class in Githa Sowerby's Rutherford and Son (1912). Stowell provides pithy, detailed precis of these plays in which she makes connections between their style and form and that of mainstream theatre as represented by male playwrights. She layers her discussion with critical commentary from both the feminist press and conventional reviewing to givc a sense of these plays' reception. She is also sensitive to the supportive yet problematic vO, ices of sympathetic male playwrights such as Granvi1le Barker, Galsworthy and Shaw. These men, who significantly endorsed female enfranchisement, explored "the Woman Question" quite differently from the women writers under discussion here. Stowell's analysis of this differenceboth in theme and dramatic form - is impressive. In her analysis of the scripts by Baker and Sowerby she takes the opportunity to reclaim realism for feminist theatre practitioners. Arguing against Jin Dolan's thesis that realism tends to replicate and reinscribe the dominant cultural and political alli- Book Reviews 425 ances, Stowell claims that both Baker and Sowerby "employ stage realism as a means of indicting the societies they depict" (IOI). Her argument is convincing yet could it not also be applied to Gorky, to Ibsen, to Chekhov? Were not the first realist playwrights considered revolutionary in their own time? Were they employing realism as an inherent criticism of their culture? Undoubtedly. Dolan's thesis considers realism in a late 20th century context, a comext that is riddled with a surfeit of filmic and televisual "reality." Nevertheless, Stowell stokes the fires of an ongoing debate among feminist theatre scholars and in doing so offers some fascinating historical examples of realism that have been ignored in conventional studies of the genre. Complementing her focus on these four scripts, Stowell includes an all too brief chapter on "Suffrage Drama." Here she provides some of the important connections between the plays and the social and political events of the period. She examines a range of shorter scripts often perfonned for political rallies and gives some background to the founding of the Actresses' Franchise League (AFL) and the Women Writers' Suffrage League (WWSL). This chapter begins to consider production elements directors , theatre spaces, design elements, management - that are given short shrift in the other chapters. Indeed, the material is so intriguing that...