Trouble Brewing on the London Stage: Women Demanding More Roles

A groundswell is brewing in London over the lack of roles for women on the London stage.  It started due to the fact that a bunch of plays recently produced at the Hampstead Theatre, the Globe, the English National Opera, and Chariots of Fire in the West End have all-male or male dominated casts.
It's striking how this situation in the UK theatre mirrors the issues related to women and film and theatre here in the US.  Each day I become more and more convinced that these are global issues, and that while thing might be a little different here and there, there remains much difficulty for women to still acheive parity all through the arts.

Some people are sick of it and playwright Stella Duffy made a call for women (who buy 70% of theatre tickets) to use their dollars to seek out plays with more of a gender balance:

Theatre, as we learn in Hamlet, is supposed to offer a window on society and yet women are treated as though they are a minority. If we don't tackle this, what hope is there for the female disabled actor, the black woman actor – they have been made a minority twice...We need, as women, to be more circumspect, to seek out plays with female roles – it is not easy, but it is worth doing.

"It is not easy, but is worth doing."  That is an important point.  And one way to make a difference is to look for plays written by women because the statistics show that women writers create more roles for women.

Read more at Women and Hollywood