Actors' union rallies theatres to create more parts for women

Janet Suzman is an actor who, by way of the Royal Shakespeare Company, has scaled the heights of the classical repertory, playing Shakespeare's women from Ophelia to Volumnia.

But it is a career that remains "really frustrating", she says, because "there aren't bloody well enough parts for women".

While men of her age have "great heroic cleaving parts still to play", and, at 73, she is "ready to play Lear", the big classical parts for women of her age simply do not exist.

And even when it comes to the towering part of Cleopatra – perhaps Suzman's most famous role – Shakespeare "doesn't allow her the interior wanderings when she falls from grace that he would to a man. All she gets is 'Tis paltry to be Caesar.' Richard  II, by contrast, has all those monologues about the fall of kings."

This week, Jean Rogers of the actors' union Equity spoke out, highlighting the need for better employment opportunities for women. It was an act sparked by Hampstead theatre's current season, which includes productions of Henry V and A Winter's Tale from the all-male company Propeller – a choice of casting that, of course, reflects Shakespeare having written for a company of boys and men.

But the problem extends across the industry. According to Nick Asbury, who is an actor with Propeller (the company consists of 21 people, of whom five, employed backstage, are women): "It's easier for male actors than for women from the time you start out until you finish. It is said in drama schools and it is said onstage. Because the fact is that until 30 years ago people were writing more parts for men than women."

Women have, from time to time, played Shakespeare's heroes: Fiona Shaw has played Richard II, Vanessa Redgrave Prospero, Kathryn Hunter Lear. The Globe has staged an all-woman Taming of the Shrew; and Tom Morris, artistic director of the Bristol Old Vic, says that he would like to stage an all-female Shakespeare play "though it would have to be a bloody good production for it not to be a meaningless experiment".

But, says Suzman, whose new book Not Hamlet explores what she calls "the frail position of women in drama", gender-blind casting of the classic repertory is not a solution.

Michael Boyd, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, agrees: "Tit-for-tat unisex productions are not the answer."

According to the playwright Zinnie Harris, who had success at last year's Edinburgh fringe with The Wheel: "A female Hamlet may balance the books a bit, and I'm not against it, but a role for women, created about a woman at the centre of a big play, is a really rare thing. The problem has to be partly to do with who is creating the roles.

"And it is no surprise then the female playwrights are seriously under-represented in the theatre too.

"With the classical repertoire, we understand the historical reasons, but why is it still happening now, what is it about theatre that continues this bias?"

Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland, has recently been appointed chief of the Royal Court in London, Britain's foremost theatre for new writing. She talks about the history of drama as a genre that adapted itself to the exterior world, to the great public debates about politics and war, as opposed to the novel, a more private form where interiority and the domestic have traditionally been explored. That characterisation began to shift, she says, with the emergence of high-profile playwrights such as Caryl Churchill.

For Featherstone, the problem of women's representation on stage can be solved only through a new type of theatre and new writing. "Tired old programming of old British plays is becoming more and more redundant. It is through new plays that we can represent the world we actually live in."

She points to a new generation of women playwrights, including Lucy Prebble who wrote Enron, Chloë Moss, author of The Gatekeeper, and the Bafta-award winning Abi Morgan – and a concomitantly shifting landscape for female actors that will, she hopes, increase as more women come to run theatres and work as directors.

However, Morris says: "There is still a tendency for young male directors to adopt a hyper-confident behavioural style and go about as if they know all the answers, whereas female directors tend to be a bit more humble and honest. Unfortunately, brash and crass can get your foot on the ladder in this business."

For companies anchored in the classical repertory, the approach, says Boyd, has to be more imaginative: hiring female directors, commissioning new work from women, and, where appropriate, making certain interventions – such as in the RSC's King John, directed by Maria Aberg, which has a woman playing the central role of the Bastard, though not uncontroversially: "The same people who get upset about colour-blind casting also get upset about gender-bending casting," he says.

For Suzman: "The question is inextricable from how society is." Theatre is unequal, because the world is. The problem will remain unsolved, she says, until "a load of geniuses come in and say 'I can write an autonomous woman who isn't someone's auntie, mother or lover; who is truly a free spirit'" – an equivalent of Hamlet rather than Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, with her "landscape of internal rottenness that she can't escape".

Until the authority and autonomy of women is accepted, theatre will register society's wider imbalances, says Harris. It is, she says, about society being able to "take a cultural or social commentary from men but finding it shrill from a woman. That stands for the writer as well as the character on stage … Interestingly, and depressingly, the contemporary female playwright who is performed the most on our stages – Sarah Kane – had to die before she was given her due credit."