Hello! Welcome back (after a year!) to the Bechdel Theatre blog, where we’re serving you a bumper collection of recommendations of theatre and performance that goes WELL above and beyond the basic low-bar of the Bechdel test - plus a selection of things to check out if you’re not physically going to theatres at the moment. First, a tiny update from us. Call it a gentle, the-pandemic-isn’t-over-yet, ultra-soft relaunch. This time last year, after we got our first ever funding

Listen to this blog in audio form 🔊 Big. Bechdel. News. 5 years after the idea for Bechdel Theatre was born, we’ve just been granted our first EVER bit of formal funding as a company, thanks to Arts Council England. This is game-changing! For those of you who don’t know, Bechdel Theatre CIC consists of 2 co-directors (Pippa & Beth) and er- that’s it! We’ve been running Bechdel Theatre in our spare time for the past 5 years, alongside several day jobs and our own creative wor

Wheeeww… that “Shows To See in 2020” blog we posted in January feels like it was posted about a decade ago?! But also, it seems like only yesterday we were bumping into pals in theatre bars, foyers, cafes & tunnels, hugging with abandon & rolling our eyes frustratedly about how “nothing in this industry ever changes”… Well, there’s been some changes. But this isn’t a blog about the future of post-pandemic feminist theatre. We haven’t stopped reeling to be able to think about

Happy New Year – it’s still appropriate to say that, right? Because January is THE longest month, and we still haven’t handed in our tax returns. Yep, we’ve been too distracted making plans for 2020, INCLUDING a massive great list of shows to see in the upcoming months. It goes without saying that we’re hyped to see the return of many successful shows from artists we already love, but we also love to see so many new names and faces cropping up with amazing looking work, and w

Autumn is well and truly upon us. It’s the season of golden leaves, shiny new stationary, and finding warm theatres to shelter us from increasingly volatile weather systems and rolling news cycles. Hopefully you’re here because you’d prefer to spend your hour-or-so inside the theatre with artists who engage in challenging the evil systems behind the apocalyptic atmosphere of this world right now. If so, you are in the right place. We’ve got so much good stuff to energise and

We’ve been in Edinburgh for a couple of weeks now, hunting down the best & most Bechdel-friendly theatre, comedy and performance – and there are still 10 more days left to catch any you’ve missed out on so far! If you’re in Edinburgh for this final stretch and still looking for recommendations with representation in mind, we can guarantee that a scroll through this list and our pre-Fringe shows-to-see blog will leave you spoilt for choice, whether you’re looking for belly-sha

Here they are, with ONE MONTH TO GO – our pre-Edinburgh Fringe picks for 2019. Listed below are our choices of shows on our radar, to help you plan your Fringe trip, entirely free of posh white guys with microphones (we’ve heard quite enough from those dudes, thanksvmuch). These are the shows that are the very TOP of our to-see list, by the artists we trust to make exciting work. They make up a tiny selection of the shows we’re excited to see in a festival with literally thou

A piece of embedded criticism. Just before I sit to write this I see that at 8:04am this morning I received an email from My Heritage DNA – Congratulations Pippa your DNA results are now ready. I pause. Fuck. Instead of opening the email, I open this word document. I’ve been thinking a lot about what this role of embedded critic means and how I feel incredibly biased because I’ve been excited about i will still be whole (when you rip me in half) since I saw it was announced o

Happy New Year, Bechdel testers! 2018 was a fairly decent one when it came to stage-watching.  We rode through the year powered by the energy of what seemed like a wave of FEMINIST BATTLECRY THEATRE, featuring killer ensemble casts filling stages across the country.  Shout out to I Have A Mouth And I Will Scream, Collective Rage, Jubilee, Hot Brown Honey & Hive City Legacy, The Sweet Science of Bruising, Dance Nation, Six, Hole, Emilia, and Queens of Sheba. We also saw a TON

Edinburgh Fringe is over for 2018, and thanks to the incredible supporters of our crowdfunder campaign, we made it to Edinburgh for the whole month this year, where we applied over 1000 stickers to posters of shows that passed the Bechdel test, recorded two new podcast episodes, and encountered more enthusiastic support for our mission to amplify under-represented voices than ever before. Looking at this year’s Fringe line-up compared to the previous two years when we’ve visi

Our first week of seeking feminist theatre at Edinburgh Fringe is over, and WHAT a wondrous week it has been! The representation and quality of work we’ve seen has been STRONG so far, and we’ve been applying stickers left, right and centre to posters of productions that pass the Bechdel test. Follow us on instagram & twitter to keep up with our festival highlights in real-time. We also took a moment out from seeing shows to record a podcast interview with Joana Nastari, creat

Heading up to Edinburgh Fringe and looking for shows to see that break from the stale/pale/male standard? Want to see something that represents you/the world as you recognise it/the changes you want to see/the FUTURE? Look no further. Listed below are our pick of the shows we have on our radar to help you plan your most entertaining and intersectional Fringe visit, without a one-man-show in sight. These are either shows that we’ve seen in previews, or have on our radar via HE

Welcome to our annual January run-down of the theatre productions that we’re most looking forward to – we don’t know if all of these shows will definitely pass the Bechdel test yet, but we hereby speculate that most of them will ace it. After 2017 proved to be erm… Challenging? Busy? Intense? Exciting? A Lot, basically, for feminists everywhere. This has given creatives a lot to reflect on and carry on to in 2018, and the year in theatre is already off to a buzzing beginning.

The Mono Box is a London-based collaborative network who, amongst other fabulous things (running workshops, panels, and advice forums), own a collection of over 3000 plays which they regularly open for anyone who wants to browse their mighty shelves of scripts in search of monologues, duologues and general inspiration. If you haven’t visited yet, get some of these dates in your diary to join in with some of their autumn events. All of the plays in The Mono Box’s ever-growing

Here it is, folks! The full list of our favourite shows from this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, in more detail than expected (we may have got carried away). There’s just over a week left of the festival, so if you’re in town and haven’t seen these shows yet, get booking ASAP. If you’re all fringed out, or didn’t make it to the festival, get these productions on your radar – Edinburgh is a springboard for successful shows to tour off the back of, so they’ll be likely to pop up agai

It’s that time again… We’re preparing to head up to Edinburgh Fringe, where we’ll be highlighting shows that pass the Bechdel test, celebrating women on stage, championing gender-conscious and female-led theatre, and doing all we can to help you find shows where women are not completely absent. If you’re up at the Fringe, make sure you look out for our stamps and stickers on posters all around the city (and let us know if you see a show that we haven’t highlighted yet). (PS

Shows on our radar for 2017… It’s as simple as that. As always, get in touch if you have more suggestions! We’ll be talking in more depth about some of these on Bechdel Theatre Podcast, live at VAULT Festival on Feb 1st. There are still a few tickets left so BOOK NOW to join us with guests including: Bella Heesom – writer and performer of My World Has Exploded A Little Bit (see below) Georgina Bobb – bipolar activist and founder of TVJobsUK Lekhani Chirwa – actor performing a

This month we’re in Edinburgh, awarding Bechdel test passing shows with stickers. Keep your eye out if you’re looking at a wall of posters and want to choose something with women at the forefront to break up the overwhelming maleness of most of the festival scene. If you see this logo you can be sure that women are being represented. For ongoing up-to-date tweets about Bechdel test passing shows, in Edinburgh and beyond, follow us on Twitter @BechdelTheatre, but if you’re pla

I wrote a guest blog for Waking The Feminists in praise of their work and how it has inspired Bechdel Theatre in the UK… http://www.wakingthefeminists.org/2016/05/03/wakingthefeminsts-story-uk-bechdel-theatre/

Today was the launch of Bechdel Theatre Festival, a year-long programme of events highlighting theatre that represents women as complex, diverse and not defined by men. For the next year (until March 2017) we will be holding pop-up conversations inspired by (and in association with) productions that pass the Bechdel Test with flying colours. Events will encourage audiences and theatre-makers to talk to each other about what we love to see (and want to see more of) when women