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Staged Reading: Her Naked Skin by Rebecca Lenkiewicz

Directed by Gaye Poole

30 November & 6 December, 2019

Her Naked Skin by Rebecca Lenkiewicz has the distinction being the first full-length play by a female playwright to be staged on the Olivier stage at London's National Theatre - in 2008!

The playwright explores the hunger for political and personal emancipation that fuelled the suffragette movement in 1913. The play charts, with remarkable precision and contained anger, the inhumane attitudes of the supposedly civilised men who sanction what amounts to torture of what they call "the lunatic fringe of lonely frigid women who crave attention". The scenes in the House of Commons and Holloway Prison are an indictment of both the fear of giving women power and the brutality of suppression.

Lenkiewicz's real concern is to show how female militancy transcended class and sexual convention. The question she obliquely raises is whether liberation is more easily achieved from a position of social privilege.

Cast

Adrienne Clothier
Tara Given
Nick Clothier
Sara Young
Clive Lamdin
Fiona Sneyd
Tycho Smith
Liam Hinton
David Lumsden
Kendra Boyle
Melanie Allison
Julianne Boyle
Andrew Lyall
Lani McNamara
Nicolas Wells