Agent 160 – review

Artist-led is a buzz word in theatre at the moment, but writer-led is still more unusual, and when all those writers are women you know something is afoot. New theatre company Agent 160 takes its title from the codename of Aphra Behn, a remarkable woman who acted as a spy for Charles II in the Netherlands, introduced milk punch to England and was the first English woman to earn her living by writing plays. Its mission is to increase the ludicrously low number of plays written by women seen on British stages. The last reliable figures suggest it is only around 17%, even though women make up 52% of the population and buy more theatre tickets than men.

The company begins its life with a touring road show of 12 plays by women writers, many of whom have a considerable body of work behind them yet still remain relatively invisible, certainly on main stages. You can catch six of the plays in a single evening, and while the short-play format makes for a slightly uneven evening, there is work here that is well worth seeing, and which belies the outdated notion that women only write domestic plays.

Morna Pearson's Skin; or How to Disappear may be no more than a sketch, but it deals directly with the coalition's policy on disability benefits. Lindsay Rodden's A Modest Proposal is a chilling glimpse at a future of closed borders and food shortages, where only the rich get to eat the pies. Lisa Parry's Nancy lets us glimpse inside the raging heart of a middle-aged women who knows that she has been sold short by both her husband and the government, but also that she has made the wrong choices in her life.

It's not just writers but a raft of young women directors who are getting a chance to show what they can do, and Kate Nelson makes a good job of Ioanna Andersen's How to Be a Pantomime Horse, an unsettlingly surreal and dreamlike playlet in which a woman survives a plane crash. Director Abigail Graham and performer Jennifer Jackson make the most of Sarah Grochala's The Red Shoes, an astonishingly direct yet poetic piece of writing, a perfect miniature that explores desire and madness in London's Westfield shopping centre.