While we're nitpicking, why no place for the South Bank's Jude Kelly – one of the few women in theatre to run an empire? Or the National Theatre of Scotland's Vicky Featherstone? I can think of a number of other women who could also stake a claim to a place on this list: West End theatre owner and producer Nica Burns, Arts Admin producer Judith Knight who has nurtured several generations of experimental artists, and Kate McGrath and Louise Blackwell of Fuel. Along with actors such as Rachel Weisz (an upcoming Blanche DuBois at the Donmar, but otherwise not on stage since 2001, so hardly indispensable), Summer Strallen and Michelle Dockery, many of the women listed will know that they will only be considered as good as their last show their future employment and projects are in the gift of others, however much they try to forge their own destinies.Īctors such as Mirren, Dench and Fiona Shaw may be at a stage in their careers where they are able to pick and choose their projects, but out of the entire list of 20 only two - producers Sonia Friedman and Sally Greene - have real power to make things happen. Since the piece appears to be sponsored by jeweller Tiffany, I very much hope that they all got an outsize rock to take home.īut I very much doubt that any of them would say they had real power to make things happen in theatre. Still, alongside the star names such as Judi Dench and Helen Mirren, it's good to see women such as Kneehigh's Emma Rice, Punchdrunk's Maxine Doyle, actor and director Kathryn Hunter, lighting designer Paule Constable, designer Miriam Buether, and playwright Bola Agbaje all getting the recognition they certainly deserve.
The strangest thing is the inclusion of Gillian Anderson (who, when I last checked, was a US citizen) as an honorary Brit, which suggests that the compilers were rather scraping the barrel of their knowledge about British theatre. The Harper's Bazaar women in theatre power list 2009 makes slightly bizarre reading.