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Ella Hickson's acute play about a woman playwright confronting everyday sexism in life as much as in theatre is brilliantly scripted, says LYNNE WALSH
Romola Garai in The Writer
[Manuel Harlan] 
JAMES WALSH takes advantage of an evening of comedy snippets to pick out which clowns will make it in Edinburgh
MAYER WAKEFIELD is swept up by the tale of the south London venue where music forged alliances across race, class and identity
MAYER WAKEFIELD applauds Rosamund Pike’s punchy and tragic portrayal of a multi-tasking mother and high court judge
FIONA O CONNOR recommends an unflinching depiction of child sexual abuse and its aftershocks, set in a working-class Liverpool family
New releases from Paul Weller, Wet Leg, and Dino Saluzzi
The Writer
Almeida Theatre, London
IN THE WRITER, the audience certainly has to put the work in. But the rewards come thick and fast. There's resonance aplenty in Ella Hickson’s energy-packed, layered and complex piece of theatre about theatre, which doesn’t so much play with genre as bend it, snap it to smithereens and put it back together again — or sometimes not.
In a tremendous opening scene, a young woman (Lara Rossi) describes watching a Bullingdon Club-type scenario on stage: “The audience is the same!” she protests. It’s reminiscent of the rape scene in The Accused, when women in cinema audiences experienced men sitting around them whooping and cheering.
Hickson's agenda is set, and the titular protagonist (Romola Garai, pictured) comes across as a desperately uncertain artist but that impression is rapidly dispelled — we realise that she’s not neurotic but anarchic. Her yearning is deep, her vision wide, but directors exist to squash a passion for theatre that “should be insurgent.”
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This year’s Bristol Radical History Festival focused on the persistent threats of racism, xenophobia and, of course, our radical collective resistance to it across Ireland and Britain, reports LYNNE WALSH
LYNNE WALSH previews the Bristol Radical History Conference this weekend
With most of recorded history dominated by the voices of men, LYNNE WALSH encourages sisters to read the memoirs of women – and to write their own too
