New Shelagh Stephenson play to launch Radical North East season
Tickets on sale for Live Theatre show
A new play by Shelagh Stephenson is always a significant event and arguably more so when it promises to shine a light on a figure from North East history.
She did it in 2009 with A Northern Odyssey, brilliantly imagining American artist Winslow Homer’s brief but inspirational spell in Cullercoats, the North Tyneside fishing village.
And she did it again in 2016 with Harriet Martineau Dreams of Dancing, bringing a major 19th Century figure to life on stage at Live Theatre.
Martineau, who was invited to Queen Victoria’s coronation by Victoria herself, was a social theorist and writer who put the case for women’s education and the abolition of slavery.
The play focused on the few years she spent in Newcastle and then Tynemouth, rendered virtually bedridden by a mystery condition.
A plaque on the wall of 57 Front Street, Tynemouth, reads: “Harriet Martineau, novelist, political economist and England’s first woman journalist, regained her health here 1840 – 1845.”
For this third Live Theatre commission, Stephenson turns to another notable woman featured on a plaque, Mary Astell, and an imagined meeting with the novelist Virginia Woolf.
It would have to be imaginary. Newcastle-born Astell, remembered as a ‘proto-feminist’ in that her ideas were formed long before feminism was a recognised concept, lived from 1666 until 1731 when she died in London after a mastectomy.
Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 and lived until 1941 when she drowned herself in the River Ouse while suffering from depression.
What would they have said to each other, these formidable champions of women’s rights?
That’s the question Shelagh Stephenson, who grew up in North Tyneside, set herself in writing Astell & Woolf, a play in which she imagines the pair meeting each other in a waiting room in the afterlife.
Astell, who grew up in a conservative and comparatively well-heeled Newcastle family, was the daughter of a coal merchant and was educated by her uncle, the Rev Ralph Astell, using the library of St Nicholas’ Church (now Newcastle Cathedral).
This you can learn from the plaque which was affixed to the cathedral’s boundary wall on International Women’s Day in 2023 in acknowledgment of her achievements and to serve as inspiration to women and girls today.
Also recorded is her rhetorical question whose fame outlived her own: “If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?” (From her Reflections on Marriage, 1700)
You can see how that would have appealed to Virginia Woolf who encapsulated the challenges faced by woman in many pithy phrases, including: “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”
There is no known portrait of Mary Astell, who never married, but she hasn’t been entirely forgotten in the North East.
There is that plaque and she is also the first woman to feature in the first volume of Angels of the North, the book celebrating “notable women of the North East” by Joyce Quin and Moira Kilkenny (Tyne Bridge Publishing, 2018).
Live Theatre describe Astell & Woolf as “a surreal new comedy” which will launch a Radical North East season in 2016.
It is also described as a “fast-paced two-hander, packed with dark comedy and electrifying language” which offers “an unexpected look at major feminist issues, using comedy to delve into a much darker reality”.
“Art, God, the patriarchy, two bottles of sherry and wave particle duality,” says the playwright who was an actress before finding fame with her first two plays in the late 1990s, The Memory of Water and An Experiment with an Air Pump.
“Something for everyone. Plus jokes!”
The play is to be directed by Karen Traynor who earned acclaim for her production of Tiny Fragments of Beautiful Light at Newcastle’s Alphabetti Theatre.
“Feminism can feel like a challenging word these days, so perhaps this is the perfect moment to examine the idea of it, what it means to us and where it began,” she says.
“Mary Astell is our very own North East pioneer and, like many other great women from history, is relegated to its furthest ranks.
“Shelagh’s clever and brilliant play allows us to see her at last – imagine her wit, her intelligence and finally, perhaps, claim her as our own.
“The conversation between Astell and Woolf is provocative and hilarious and I can’t wait to get in the rehearsal room with both of them.”
Jack McNamara, artistic director at Live Theatre, adds: “Sometimes writers approach biographical material with a degree of reverence or objectivity.
“Not so with Astell & Woolf. Shelagh has taken the overlooked figure of Mary Astell as a jumping off point to create something hilarious, truly original and packed with ideas.
“It’s whip-smart and unashamedly entertaining but also goes headlong into the darkness of its subject.
“I’d never read anything quite like it – a kind of Endgame with feminists.
“The North East has a lot of hidden radical roots and this play marks our first foray into them, bringing them to the surface to shed light on where we are today.”
Astell & Woolf will run at Live Theatre from May 14 to June 6, 2026. Tickets are on sale now. To find out more and to book, go to the Live Theatre website.