Rehearsal Room 26 unleashed Notorious Strumpets and Dangerous Girls at the Traverse for one night only.
Scottish theatre company Stellar Quines specialises in promoting the voices of women, through the stories they tell and through ensuring the creative roles – writers, directors, designers – are driven and led by female practitioners. This is their 26th Rehearsal Room, where actors have just one day to work on a new script with the writer and director, before presenting the piece to a live and paying audience, that same evening, for the very first time.
The atmosphere is intimate and informal. The cast of eight – six of them female – walk onto a stage furnished only with plain wooden chairs, armed with scripts and wearing their own clothes. They perform excerpts from a work that is still very much in progress, the writer having provided the audience with questions to consider during the performance, to be discussed after the reading as part of the development process.
Notorious Strumpets and Dangerous Girls, written by award-winning playwright Lynda Radley and directed by Glasgow-based Emily Reutlinger, imagines the largely untold stories of those women who were transported to Tasmania (then known as Van Diemen’s Land) as convicts during the first half of the 19th Century. The first act follows the women on their journey on board the ship, with Act two setting them in the Female Factory, an unhygienic, overcrowded prison in the shadow of Mount Wellington.
Focussing as it does on the experiences of Scots and Irish female convicts, the discussion afterwards began with a debate about the mix of languages and accents within the play, which was generally agreed did appear authentic and worked well. There was also some discussion around how the play resonates with contemporary life and a plea to develop the relationships between the women – who bonds with whom and why, as well as how allegiances are made and betrayals enacted.
There is an earthy and lyrical feel to this piece, still in its early stages, that immediately draws you in. Original convict folksongs are used to stirring effect – no matter that some of the words have been changed to suit this bunch of female protagonists. Looking forward to seeing the full-scale production in due course.