As the Jeffrey Epstein juggernaut rolled across the media landscape earlier this year, transfixing the world with its grim stories of corruption and sexual abuse by powerful and well-connected men, a small group of female playwrights decided enough was enough: there was a glaring need for the story to be turned on its head, to focus on the suffering of the victims rather than the perpetrators.
The writers all belonged to a WhatsApp group. “I just put out a call,” says Rebecca Lenkiewicz. “I asked: ‘Is anyone else enraged about the Epstein files and how it’s all about the men and the money?’ It wasn’t just a question of what happened, but of how it is being dealt with by the press afterwards.” Lenkiewicz was all too familiar with the history of abusive and powerful men, being the screenwriter of She Said, about the struggle to bring Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein to justice.
Forty-five writers responded. “So, I said, let’s actually make something. It started off very grassroots – perhaps we’ll all get together and have a reading – and it just escalated.” Three months later, she and a team of directors and designers are days away from premiering a spectacle that will involve the work of more than 80 female and non-binary writers, unfolding across 15 spaces in a repurposed office block in the City of London.
With a week to go, the final texts are still landing. “It really is guerrilla theatre, where art meets activism,” says Lucy Morrison, the director responsible for bringing all the elements together. “It’s lots of ideas flying across the airwaves, but actually the space sits there with nothing in it yet. But, excitingly, there are lots of artists who are going to bring themselves and their bodies as well as their ideas and their words.”
All the Rage will be a work of two halves: the first invites spectators to wander through small rooms full of text, images and installations, writing their own responses if they wish; the second will gather the audience together for a 50-minute theatre piece that Lenkiewicz is in the process of stitching together, for performance by nine actors – all but one of them female. Part of the philosophy is that contributors will give what they can, with writers doubling up as everything from publicists to stage managers. That comes with an acceptance that all the participants will be fitting it in around their other work.
Morrison, who now has a full schedule teaching at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, has brought in some student designers she has met there to help curate the smaller spaces, as well as three other directors, freeing her up to concentrate on the collective piece. “Some of the writers are self-directing, some will want support, some won’t even be there,” she says. “We’ve got so much material that it’s about having enough directors who can quickly take a monologue and work on it with an actor.”
All the Rage is in a tradition of rapid-response theatre, one outstanding example of which will be extracted as part of it. Lucy Kirkwood’s blistering 30-minute play Maryland – premiered at the Royal Court then adapted for TV – was written in two days in 2021 in response to the murders of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa. It is the only non-original piece in the show, included to gesture at its lineage, and also to emphasise that Epstein and his cronies were not outliers in their disregard for the lives of women.
Writers were encouraged to restrict themselves to five-minute scenes or monologues. But in the democratic spirit of the show, says Lenkiewicz, “if they want their half-hour play put on the wall, they can do that. We didn’t have a selection process, because we felt it was important there was no hierarchy.”
One of those who answered the call is Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, who is no stranger to the heat such interventions can generate: her play Behzti (Dishonour), which featured a rape in a Sikh place of worship, was cancelled mid-run in Birmingham in 2005 after protesters besieged the theatre.
Bhatti is contributing a scene inspired by a classic 1970s Indian film, Pakeezah, in which a courtesan is forced to dance on glass from a chandelier, which is shattered as men throw coins at her. “I suppose I’ve written about [the glamorisation of] what is essentially sex work and control of women,” says Bhatti. “And then it explodes into a current story about the kind of micro-objectifications that happen in daily life, using the shards of glass as a point of inspiration. It’s about moving from the macro to the micro.”
Another writer, Timberlake Wertenbaker, decided to frame her contribution as a question. “In this day of social media,” she says, “we don’t question enough, but I think the discipline of questioning – of never quite being sure – is a good one. It’s also very much to do with theatre, because theatre is always a question: you’ve got lots of different people there, not saying the same thing.”
Wertenbaker, the author of theatre classics such as Our Country’s Good, about a play put on in an Australian penal colony, is now 75 and talks of seeing waves of feminist energy disappearing. “It seems to me that the feminism of the 1970s and 80s never happened. The whole history is being erased. And the voices of women around the world are also being erased.”
She recalls talking to Iranian women at the time of the popular uprising caused by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini in 2022, after being arrested by the “morality police” for allegedly violating Iran’s strict dress code. “They were incredibly positive, saying this may be the first time there is a revolution really led by women. And what’s happened? You immediately get a war. There was a moment – it might have been Gaza – when you suddenly think that, despite everything, a lot of powerful men now feel OK because it’s back to what they know: war, fighting. Plus, you have Trump in the White House, who you know is really a model of abuse.”
The unfolding catastrophe of the Middle East might seem a long way from the crimes of a disgraced financier, but as everyone involved in the project makes clear, the whole point of All the Rage is to find the universal in the particular, or its reverse, the micro in the macro: to explore how such shocking depravities as those of Epstein or Weinstein map on to the everyday lives of women all over the world today.
What sort of pushback can a small piece of theatre offer? “I do not see something that involves 80-plus writers as being small at all,” says Bhatti. “Theatre is not documentary, it’s not a news report. What our imaginations do is create story that transcends what we think we know, enabling us to feel. And that feeling can ignite a kind of activism – because, though you can forget facts, you don’t ever forget how you feel. But it’s a slow process. We’re talking about centuries of patterns of behaviour.”
Lenkiewicz agrees: “We’ve all had something happen to either a friend, ourselves or our family. It’s not like it’s a foreign subject. So I think it’s important to talk and share, because this idea of shame is still very prevalent. It would be so wonderful if somehow we could shift that.”
Apart from initiating, leading and editing the show, Lenkiewicz’s own contributions will include a poem, a letter and a video. “I am going to interview a lot of teenagers,” she says. “That’s what I passionately wanted to do, because I thought it was so important to show a teen energy before anyone has damaged, defaced or blunted it.”
She adds: “It’s a collective response. It’s not about waving banners and shouting. It’s about gathering the rage and transforming it into something not exactly palatable, but rather beautiful and profound.”
-
All the Rage is at Theatre Deli, London, 11-13 June
