Experimental... Debbie Tucker Green's Generations. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
The premieres last week of Alexandra Wood's debut play The Eleventh Capital at the Royal Court and Debbie Tucker Green's Generations at the Young Vic are a reminder - if it was needed - that it is women who are often in the forefront of experiments in form and style in British theatre. Over the last 20 years Caryl Churchill has proved herself a tireless seeker after new form and it seems that her creative, rumbustious successors are increasingly taking up the baton with enthusiasm and confidence too.
For many women, it is not just what you say but how you say it that matters. I'm thinking of writers such as Green, the late Sarah Kane, Abi Morgan, Bryony Lavery, Polly Teale, Judith Adams and Rona Munro as well as more recent newcomers such as Laura Wade and Georgia Fitch whose plays snake around on themselves or which use the kind of jump cut techniques more associated with movies. These writers often put realism, surrealism and poetry in the blender and come up with something refreshingly new in which the internal and unconscious is unexpectedly exposed.
Yet it still seems to be the case that when women experiment in form they are more likely to be shot down by critics and told that they don't know how to structure a play properly. Sarah Kane's Blasted was condemned not just for its subject matter but also for its shift into a different reality half way through. The playwright tirelessly grappled with marrying form and content throughout her short career.
Back in the mid-1980s when both women theatre critics and playwrights were in pretty short supply, accusations that women didn't know how to write proper plays were commonplace. Jack Tinker dismissed Churchill's now-classic Cloud Nine because of its "sloppy construction" while another male critic complained: "The play, if I may use the term of a work that is almost totally innocent of any formal structure, may be about nothing at all." Reviewing Sarah Daniels' Byrthrite at the Royal Court, Mark Lawson declared: "Ms Daniels has a gift for provocative invective but she is a poor storyteller: perhaps linear narrative is too phallic."
Well perhaps it is. I've certainly heard it suggested that the well made play in Aristotelian mode corresponds closely to the male orgasm in the way it reaches its climax, release and post-coital conclusion. But maybe choosing not to write a traditionally structured play doesn't mean that you don't know how to write one, simply that you want to find different ways to tell your stories. It's the hoary old "do abstract artists know how to draw properly debate.
Male innovators in form - and yes there are plenty of them, although not as many as their sisters - often get a much easier time of it from the critics: Crimp has had an easier ride than Churchill, and when Tom Stoppard utilised a double time frame in Arcadia in 1993 everyone cheered and said what a clever boy he was to think of it. I'd be the first to admit he did it beautifully (I'm not a big Stoppard fan, but Arcadia never fails to get me where it hurts) but I'd also point out that writers such as Sarah Daniels, Louise Page and Lou Wakefield were just some of many women using multiple time frames and parallel plots on a regular basis throughout the 1980s.
Times fortunately have changed, and there is now an entire army of women playwrights marching out there in the direction of the future who will not be stopped by a bit of critical sniping. But when I hear people saying about Green's Generations: "Oh, it's very interesting, but it's not really a play, is it?" I know that we've still got a long way to go before women's experiments in form are accepted without qualification.
