Out of the Margins

Her Naked Skin was the first play by a living female playwright to be staged on the Olivier stage of the National Theatre, in 2008 (!) The groundbreaking feminist playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz enclosed a typed letter to us with her contribution and we felt it was the best way to describe her lot. Note: the author’s ellipses are her own. 

“I’m enclosing an annotated version of Her Naked Skin… it was performed in 2008 at the National… this script is from when it was revived and it needed a few less people in the cast, hence the cuts. 

Good Chance Theatre are an incredible group and it felt right that Her Naked Skin was the play I’d choose to give to the auction as it was the one play where I felt its story was so deeply important… it celebrates the suffragettes and forgotten voices and Good Chance has been such a powerful and brilliant force for hearing voices that authorities are trying to silence. So this was a good match. 

I have scrawled over the text about various lines and references and meanings… but just a few words about the origin of the play. I had always wanted to write about the suffragettes and buying Mitch Mackenzie’s book in the market under Waterloo Bridge finally gave me the direction for the play to take. Here were first-hand testaments of the women involved and they were so deeply impressive… and strangely modern feeling. The photos of the incarcerated feminists too felt as though they had been taken in Camden 2020 or Glastonbury 2023… strong young women smoking and talking in the prison yards. 

I wanted the play to tell their story but didn’t want a biopic of the Pankhursts, however amazing they were… it needed to be more invisible women… so I made composites from the various testaments and added qualities from different people in my life… a lover who had rejected me was entrenched in Celia Cain… and I tried to mix the personal with the political and tell both a love story and the bigger story of the women’s fight for freedom. In some ways it is a similar battle… the fight to be one’s self and to be loved and the fight to be heard in a legal social context… to have a vote.

I have always felt incredibly proud to be a woman but I am mindful too of shame that society can pin upon women and I have always fought for equality with my writing and to eradicate the idea of shame in terms of power play and abuse." 

The play was a commission for the National and I imagined it in the then Cottesloe Theatre to follow my first play there. But Howard Davies championed it and he and Nick Hytner met me and suggested we change the play and put it on in the Olivier. I was excited by the idea and nervous that the intimacy of it would be lost. But the actors and Howard’s beautiful direction kept the absolute spirit of the personal and the political. It was a privilege to work with all of them. I hope you enjoy the script. Best to anonymous You if this script found a bid and home… and to the brilliant Good Chance. 

From Rebecca” 

Beneath the typewritten letter, Rebecca Lenkiewicz scribbles in her own hand: “‘It was the best of times, it as the worst of times’ Hoping for better times?” 

Accompanying this generous lot is an 1898 original edition of a Girls Own Annual, photos from the play (as mentioned) and a copy of the script.