DIRECTOR’S NOTE

Imara Savage — Director

In 1936, Clare Boothe Luce wrote The Women, a comedy-of-manners with an all-female cast, where all they talk about is men. In Miriam Battye’s 2020 spiritual successor, Battye offers a tongue-in-cheek answer to the Bechdel test, in a play which explores the modern sexual politics and patriarchal pressures faced by millennial and gen z women, and the importance of female friendships.

There’s a scene in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, where Jo (Saoirse Ronan) wonders if anyone would be interested in reading a book about her sister’s domestic lives. Amy (Florence Pugh) replies “Maybe we don’t see those things as important because people don’t write about them… Perhaps writing will make them more important.” This is the perfect analogy for what makes Scenes with Girls a valuable play to stage today.

Battye questions the “Typical Narrative” in storytelling, what we prioritise and what we honour as ‘important’. It interrogates the value society places on romantic (often heteronormative) relationships and re-focuses the lense on female friendship (usually relagated to the subplot).

The installation artworks of Tracey Emin (My Bed 1998) and Tamara Santibañez (I was thinking about everything, but then again, I was thinking about nothing 2018) achieved the same thing as Battye’s play: by putting their own bedrooms in an art gallery, it validated the importance of intimate stories about the minutiae of women’s lives. Their work has served as inspiration for the design world and helped us find a middle ground between a realistic messy sharehouse, and a stylised gallery space.

Through conversations with the creatives, we have explored how to create an intimate voyeuristic experience for the audience. Battye wrote on Succession season 4, and her interest in televisual writing is clear from format of this playtext: which totals at 29 episodic-style scenes.

Miriam Battye wrote this in her late twenties as part of the Royal Court’s Writers Group. While the play’s content appears relatable to that twenties demographic (hookup culture, dating apps, friendship), that doesn’t make it a simple text.

Battye was inspired by a modern movement of political, post-dramatic female British playwrights who are radically challenging form. Battye was mentored by Alice Birch (Anatomy of a Suicide, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again.) whose peers include the indomitable Caryl Churchill and Ella Hickson (whose play The Writer joins us in the June season). In their defiance of traditional Aristotelian form, these women investigate how new forms can speak to the female experience.