Critics' Choice: Aliya Al-Hassan's Women of the Year 2024

In increasingly difficult fiscal times, with a new government who seem to have as little regard for the arts as the previous incarnation, the challenges to the world of theatre are stark. However, in 2024, both on and off the stage, women in theatre continued to innovate, improvise, create, entertain and inspire. Here are a few of my heroines of 2024.

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Powerhouse female producers continue to shape what appears on our stages. Sonia Friedman was named in The Standard's annual power list of The Standard 100 People Shaping London. Her productions of Stranger Things: The First Shadow and The Hills Of California will open on Broadway in 2025, as well as Harry Potter and the Cursed Child celebrating eight years in the West End in July 2024. There was also the small matter of Sonia Friedman Productions being nominated for 21 Tony Awards, taking home nine this year too.

Nimax Theatres owner and West End producer Nica Burns was honoured with a CBE for services to theatre in June. She was also named BroadwayWorld's Accessibility Champion due to her pioneering work @sohoplace in making it as accessible as possible. In June the venue's Sensory Cinders became the first inclusive sensory pantomime specifically designed for audiences labelled with PMLD. 2025 will also see the West End transfer of the Kiln Theatre's acclaimed production of Retrograde by Ryan Calais Cameron.

Lynette Linton has done wonderful things as artistic director at the Bush Theatre. Her intimate staging of Shifters (also produced by SFP) rightly won a very successful West End transfer. Written by Benedict Lombe, the Congolese-British author, the show was touching, thoughtful and beautifully performed. Incredibly, Lombe is only the third black British woman writer to have work performed in the West End; Natasha Gordon's Nine Night was the first and Yasmin Joseph’s J’Ouvert the second. An incredible achievement, but one that was well overdue.

Always striving to give voice to minority groups, pushing the need for representation on and off the stage and supporting women, Linton has championed Eleanor Tindall’s inciteful Tender, Waleed Akbar's painfully honest The Real Ones and Faith Omole's tension-filled My Father's Fable, to name but a few. The new spring season at the Bush looks fascinating, but Linton's departure from the theatre in March (along with Daniel Bailey) after six fabulous years, will be keenly felt. I can't wait to see what she does next.

Imelda Staunton proved that her return to the stage was very much worth waiting for. Hello, Dolly! was initially due in the West End in 2020, but small issues such as a global pandemic and playing the Queen in Netflix's The Crown meant we had to be patient.

Stanton's stage presence was wonderful and the role felt as though it was written for her; she was funny, dynamic and cheeky, yet full of genuine emotion and heart. It was also wonderful to see two middle-aged women in such interesting roles and Olivier Award-winning Jenna Russell was great as widow Irene Molloy.

In one of the productions of the year, Denise Gough was simply mesmerising when she returned to Duncan MacMillan’s starkly raw study of addiction People, Places and Things, after a decade.

After revealing her own struggles with addiction, the troubled and conflicted role of Emma on stage was even more absorbing to watch. It is a truly superb performance; knotty, gnarly and, at times, very ugly. You simply could not take your eyes off her.

TV actors moving to the stage do not always translate well, but Succession's Sarah Snook in Kip Williams' trippy adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray more than proved her place treading the boards.

Taking on all 26 roles, while narrating the plot, Snook displayed chameleon-like distinction as every character, even when she had to switch with lightening speed between very contrasting roles. She has nothing to hide behind and it was a magnificent display of the most intricate stagecraft, well worthy of the Olivier Award she won. Marg Howell also deservedly won an Olivier for her fabulous costume design for the show.

A particular highlight for me was watching a giddy Arlene Phillips, a veritable spring chicken aged 80, finally win her first Olivier for her choreography of the superb Guys & Dolls. It earned the only complete standing ovation of the night. About bloody time!

The feminist powerhouse of Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World  came to The Other Palace in the summer; a joyful musical celebrating powerful women and espousing values of sisterhood and self-belief. A lesson from HERstory indeed.

Currently showing is the National Theatre's beautiful show Ballet Shoes; an adaptation Noel Streatfeild’s story of determination, hope and female empowerment. It's a treat of a show which just happens to have a female author, adaptor, choreographer, set designer and director. 

Representation has a fair way to go. The latest Women in Theatre Survey Update reported that only 6% of respondents believe there has been an increase in opportunities for women in theatre.

However, there is much to be positive about. In April 2024, writer Rafaella Marcus and Bush Theatre associate dramaturg Titilola Dawudu were among the 10 playwrights chosen for the inaugural Women in Theatre Lab. The cohort are receiving one-to-one mentoring, a seed commission, sessions on business and craft skills and a showcase, in an initiative spearheaded by the likes of April De Angelis and Timberlake Wertenbaker.

Back in July, Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse and Theatr Clwyd nominated a female playwright each to support as part of a scheme tackling under-representation of women writers. Tamasha and Fuel also put forward candidates for the Women in Theatre Lab project in a bid to end barriers blocking female playwrights’ careers.

The women’s prize for playwriting (WPP), the leading award for female and non-binary playwrights in the UK and Ireland, aiming to support and showcase established writers and emerging talent has also returned for 2025, with the largest ever prize fund of £20,000.

Women continue to shine as theatrical decision-makers; Michelle Terry at Shakespeare’s Globe, Nancy Medina at Bristol Old Vic, Tamara Harvey as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s first permanently appointed female artistic director (in partnership with Daniel Evans) and Rachel O’Riordan at the Lyric Hammersmith. 

2025 will also see Indhu Rubasingham taking over as the director of the National Theatre, marking the first time that a woman and a person of colour has taken on the biggest role in British theatre. After taking the Kiln Theatre to increasingly great places, Rubasingham has a huge job on her hands, but it will be fascinating to see what she can do. Roll on 2025!

Main Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan

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