Editors’ note

The political, cultural, theatrical, and feminist matrix is very different in the 1980s from that of the 1970s that Michelene Wandor charts at the close of the last part. In terms of the Women’s Movement specifically, a major shift by the end of the 1970s was constituted by thinking about difference, rather than sisterhood; acknowledging that not all women are oppressed in the same way, but, for example, are affected by different economic, class, or ethnic factors. Susan Bassnett’s chapter which opens this part looks at 'the politics of location' as a site of difference in 1980s and 1990s politics and culture, arguing that where you are, where you live, is inextricably bound up with issues of who you are - with issues of gender, identity, and oppression. This is particularly true in Britain which, as Bassnett describes, has constituent national cultures in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and England. The politics of these national cultures and locations will create very different stage pictures, arguments, and feminisms. Chapters in this section examine women’s playwriting in relation to the various 'politics of [national] location'.

Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland all have histories of seeking separate national identities from England. In Wales in the late 1960s the assertion of identity was marked by the campaigning of the Welsh Language Society and the bomb outrages committed by the Welsh Home Rule Group. When it came to the referendum on devolution in 1979, however, the vote went convincingly against a national assembly. This, coupled with the election of Margaret Thatcher had, as Anna-Marie Taylor describes in the introduction to Staging Wales, 'a bearing on our lives well on into the 1990s.