As a creative practitioner, actor, singer and theatre-maker, my recent focus has been on new small-scale touring theatre productions which tell the life stories of two twentieth-century women: the composer and writer Ethel Smyth, and the writer Virginia Woolf. Both of these women were writing and creating their work within the modernist period and used innovative narrative forms. They introduced experimental ideas and techniques in their work with the stream of consciousness as a narrative device.

Ethel Smyth: Grasp the Nettle and Virginia Woolf: Killing the Angel were written for a single female performer with a pianist on stage, not a dramatic but a ‘neutral’ presence, as if in the orchestra pit. The scripts are compiled by editing text taken from the published autobiographical books, essays, letters and diaries written by these women into a dramatic structure. Solely drawing from their words provides an authenticity to the text, placing each character in her time, weighted with her phrasing, nuance and humour. These one-woman plays rely on the ‘drama’ to be built by the character's journey, her preoccupation with her internal reality and her response to other characters and events. At all times, the performer is aware of and talking to the audience; there is no conventional ‘fourth wall’. The audience is required to leap in time and place with the character on her journey with minimal help from the set or props.

These scripts are mostly drawn from Ethel Smyth's eight published autobiographical books, letters and newspaper articles and Virginia Woolf's memoirs, autobiographical and polemic essays, letters and diaries. Both women experimented in life-writing and narrative form. The text is delivered as a stream of consciousness; the character is her own storyteller. An intimacy develops between her and the audience, drawing them in as her confidants, privy to private thoughts and desires, and enabling an audience to suspend its disbelief; the actor ‘is’ the historical woman in question. Janet Gibson, convenor of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Opera, remarked of the performance: ‘I am left with the distinct impression that I was in the presence of Smyth herself.’