London Performance Studios and Unfinished Histories were pleased to present two day-long playreading sessions that explored works by pioneering voices of early out gay theatre from the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

About

Alexander Gallimore (he/him) is a performer, playwright, and archivist whose artistic practice explores the intersections of Blackness, queerness, colonialism, fanaticism and folklore. Raised in both Jamaica and Toronto, his work challenges conventional narratives by integrating archival research, particularly in Afro-Caribbean art history, with expressionistic and experimental contemporary performance.  He has previously been an artist in residence at The Face Magazine and  London Performance Studios. Alexander was a youth programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival and has developed work under commission from Vice Media Group. He is a graduate from East 15’s Contemporary Theatre program where he received the David Garrick Scholarship. Most recently, his new play Boys Beware was nominated for the Alfred Fagon Mustapha Matura Award. He currently works closely with the alternative theatre archive Unfinished Histories.

​​Rachel Mars (she/her) is a writer and performer based in the UK. She works at the cross-over of performance art and theatre, interrogating the possibilities of live assembly; female, Jewish and Queer identities and their intersections; and the ways cultural and political constucts affect everyday human behaviours. Her recent performance work includes: FORGE, a durational metalwork installation exploring memorial inheritance and historical replica; YOUR SEXTS ARE SHIT: OLDER BETTER LETTERS, an archive of sex and desire; OUR CARNAL HEARTS, a choral dissection of envy; ROLLER, with Mars.tarrab, a fight show about female aggression and Roller Derby, and STORY #1/#3, an ongoing collaboration with Greg Wohead on radical narrative. She has won a Total Theatre Award and the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award. For screen, she is currently on the TV Foundation New Writers Collective and was a participant on the inaugural UK and Ireland Writers Lab. She has performed all over the UK and internationally, including recently at Under The Radar in NYC, UMS Michigan, Barbican London, Brisbane International Festival, Brighton International Festival, Fusebox Festival Austin and On The Boards in Seattle.

Susan Croft (she/her) is a writer, curator, dramaturg and bibliographer. She was co-founder and is Director of Unfinished Histories, documenting the history of the alternative theatre movement in Britain. Her work concentrates on complicating narratives and supplementing the archive and the repertory by retrieving the history of marginalised groups in theatre and rediscovering neglected work, especially by women, LGBTQ+ and Black and Asian writers and by experimental performance makers. She has edited volumes of classic plays by women, suffrage plays and lost plays of the women’s theatre movement, most recently Radical Rediscoveries 1969-1987 Performance Texts from the Women’s Theatre Movement (Montez Press, 2025) In recent years she has curated Acting Out: LGBTQ+ Theatre in the 1970s and 80s and is leading Unfinished Histories’ three year project FYFFI, Fifty Years of the Fight for Inclusion as Associate Artist at London Performance Studios.

Unfinished Histories was founded in 2006 by Susan Croft and Jessica Higgs and later established as an independent organisation in 2012. It is dedicated to preserving and celebrating the history of Alternative Theatre in Britain from the 1960s to the 1980s. Through extensive interviews and archival work, Unfinished Histories highlights the pioneering contributions of marginalised communities, including Black, Asian, disabled, and LGBTQ+ communities, women, and other politically engaged theatre groups, ensuring their transformative legacy is recognised and remembered.