A staged reading of one of the most powerful plays of the early women’s movement by poet, playwright, novelist, biographer and activist for gay rights, Maureen Duffy. Originally produced in 1969 by the National Theatre at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre, Rites has been described as ‘distorted from the story of The Bacchae,’ and is a wild, darkly comic and disturbing reworking of Euripides’ play set in a women’s public toilet. It uses the rituals of office chit-chat and female exchange to build a world, within which it ultimately stages a riotous, dark ritual.

This staged reading is produced by The Director’s Theatre’s Writer’s Theatre, and directed by Nathaniel Hussein Clark. 

About

Dr Susan Croft (she/her) is a writer and curator, specialising in theatre, especially women’s work, but also LGBTQ+ and Global Majority work. In 2007 she co-founded Unfinished Histories, the project dedicated to gathering the oral history and archive of the alternative theatre movement and serves as its Director. Her practice focuses on sharing this history with inter- generationally through exhibitions, readings, discussion and publications. Recent exhibitions include Radical Rediscovery: Feminist Theatre in Britain 1969-92 (2024), Acting Out: Celebrating LGBTQ Theatre of the 1970s and 80s, Black Theatre in Britain: 1950s-2000s (both 2023). Her publications include Radical Rediscoveries: Performance texts from the Women’s Theatre Movement 1960 -1990 (Montez Press, 2025), Re-Staging Revolutions: Alternative Theatre in Lambeth and Camden 1968-88 (2013) and She Also Wrote Plays: an International Guide to Women Playwrights (Faber & Faber, 2001). She is an associate Artist of LPS running the three-year project FYFFI: Fifty Years of the Fight for Inclusion.

Maureen Duffy (she/her) recently honoured by Bernardine Evaristo as the first recipient of the Royal Society of Literature’s Pioneer prize, designed to pay tribute to and thank trailblazing women writers over 60, Maureen Duffy is a poet, playwright, novelist and non-fiction writer whose groundbreaking novels That’s How It Was (1962) and The Microcosm (1966), set in and around the Gateways Club, draw on her experience as a working-class lesbian.