Staging Violence Against Women and Girls: Plays and Interviews

This collection brings together three international and contemporary plays that each denounce violence against women, alongside interviews with the creators and practitioners who brought them to life.

With interviews with writers, directors and producers, who discuss the conception and staging of their plays, their hope is to de-glamourize the staging of violence, to give voice to the survivors of gendered violence, and to create awareness and empathy within the audiences.

Little Stitches (London, 2014): four short pieces by Isley Lynn, Raúl Quirós Molina, Bahar Brunton and Karis E. Halsall on the issue of Female Genital Mutilation as seen from the point of view of by-standers, health professionals, women who support the practice and, finally, survivors.

’Kubra’ (Sydney, 2016) by Dacia Maraini, features a young female protagonist who was subjected to FGM/C as a child, and now brings her case to court.

Rape Trial(Rome, 2018), adapted for theatre by Renato Chiocca from the international award-winning documentary of the same title made for Italian state television in 1979, shows how attitudes toward sexual violence, and judicial procedures, tend to turn rape survivors from accusers into accused, in court and in everyday discourse.

Daniela Cavallaro lectures in Italian studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has authored several articles and two books (Italian Women’s Theatre 1930-1960: an anthology of plays; Educational Theatre for Women in post-WWII Italy: a stage of their own).

Luciana d’Arcangeli is Cassamarca Senior Lecturer in Italian at Flinders University, Australia. Her areas of expertise are: Italian theatre, cinema, 20th century studies, translation (FCIL) and interpreting (MITI), and scholarship (FHEA). Luciana coordinates the ACIS funded project ＂Indelible (Eng) / Indelebile (It): The representation of (in)visible violence against women and their resistance＂.

Claire Kennedy was until recently Cassamarca Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at Griffith University. Australia, conducting research in applied linguistics and more recently translation studies and the Italian presence in Australia. Over the last 30 years she has participated in numerous community theatre productions in Brisbane concerned with social and political issues.