S3 Ep1: Women and Power

In the first episode of Season 3 of Such Stuff, we go behind the scenes with the Women and Power festival. As women take to the Globe stage to play the traditionally male roles of King Henry V, Falstaff and Hotspur, we ask what the relationship is between women and power. What does it mean to occupy spaces and roles that have been predominantly male and predominantly white? How can the voices that came before us inspire us moving forwards? Is there a backlash to the progress we’ve made? And what might the relationship between women and power look like in future? 

We hear from Sarah Amankwah, who is playing King Henry V in the Globe’s history plays about what it means to take on the role as a woman and a woman of colour. We chat to classicist Donna Zuckerberg, whose book Not All Dead White Men, delves into the murky, misogynistic online world of the alt-right. And we sit down with Claire Van Kampen to talk about the progress she’s seen when it comes to the relationship between women and power in her lengthy career across the arts. And as we move forwards, we look to the women who came before us, with an extract imagining the life of Shakespeare’s sister from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.