How to Not Sink (NHB Modern Plays)

By Georgia Christou

How to Not Sink looks at duty, love and dependency across three generations of women.
The play is taken from Women Centre Stage; a collection of eight short plays, commissioned and developed as part of the Women Centre Stage Festival, that together demonstrate the range, depth and richness of women's writing for the stage.
Selected by Sue Parrish, Artistic Director of Sphinx Theatre, these plays offer a wide variety of rewarding roles for women, and are perfect for schools, youth groups and theatre companies to perform. Other writers included in the collection include Winsome Pinnock, Timberlake Wertenbaker and April De Angelis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Jun 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781788500593

Georgia Christou

Georgia Christou is a writer for stage and screen. Theatre includes Yous Two at Hampstead Theatre (nominated for the Verity Bargate Award and a Stage Debut Award), How to Spot an Alien for Paines Plough, and Peter Pan for Birmingham Rep (co-adapter). Short plays include How to Not Sink for Sphinx Theatre (published in Women Centre Stage by Nick Hern Books), and Ephrem Holmes for DryWrite/The Bush. Georgia has taken part in the Royal Court’s Young Writers Programme. Georgia’s television debut, Through the Gates for Channel 4, was nominated for two BAFTAs: Best Single Drama and Best Breakthrough. She has also worked on dramas for Netflix, Sky Atlantic, Channel 4 and the BBC.

Book preview

Georgia Christou

HOW TO NOT SINK

Taken from the collection

WOMEN CENTRE STAGE

Eight Short Plays By and About Women

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Original Production Details

How to Not Sink

The Sphinx Test

Biography

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

For My Comrades-in-Arms

Dame Rosemary Squire DBE and Jules Wright

And for Louisa, Tiffany, Helen, Ros,

Isabel, Lisa, Ben and Joanna.

Introduction

Sue Parrish

‘Women can’t be artists, women are mothers’

Sian Ede, Arts Council officer, 1991

The eight plays in this volume first saw the light of day in the Women Centre Stage Festival. They were chosen to show the range, depth and richness of the work that can be created in a celebration of women artists. The Women Centre Stage Festival is an exciting cultural project designed to address and combat women’s exclusion from UK theatre. Sphinx Theatre, founded as the Women’s Theatre Group in 1973 and renamed in 1990, has been in the vanguard of advocating and inspiring women in the arts through productions, conferences and research for four decades. As a kind of feminist-theatre think tank, we initiated the breakthrough Glass Ceiling conferences in the 1990s at the National Theatre, and more recently from 2009, four Vamps, Vixens and