The Nightclub (NHB Modern Plays)

By Chloe Todd Fordham

The Nightclub features three very different women at a gay nightclub in Orlando, who are caught up in a terrifying hate crime.
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: 9781788500609

Chloe Todd Fordham

Chloe Todd Fordham is an award-winning playwright from London. Her play Sound of Silence won a Bruntwood Prize Judges Award in 2015. Her play The Next Generation was shortlisted for the 2017 Writers in Theatre Award, run by Out of Joint. Her first play Land’s End was developed while studying at Goldsmiths University and through the the Arcola’s inaugural PlayWROUGHT festival, and was later shortlisted for Theatre503’s Playwriting Award in 2014. Short plays include: The Nightclub (originally commissioned by MamaQuilla as part of Acts of Defiance at Theatre503, later developed for Sphinx’s Women Centre Stage Festival at Hampstead Theatre), Play 9 (for PLAY Theatre Company, Vault Festival), Chicken and Chips, part of EleXion (Theatre503). Chloe is a graduate of the 503Five, Theatre503’s writer residency scheme and has attended the Kenyon College Playwrights Conference in Ohio (supported by Bruntwood and the Royal Exchange). She has an MA in Writing for Performance from Goldsmiths University. Chloe currently also works as the Literary Manager at Graeae Theatre Company.

Book preview

Chloe Todd Fordham

THE NIGHTCLUB

Taken from the collection

WOMEN CENTRE STAGE

Eight Short Plays By and About Women

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Original Production Details

The Nightclub

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 Feminists conferences; while landmark productions include Pam Gems’ The Snow Palace and April De Angelis’ modern classic, Playhouse Creatures.

The conferences were a forum for gathering a