Tituba (NHB Modern Plays)

By Winsome Pinnock

Tituba by Winsome Pinnock is a one-woman show about Tituba Indian, the enslaved woman who played a central role in the seventeenth-century Salem Witch Trials.
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 Rose Lewenstein, Timberlake Wertenbaker and April De Angelis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Jun 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781788500623

Winsome Pinnock

Winsome Pinnock is an award-winning British playwright of Jamaican heritage. Her plays include: Rockets and Blue Lights (Royal Exchange, Manchester, 2020; National Theatre, 2021); One Under (2005) and Water (2000) at the Tricycle Theatre; Mules (Clean Break/Royal Court Theatre Upstairs/Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles and The Magic Theatre, San Francisco, 1996); Talking in Tongues (1991) and A Hero's Welcome (1989; runner-up Susan Smith Blackburn Prize) at the Royal Court Theatre; and Leave Taking (Liverpool Playhouse Theatre/Contact Theatre Manchester/Belgrade Theatre Coventry/Lyric Hammersmith/ National Theatre, 1986). Awards include the George Devine Award, the Pearson Award and the Unity Theatre Trust Award.

Book preview

Winsome Pinnock

TITUBA

Taken from the collection

WOMEN CENTRE STAGE

Eight Short Plays By and About Women

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Original Production Details

Tituba

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 UK-wide network and forming a sense of solidarity among women in the arts who are often isolated. Leading women artists, academics and journalists shared their professional experiences with packed audiences. For ten years running we hired the NT’s Cottesloe Theatre for the day for the Glass Ceilings, and in 2009, thanks to the good offices of the Literary Manager Sebastian Born, we took over the Olivier Theatre for Vamps, Vixens and Feminists, a sign of dawning consciousness. Many women recount moments of inspiration from these talkshops, and the latest spin-off, Nottingham’s The Party Somewhere Else, took its name from