MOIRA BUFFINI AND THE STRONG WOMEN

“I may be tired,” says Moira Buffini, “but I’m also exhilarated.” So she should be: she is a writer having a bumper year. Just back in London after overseeing an off-Broadway revival of her 1997 drama “Gabriel”, she has two film scripts in the can—both adaptations, “Jane Eyre” for BBC Films, and Posy Simmonds’s novel-as-cartoon-strip “Tamara Drewe”—plus two new plays in production. One of these is “Welcome to Thebes”, which will premiere at the Olivier—only the second time the National has given its main stage to a new play by a woman. Using characters from Sophocles’s “Antigone”, it asks a simple question: what would have happened if, instead of King Creon, his wife Eurydice had been in charge? From this, Buffini develops a fascinating, darkly comic thesis about women, power and—with the arrival from another Greek myth of Theseus, founder-king of Athens—the relationship between the west and emerging nations.

This is home ground for Buffini, who is 44 and has spent more than 20 years creating larger-than-life females in conflict with their times: in “Silence” (1999), the medieval heroine finds freedom by living as a man, while the furiously funny, Olivier-nominated “Dinner” (2002) had at its heart a wealthy, clever woman rendered desolate to the point of murderousness by the lack of meaning in her life. Now, in “Handbagged”, Buffini imagines the friendship—or otherwise—between Margaret Thatcher and the Queen. Why does so much of her writing centre on women? “Because so little else has before,” she says, “it makes women more interesting.” So if male characters hadn’t, historically, dominated theatre, would she be writing plays about men? “Ah,” she says. “There you have me. No, I’d go on writing about strong, interesting women, because that’s what they’re like in real life: strong and interesting.”

"Welcome to Thebes" National, London, from June 15th

"Handbagged" Tricycle, London, to July 17th

~ ISABEL LLOYD

Picture Credit: Julian Anderson