BWW Blog: Telling Women's War Stories

WOMEN AND WAR, now open, is a month-long festival examining the effect of warfare on women worldwide. Bringing together an extraordinary span of international work, and performers from all continents, the festival will showcase cutting-edge drama, comedy, dance, documentary film and photography, drawn from the United Kingdom, United States, Spain, Iran, and Uzbekistan. Across the centuries, from the Crimean War and WW2 through to the current conflict in Syria, Women and War tells the profoundly personal and yet universal stories of the role of women and the impact upon them during and after conflict, whether subjugated or subversive, victim or healer, protector or fighter. Opening today, the festival is held at Frederick's Place - a historic building in the heart of the City.

I am from a military background, my father was in the Navy, and so I grew up around sailors all my life. My mother and both of my aunts were Wrens in WW2 and my grandmother drove an ambulance in WW1. When my father was dying he gave me a letter written in pencil that he had sent to his mother from an American hospital ship where he was being treated after being severely wounded in China. This started me thinking, as a mother of a son myself, what it must have been like, must be like for the women who sent their loved ones off to war.

War has changed, but its effect on generations of women hasn't. I wanted to use many different art forms to give a voice to and examine the experience of women in war zones; to look not just at what happens to them during conflict, but to tell the stories of their lives both before and after it. Women are so often portrayed as victims, but time and again it is them who build a new life out of the ashes. Women demonstrate huge resourcefulness, humour and courage in the face of sometimes horrifying adversity, and it feels like the right time to tell some of these stories.

Especially at the moment, with the current turmoil of Brexit and the diaspora of refugees fleeing Syria and other war-torn countries, now more than ever it seems we need to address the situation particularly of women. Part of the remit of the Festival is to tell their stories, and to that end we have paired with the charity Women for Women Refugees, with a group of female refugees performing the poem "Set Her Free" and talking about their experiences of arriving and living in this country. We also have a brilliant short film, Hamsa, that tells the story of the first two weeks of a Syrian refugee's arrival in a rural village in Germany.

Alongside the documentaries and talks by foreign correspondents and historians we have 15 original pieces of drama. They range from one-woman shows about Aphra Behn's time as a spy and Mary Seacole, the famous creole doctress in the Crimea, to two girls meeting at the outset of the Arab Spring in Veils, and a young soldier suffering form PTS after returning form Iraq in By My Strength. There are participants from Spain (Rosaura), America (Army B.R.A.T), Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan (Munojat) - in total, we represent people from 15 countries.

There's also music in the form of War Songs and We'll Meet Again, comedic drama with Kate Cook's acclaimed show Invisible Woman, and two very different shows set after World War Two: Nepenthe and War Babies. Meanwhile, Valiant and Shrapnel use both verbatim and poetry to tell a series of very different stories across history right up to the modern day, and Gidion's Knot looks at our terror of radicalisation in education.

We're hosting a simultaneous writers response event to the question 'What Is Your Weapon?' with the Lama Theater Company in NYC, and are hoping that as many people as possible will join in and start an artistic debate about the times we live in.

Since embarking on this project, I have met some remarkable women and heard some extraordinary stories, which I look forward to sharing with as many people as possible. The subject is so huge that we seem to have just opened the door onto something. I hope it will continue to grow, both here and internationally.

Women and War is at Frederick's Place until July 31

Picture credit: Alison Baskerville