I’ve spent a lot of my life choosing words carefully. Often because I like to be precise with my meaning. Sometimes because I’m trying not to upset anyone. There is a difference and women are often taught to choose the latter. Being a woman and writing as a woman are two different things, thankfully.

We are encouraged to soften, phrase things gently, make the truth easier to receive. Not always, not by everyone, but often enough that we have been trained that way without anyone saying it explicitly. A kind of internal editor who sits there with a red pen, removing anything too sharp, too direct, too inconvenient. “I feel” instead of “I know.” “Maybe” instead of “this is what happened.” “I might be wrong” offered up before anyone has even had the chance to disagree.

Because I write and writing is mostly choosing the right words and then arguing with yourself about whether they are, in fact, the right words it’s something I’ve been even more aware of. But also partly because I have spent years listening to people tell stories about their lives and I know how much can change depending on who is allowed to describe reality. The same event can become a misunderstanding, an overreaction, a concern, a complaint, a symptom, a pattern, a warning, or evidence, depending on who gets to name it.

Most arguments about power are, in the end, arguments about the story. Who is believed, edited, deemed reasonable or unreasonable. Who is told they are being dramatic, difficult, bitter, hysterical, unkind, divisive, or whatever the preferred word is that week for a woman who has decided she is done playing the game.

Theatre changes the platform. A woman speaking in public is dangerous and probably why theatre is full of women who unsettle people. Witches, mothers, widows, wives, queens, madwomen, girls who know too much, women who remember, women who accuse, women who grieve, women who refuse to die quietly.

The research my writing partner and I have undertaken indicates Mary Magdalene was written away, over centuries, from a wealthy woman to be a lowly prostitute. By men. Now I’m not saying I believe in all the religious stuff but there is some reality here in each developing version of the bible and many other writings where women have been reduced to the least of their existence since the dawn of time.
Sometimes they are punished for speaking up, often mocked. Sometimes they are called mad, which is a very old trick, not a particularly subtle one, designed to diminish.

Deeming women lesser has become part of our culture, despite what we are supposed to say is happening. I have always loved theatre for the reason that we can often show our true selves under the masquerade of performance and no one gets to shut you up. We can speak uncomfortable truths, speak for ourselves, speak aloud and without interrruption. You can read something and think you have absorbed it, but hear it said in front of you, by a living person and suddenly it is so much more.

This is on my mind because of Dracula: Nocturne, which accidentally became an act of feminism by taking the narrative away from the men and placed almost all of it in her perspective. To take a nineteenth-century text and shift the centre of gravity, away from the male centred manuscript and tilt it to a woman and yet keep its essence is a challenge. I wonder what more Mina might have been in the supposed freedoms of the twenty-first century. More like asking what changes when the woman is not simply spoken about, protected, desired, endangered, praised, feared or remembered by men, but becomes the person telling the story.

There is something called the Bechdel test. It asks whether a story has at least two women in it, whether they talk to each other and whether they talk about something other than a man. That’s it. It’s hardly a grand feminist measuring stick, nor a guarantee of quality, neither is it proof that the women are well written. Just a very small test which becomes alarming once you realise how many stories fail it. Dracula hovers on the edge because Mina and Lucy discuss fainting, but it’s because of a male vampire, so I would say it fails. The Hobbit, largely male. Lord Of The Flies, male. Frankenstein, written by a woman but about men. It goes on. The Bechdel Test isn’t a moral guillotine, these books are fantastic, but did we notice how male centred they are?
The Phantom of The Opera, the women exist but their lives and lines primarily revolve around The Phantom and the men. Les Miserables, there are important female characters, but they are separated from each other and orbit male suffering, male politics, male redemption and male revolution. Fantine, Cosette and Éponine are iconic, but their major arcs are tied to men. Similarly Jersey Boys, The Lion King, Hamilton, The Book Of Mormon, Sweeney Todd, Romeo & Juliet. Great shows, but centred on men. Which is ironic since theatre typically attracts more women, both in performance and bums on seats.

Because Mina is already important in Dracula, it’s easier. She gathers the records, types them, connects and understands the importance of what people have seen and said, she is an administrator, an archive and a witness. Which makes her a delicious narrator. An unwitting oversight on the part of Stoker in my opinion.

And yet, culturally, when people think of Dracula, they think of Dracula himself. Understandably, of course. He has the castle, the teeth, the cape and frankly the most excellent branding. Then perhaps Van Helsing, with all the certainty and authority of a man. Then the men pursuing the monster, the men making plans, the men writing journals, being brave and troubled and central. Mina is there, but often as the woman at the centre of danger, vulnerable and irrelevent. (Except for when she isn’t because it moves the story along to have her the victim.) Rather than the woman holding the evidence.

In Dracula: Nocturne, making Mina the narrator changes little and everything all at once, all the events occur in the same way, to the same people. It doesn’t make Dracula less powerful, or Jonathan less terrified, or Van Helsing less authoritarian. Neither does it change her role, but now her voice is heard more than anyone elses.

Because women are often placed close to the centre of events without being treated as central to the meaning of them. They experience it all but become a secondary factor and yet the story is still named after the man. The brilliant/dangerous/monstrous/genius/hero/villain/the damaged soul with a handsome face and a tragic backstory. Around him, women speak. They explain him. Love him. Fear him. Forgive him. Try to understand him. Adore him. Try to survive him. Sometimes they die so he can become more interesting, which is very generous of them really.

And this is where writing and theatre meet for me. On the page, you can shift the lens. On stage, you can give that shift a woman’s body, a womans voice and they will listen, because it is expected, required. A woman standing in front of an audience and saying, this is what happened, is doing something more than narration. She’s making her voice heard.

That doesn’t mean every woman is right about everything. Obviously not. We are not magical truth machines in frocks, although frankly some days being outspoken in a frock feels good. It means women are entitled to language without having to apologise for existing. It means clarity is not cruelty. It means naming reality is not the same as attacking someone.

As a writer, as a theatre practitioner, as someone who has spent a great deal of time listening to the gap between what people say and what they mean. I’m interested in the words women reach for when they are finally allowed to stop cushioning the landing for everyone else. Story lives in the friction.

Maybe that is why female narrators are so often treated as unreliable before they’ve even begun, though now we’re utilising this as a mechanism in literature. There’s a come uppance! Maybe that is why women on stage can feel so electric. They are not just performing, they are occupying space which has historically been contested.

I think about all the women whose words were edited, softened, doubted, mocked, dismissed, or even recorded by someone else. I think about the women in stories and about how often female pain is aestheticised, female anger pathologised and female clarity treated as aggression.

The numbers in writing suggest progress, but not parity. In publishing, women have made enormous gains. Research by Joel Waldfogel found that women went from publishing roughly a third as many books as men in 1970 to producing the majority of books by 2020 and other summaries of the research note that women’s share of published titles rose from around 20% in the 1970s to more than half by 2020. That sounds like victory, until you remember that visibility, prestige, genre respect and cultural authority don’t happen at the same speed as sales. Women may now publish and sell extremely well, but women’s stories are still too often treated as niche, domestic, romantic, commercial or somehow less universal than men’s.

Theatre tells the same story in a different costume. A 2011- 2012 UK study found that only 35% of playwrights of new plays were women. It also found that women playwrights wrote much more balanced casts, with 49% of their roles for women, while male playwrights wrote only 37% of roles for women. A decade later, the imbalance persists. Research reported by The Stage found that three quarters of credited UK theatre writers in 2022 were male, while 83% of musical theatre composers were male and only 9% of West End composers were female. So yes, things are better than they were, but the pen, the stage, the score and the biggest opportunities are still not evenly shared.

And then I think, well, perhaps this is why I write. Not only for that reason. I also write because I have too many ideas and not enough time, because vampires keep wandering into my imagination, because time travel is irresistible to me and because apparently I enjoy making things complicated for myself. But I also write because words are how we make a record of being here, our lives, our experiences, thoughts, opinions and the way we shape the world, in the safety of not having spoken aloud.

I think of the women I want to join. Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, The Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood and Hilary Mantel. Not that I might achieve the same but because those are the writers who remind me what is possible. Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, The Bloody Chamber, The Handmaid’s Tale and Wolf Hall are not powerful because their women are endlessly admirable. They are powerful because their women are alive. Difficult, damaged, funny, furious, desiring, clever, cruel, tender, ambitious, afraid and impossible to reduce. Not women as emotional wallpaper for a man’s transformation, but women as the centre of meaning. Women who speak, want, remember, refuse, survive and sometimes make an almighty mess of things because that, inconveniently, is what being human looks like.