Table of Contents

Introduction
Historical and cultural contexts
Scene analysis
Critical reception
List of key productions
Works Cited

Revolt. She said. Revolt again

Notes

Promotional Information

In this play, Alice Birch examines the language, behaviour, and forces that shape women in the 21st century through a study of social power structures. It is published here as a Student Edition with commentary and notes by Marissia Fragkou.

About the Author

Alice Birch has written for the Royal Court Theatre, BBC Radio 4, Old Vic, Comédie de Valence, Almeida Festival, Clean Break, Schaubühne and RSC. She has been on attachment to the National Theatre Studio, Royal Court Theatre, Paines Plough and Channel 4. Her play Many Moons was shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award and she was winner of the George Devine Award for Most Promising New Playwright in 2014.

Marissia Fragkou is Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts and joined Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. She has published and presented papers on contemporary British and European theatre and performance, as well as performance and cultural politics, ethics of responsibility and radical democratic politics.

Reviews

Alice Birch doesn’t want this work to be unseen. Her angry and frantic play Revolt. She aaid. Revolt again is an experimental work focused on using a feminist voice which is loud; a feminist voice which seeks to change the world not through small increments but through a revolution: through the destruction of language; through the destruction of society...
*Guardian*

Ms. Birch’s play, which became a hit for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2014, has a way of making you question everything you say when it comes to discussing women and their relationships with men, one another and a world in a state of unending upheaval... Linguistic confusion plagues the frantic souls portrayed... Even the play’s title, with its use of periods instead of commas, suggests the difficulty of getting words out and how inadequate they seem when you do... Yet Revolt teems with the same anarchic fury that possessed Jimmy Porter [in Look Back in Anger] and the same frustrated awareness that there are no easy fixes for an unsatisfactory social system... Instead, Ms. Birch is articulating the alternatives that come to women’s minds in dealing with how they are dealt with — as objects of love and lust, as employees and employers, as mothers and daughters.
*New York Times*

Acts One to Three are dialogues. Issues of gender language change into material questions of marriage, of women in capitalism, women raped and colonised, women desperate for refusal of the roles imposed on them. By Act Four, everything is deconstructed and there isn’t dialogue anymore... We witness conversations, haunting solo performances, disturbing statements about or directed to women, and a lack of genuine solutions provided in a system that benefits from oppression... In many ways, this play is a call to arms. It exposes the contradictions in simply refusing sexism in words, which is promoted as “revolutionary” by the very agents of the status quo.
*Diva Mag*