East 15 postgrads turn Masters project into sell-out play

Three East 15 postgraduates have embarked on a successful first tour of the UK after the play they wrote while studying their Masters became a hit sensation.

The Good Women has been earning raved reviews ever since it launched at the Greenwich Theatre in London earlier this year.

Written by MA Acting postgrads Sophie Marsden, Faith McCune and Lena Liedl, the play tells the love story between Bette, the star of a TV cooking show, and Trudy, a housewife, and is set against the backdrop of the Swiss suffragette movement of the 1960s.

Inspired by a true story, The Good Women caught the eye of the Greenwich Theatre after it was performed for the first time at the high-profile VAULT Festival last year.

After a successful launch in London, the trio have taken the play around the UK and sold out endless venues on their debut tour.

Actor and writer Lena, who plays Trudy in the play, said: “It has been really exciting, it's the biggest project for our young production company so far.

“We took the show to our hometowns and places we have family connections like Belfast, Dublin and Bradford. It was also very special to perform in front of different audiences and to see that so many different people connect to the story of Bette and Trudy.

“We had women from all backgrounds - from Ireland, from Iran, from Europe - come up to us after the show to talk about how they saw their own lives or the lives of their mothers and grandmothers reflected in the show.”

The trio will end their tour of the UK with ten shows at The Cockpit Theatre, with tickets selling fast.

They plan to continue work on a number of other projects at the end of the tour, including a short film, podcast and another play.

Lena says she, Sophie and Faith are keen to build on the momentum of their success by making a difference for women across the performing arts industry, with statistics showing 70 per cent of plays performed in the UK last year were written by males.

Despite their success, Lena insists the trio will always be grateful for the help and support they received at East 15, adding: “What is so brilliant about East 15 is that we were encouraged to be proactive in our acting careers and create our own work - and we learnt the skills to do that from writing to marketing to production.

“The Good Women started out as a university project and it really showed us how we can have agency in an industry that can feel very volatile.

“It's quite incredible to look back on how we took it from a university project to runs at Greenwich Theatre, Smock Alley Dublin and now The Cockpit.”

Tickets for The Good Women are on sale via The Cockpit website.