How is it that angels fall and where do they land when they do? Symbolically, fallen angels can represent lost hope, disillusionment, isolation. They may represent the inward struggle between good and evil, function as a cautionary tale, symbolize rebellion against authority, or challenge social norms. They may even represent the darker parts in each of us we may want to repress.
The fallen angels in Noël Coward’s play, Fallen Angels, are its two main characters, Julia and Jane. Thematically the play accomplishes much of what fallen angels do symbolically. With two strong women at its center, it offers a glimpse of where they land when freed from their pedestals, tumbling, if not all the way into the pit, then straight into a society perhaps not quite ready for them in 1925 and onward into today. The play was a daring step forward—especially for a male playwright—offering a ground-breaking (and shocking at the time) view of women, landing them somewhere between pedestal and pit. When they debuted the characters Julia and Jane helped break the female mold, redefining and humanizing the image of women. And yet, ironically, Julia and Jane’s actions and motivations are still viewed from within the Male Gaze, and the story centers around a male character. Humor has been used for centuries to examine the role of women and challenge its social norms, but there are elements within the style of comedy that can work against this goal. Let’s look at some of the women in British comedy—both writers and actors—and how they used humor to advance their cause while at the same time finding themselves constrained by it. We’ll also look at the challenges in writing women’s roles and how women in theatre have changed the comic tradition.
Those “Historical” Women.
Armed only with only her pen, a razor-sharp wit, and boldness in uplifting women’s sexuality, Aphra Behn was the first woman known to make a living as a playwright. Comedy was her genre of choice, as it was for so many other women playwrights of the 17th century. Women of the day had permission to be funny, not dramatic, since their pointed send-up of women’s predicament could be more easily digested within a comic context. According to Willow White in her book Feminist Comedy, “these early women playwrights turned to stage comedy as a lucrative professional opportunity and to raise awareness of gender inequality and patriarchal oppression.” They created a “comedy that centralized women and their concerns.” Through comedy, women had the freedom to challenge societal norms, give female characters power, and voice progressive values. And while she used her talents to decry the subjection of women, Aphra Behn herself was working within the constraints of the genre. Susan Carlson, in her book, Women and Comedy: Rewriting the British Theatrical Tradition, asserts that Behn’s plays are “both dependent on as well as disruptive of the genre. And it is this double nature of her ties to comedy that makes her drama a turning point . . .in British comedy.” She goes on to say that “for women comedy means power” and that comedy is “valuable territory for the empowering of women characters.”
Nevertheless Carlson argues that the tools of comedy, while useful in empowering women, often did more to undermine their power. She offers an example, focusing on two familiar comic tropes: inversion (turning status quo upside-down and reversing roles) and happy endings (typically a marriage). Citing as an example, Shakespeare’s As You Like It, well-known for its strong lead female character and incorporating both comic tropes, Carlson believes we accept Rosalind as an independent, witty, free spirit in the magical world, because we are expecting to see her “happy ending”—a conventional marriage—in the real world. Carlson notices that in the writing of this period “when women gain power in comedy, the world is somehow extraordinary.” She concludes that, “in response to those who find traditional comedy a haven for women . . . the genre does more to reduce than to enlarge female power.”
Aphra Behn knew her audience though and appealed to the women in her audience. Carlson believes the work of Aphra Behn “establishes a vision of comedy that offers women more than marriage and truncated power.” Through her characters she was expanding the power women had, especially around women’s sexuality. In addition to Behn, many women playwrights thrived in England during the 17th and 18th centuries, most often embracing comedy: Ariadne, Susannah Centlivre, Hannah Cowley, Catherine Clive, to name a few. In the 19th century, as women entered the role of consumer and limitations to their access and movement in public arenas relaxed, they became a larger part of audiences. And they weren’t just in the audience, during the 19th century women continued to work in the theatre, now as professional actors, playwrights, directors, and managers. According to Katherine Newey of the Univ. of Exeter, in her essay “Women and Performance in the Nineteenth Century,” theatre was “one of the few professions in which women could compete with men on—almost—the same terms.” So women playwrights were abundant, and many of them made their living as professional playwrights and performers, often using their married names to gain respectability and protected status. In 1843 novelist and playwright Catherine Gore submitted a play to Benjamin Webster’s Prize Comedy competition; she was one of 98 entries and the only woman to submit. When she won the top prize for her satirical play, Quid Pro Quo, she was awarded £500 and a full production at the Haymarket Theatre Royal. Unfortunately, what accompanied her win and full production was industry and public outrage in the form of criticism, bad reviews, boos on opening night, and other admonishments from the male-dominated playwrighting world.
Coward’s Contemporaries.
The 1920s and 1930s saw a shift in British culture as the class system was weakened by World War I. Women’s entire experiences were changing as they moved into the workforce during the war, and some would remain there even after it ended. Four hundred women wrote plays during the first 20 years of the 20th century. Maggie Gale, in her work “Women Playwrights of the 1920s and 1930s” believes that the interwar female playwrights were showing clear signs of “breaking into the male-dominated market.” Many were Noël Coward contemporaries. These women were, for the most part, middle class, working for the commercial theatre (there were no government subsidies in England until the 1940s), and leaned conservative since nationhood and a sense of duty were important values during the war years. Many of these new plays began asking questions directly related to the experience of women, around topics we continue to struggle with today: how to balance marriage and career, the expectations of equal pay and desire for same legal rights, etc. Many of these plays again used comic-realism and domestic comedy as genres to illuminate women’s issues. Comedy was “the perfect vehicle with which to place centre stage the issues directly effecting change in the lives of their female contemporaries.” During the fight for women’s Suffrage (not fully achieved for all women in England until 1928) the AFL—Actresses’ Franchise League—sought to use theatre to promote Suffrage ideals. These women recognized early on the potential theatre had for advancing their cause both onstage and off; suffrage plays toured, proceeds were donated to the cause, professional actresses stepped in to train women—traditionally inexperienced in public speaking—for public rallies. Organizers even consulted actresses on the “theatricality of demonstrations” and on “staging political ‘spectacles.’” These actresses even helped women who had been recently released from jail after hunger strikes to create costumed disguises so they could evade recapture. Likewise, the fight for women’s suffrage created additional opportunities for women theatre professionals to step into playwriting, many of whom had begun their careers as actresses. Once again, comic-realism became a favorite and effective approach. Still other women were stepping into the roles of directors and managers. Successfully embodied in many of the plays of this time were “larger female casts, plots centred around female heroines, woman as subject rather than object within the domestic sphere . . [and they] prevail.” According to Maggie Gale, during the first decades of the twentieth century, plays by women regularly ran on British stages, and “appear on average to have run for longer and thus been ‘safer’ investments for managements.” Gale notes that women were not just making their mark and advancing their cause in London professional theatre, they were also responsible for building the regional repertory theatre movement in England which was just beginning at this time, and are credited with expanding the West End, England’s Broadway.
Women Writing Women vs. Men Writing Women.
What about the impact of a playwright’s gender on the characters they create? A 2024 study released by the Proc National Academy of Science looked at fiction writing from 1850 to 2010. They found that consistently, “Female characters are persistently portrayed as more passive, especially by male authors. Termed ‘the gender agency gap’, this disparity underscores the enduring nature of gendered biases in literature, suggesting both a reflection of and potential impact on societal norms.” The Academy notes that the gender agency gap has indeed waned since the 19th century but acknowledges it is still present today.
In their study on the impact of a playwright’s gender on their writing, The Fund for Women Artists (a US study) found that:
- Both women and men write shows that skew towards a roughly 60/40 split favoring their gender.
- The average cast size for female playwrights is 5.6 actors, while the average cast size for male playwrights is 8.2 actors.
- While female playwrights tend to write more female characters than male playwrights do, they tend to be doing so on a smaller scale, and with fewer resources.
In her book, Women in British Comedy, Susan Carlson cautions against drawing simple conclusions and acknowledges the importance of not just focusing on an author’s gender. The Intellectual Reader, in its article “Fiction by Men vs Women: Are There Differences We Notice?” acknowledges that this is an old question and not one with an easy answer. It states:
Literature does not exist in a vacuum; it is shaped by history, social structure, gendered experience, and the philosophical positions of its creators. To approach the question of gender-based distinctions in fiction is to enter a landscape of both nuance and generality, where tendencies and traditions can be observed, but must never be rigidly enforced. . . . Nonetheless . . .we may arrive at a compelling understanding that there do exist specific recurrent differences in the fiction written by men and by women.
The article goes on to described differences in how men and women engage with the body, stating: “men usually write the body as something to conquer or be freed from, while women write it as something to inhabit, negotiate, and reclaim. ” Another point of differentiation identified is how relationships are written: “While male authors have traditionally used romance as a subplot or a character motivator, women’s fiction has tended to foreground it as central to emotional and existential experience.”
In exploring the dynamic of male playwrights writing female characters, Gay Gibson Cima pursues an interesting theory in her book Performing Women: Female Characters, Male Playwrights, and the Modern Stage. She explores the beginnings of modern playwrighting—the turn of the twentieth century—and believes that even as men were most often the ones writing female characters, it was the women who played them who gave those characters authenticity by creating new performance styles—especially in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s age of realism. Before Ibsen, for example, tools such as text analysis and character backstory didn’t exist. It was the actresses playing Ibsen’s great female roles that began to explore these tools, creating a new acting technique that would “redefine the relationship between actor and character, actor and director, and actor and audience.” Cima believes that . . . “The male critical establishment, particularly in England, grew anxious about the new power assumed by female actors [and who] also independently produced many of his plays. . . Female actors since the late nineteenth century have actually assumed a collaborative and potentially disruptive role in creating new ways of performing the idea of woman.” So regardless of any gender agency gap that may or may not have existed, the dimensionality of those female characters was enhanced because of the women who not only created those roles but established a new approach to the craft of acting.
How Women Have Changed Comedy.
Throughout the centuries not only have women in British comedy succeeded in changing society, politics, family and home attitudes and practices, but in addition, women have changed comedy itself. Susan Carlson identifies several ways in which comedy has been revised by women. One of these is the new importance contemporary women have placed on community in their work. Carlson analyzes what she sees as women’s preference for working in groups, and how this has not only made its way into plots of plays, but into theatre management and collaborative creation styles. Carlson also talks about how the audience is part of this community: “Women playwrights have altered the comic equation in a radical way by writing in, offering plays about, and producing plays for women’s communities.” She also identifies comic elements from the past that women have re-woven back into comedy to move beyond realism, delve deeply into women characters, and to inspire social change. These elements include a “reliance on cross-gender and multiple-role casting, the incorporation of music, and the grafting of cabaret performance onto comic staging.” Laura Minor, in her work, Reclaiming Female Authorship in UK Television Comedy examines women and situation comedy—once originating on the stage and which now finds a home on everyone’s TV set. She notes that semi-autobiographical comedies are a recent trend, such as with Fleabag (Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s one-woman show-turned hit TV series) and Catastrophe, giving home to the real women of their stories. And onstage: Enron, by Lucy Prebble, a sardonic yet comic take on the Enron scandal which pushed the bounds of reality; Jumpy, by April De Angelis centering on a woman’s mid-life crisis; Belong by Bola Agbaje, a comic examination of post-colonialism.
Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels, while written by a man, certainly has a claim to predecessor for contemporary plays by, for, and about women. This wasn’t unusual in Coward’s oeuvre. Holly Williams, in her article for BBC, “Noël Coward: The Dark Side of the Quintessential Englishman” writes: “The fear that love might be impossible and life pointless lurks in many of Coward’s plays, and indeed throughout his own life.” It’s curious to consider that, although his public persona conveyed a radically different figure, he himself was a closeted gay man and experienced multiple nervous breakdowns, suffered from depression and manic-like episodes, and endured troubled relationships. Raised lower middle-class, he left school at nine years old and taught himself what he needed to survive as child actor. Perhaps he yearned to be in the shoes of Julia and Jane and longed for comedy to free and uplift him.
Susan Carlson’s exploration of women in British comedy offers evidence pointing her to an interesting conclusion. She feels that—at least among contemporary British playwrights—many male playwrights may have lost a sense of comedy’s joy, and it is the women playwrights that have held onto it. The evidence she uncovered in her research led Susan Carlson to one immovable truth about women’s comedy, which says a lot about its creators too: “Most important, it is a comedy relentlessly pointed toward joy.”