About this website
This website is based largely on material from the Monstrous Regiment Theatre Company’s extensive archives, which are now held in the V&A’s Theatre and Performance archive collection in London (see below). It was designed by buzzwordcreative.co.uk, and launched in January 2019; further material has been added since then (see updates below).
The site aims to provide a detailed, concrete picture of the work the company did, how it operated, and how its shows were received at the time. It doesn’t try to engage with theoretical debates about feminist theatre and politics, or to evaluate its own contribution to these. Instead it provides a resource for people to think about these things themselves.
Go to Company to find out how and why we created Monstrous Regiment in the 1970s and have now produced this website; to Productions for cast-lists, photos, touring dates, publicity materials, reviews etc for all the main shows, and for many of the scripts and much of the recorded music; to History for the story of the company’s work from 1975 to 1993, and how it has kept that alive since then; and to Archive for materials about the company itself – photos, publicity, press cuttings, interviews with members, workshops and readings, commentaries, and Gillian Hanna’s 1991 historical account.
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Copyright and Permissions
Unless otherwise indicated, all the material on this website is the intellectual property of The Monstrous Regiment Ltd, and using any of it for purposes other than personal or educational ones is strictly prohibited.
We’ve tried to identify and contact copyright holders such as photographers, graphic designers, writers and composers, to ask permission to reproduce the work they did for Monstrous Regiment. Everyone we’ve managed to contact has agreed to this and we are very grateful to them for doing so.
We apologise to those we haven’t managed to contact, and hope they will get in touch with us. We apologise also for any mistakes made in attributing items to individuals, and hope that they, or those who know of their work, will get in touch with us so that we can correct these mistakes. We can be contacted at: info@monstrousregiment.co.uk
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Thanks
To Simon Sladen, Ramona Riedzewski, Sabrina Sandford and their colleagues at the V&A’s Theatre and Performance Archives at Blythe House (now relocated at V&A East Storehouse), for their help and advice in accessing the Monstrous Regiment materials prior to cataloguing and for hosting the October 2016 archive launch; to Dominic Kennedy, archivist and education officer at Cheek by Jowl, for his invaluable advice and encouragement early on in the project; to Emma Dodds and Adrian Rowe at industriousdark.com for their work on cleaning, editing and re-presenting the scanned archive images and the digitised music recordings; to the website design team at buzzwordcreative.com (and especially Mark Bold and Aaron Buckley), and to Geraldine Charles for agreeing to transfer to us the domain name for this website.
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More at the V&A
A lot of the material on this website comes from the Monstrous Regiment company archive, which is held in the V&A’s Theatre and Performance Archives in London. But there’s a great deal more in the archive than is here on this website. The recently completed catalogue is now available online at: https://www.vam.ac.uk/archives/unit/ARC24744; also at: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/data/gb71-thm/450.
You can find out about accessing material in the V&A’s Theatre and Performance Archives at: https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/theatre-performance-archives. And note that these V&A Archives also hold material from other theatre companies of the same time, such as the Women’s Theatre Group, as well as the archives of the Arts Council.
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Unfinished Histories
If you’d like to find out more about feminist theatre in the 1970s and 80s and the alternative theatre movement of which it was a part, do visit www.unfinishedhistories.com, which also has information about interviews with Gillian Hanna and Mary McCusker, founding members of Monstrous Regiment, and with writers, directors and designers who worked with the company such as Bryony Lavery, Andrea Montag, Chris Montag, Lily Susan Todd, and Hilary Westlake.
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Additional materials
We’d be very pleased to hear from you if you have any materials that might be suitable for adding to the company’s archive. If so, please get in touch with us at: info@monstrousregiment.co.uk
For example, there are several shows for which we have almost no photos or reviews, and we are short of live performance recordings, especially video. Or maybe you have old copies of magazines with articles about Monstrous Regiment and feminist/political theatre, or tape recordings of radio interviews?
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Tell your friends
We’d like this website to reach as many people as possible, so if there’s anyone you think would find it interesting – friends, relatives, students, teachers, colleagues – please let them know about it, through Facebook or Twitter or email or conversation or…
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Donations
We’re going to need money to maintain and develop this site over the coming years – digitalising more recordings, paying for hosting and security, etc. So any donations would be extremely welcome.
Since Monstrous Regiment has charitable status (Charity Commission no. 274517), a simple way to do this is through the Charities Aid Foundation. Just go to the ‘I’m an individual’… ‘Donate Now‘ page of their website. In the ‘Find A Charity’ box, enter ‘The Monstrous Regiment Limited’, and follow the instructions. Thank you!
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Updates
May 2024-June 2025 Minor revisions made to the HISTORY page, plus an update for the period since the site was launched in 2019, including links to the 2024 celebration of 50 years of feminist theatre and the 2025 BBC Radio 4 documentary on the company; slideshow with music from Love Story of the Century also added.
January 2023 Scripts for the following shows have been added: Kiss and Kill, Teendreams, Dialogue Between a Prostitute and One of Her Clients, The Fourth Wall, and A Common Woman. They’re located both in the ARCHIVE: Scripts section, and in the Words sections of their respective PRODUCTIONS pages.
February 2022 Over the past few months the following scripts have been added: Scum, The Execution, My Song is Free, Alarms, More Than One Antoinette, Beatrice, My Sister in This House, Love Story of the Century, The Colony Comes a Cropper, and Medea. They’re located both in the ARCHIVE: Scripts section, and in the Words sections of their respective PRODUCTIONS pages.
February 2021 Much of the recorded music from the following shows has been added: Scum, Vinegar Tom, Floorshow, Kiss and Kill, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes I, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes II, Mourning Pictures, The Execution, Enslaved by Dreams, Point of Convergence, My Song is Free and The Colony Comes a Cropper. It’s located in the Sounds sections of their respective PRODUCTIONS pages.
September 2019 Over the past few months, scripts for the following shows have been added: Calamity, Mourning Pictures, Shakespeare’s Sister, The Colony and scenes 1 to 7 of Vinegar Tom, joining Enslaved by Dreams. They’re located both in the ARCHIVE: Scripts section, and in the Words sections of their respective PRODUCTIONS pages.