Skip to main content
Betties break boundaries
KATHERINE M GRAHAM is inspired by a show about women shattering gender conventions
Empowering: Lucy McCormick [Jack Sain]

Collective Rage: A Play in Five Betties
Southwark Playhouse

ABSURDIST, funny, affecting and intelligent, Collective Rage is a wonderfully inventive piece of theatre.

US playwright Jen Silverman’s script, tightly directed here by Charlie Parham, interrogates the social rules that shape women and the actions it might take to break them via five personas named Betty.

They're a pleasingly mixed bunch. One is watching the news and learning to fight, another is lonely but willing to explore while a third is is going to leave her job at a cosmetics outlet and become the voice of her generation.

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
venus and adonis
Theatre Review / 23 June 2026
23 June 2026

GEORGE FOGARTY is dazzled by a breathtakingly skillful puppet version of Shakespeare’s greatest love poem

ladies football
Theatre Review / 6 March 2026
6 March 2026

GEOFF BOTTOMS recommends an inspiring, political and bittersweet account of the munitions factory workers who are the fore-runners of the modern women’s game

MILES
Theatre Review / 10 February 2026
10 February 2026

MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about a two-handed theatrical homage to jazz’s most mercurial musician

DEFIANT: Dan Daw and Christopher Owen in The Dan Daw Show [Pic: Jess Shurte]
Follow the movement / 5 August 2025
5 August 2025

Given the tawdry push and pull around disability benefits, MATTHEW HAWKINS relishes Dan Daw’s defiant celebration of body and sexuality