Calm Down Dear, billed as "the UK’s first and only festival of innovative feminist theatre", returns for a third year, featuring porn industry refuseniks, a celebrated 15th century cross-dresser, a Bruce Springsteen loving male alter ego, a mother and baby performance duo and outspoken teenage activists.
After her play Pretty Ugly was featured in the 2013 festival, Louise Orwin will première A Girl and a Gun, which explores the prevalence of images of girls with guns on film, challenging Jean-Luc Goddard’s assertion that "all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun".
Racheal Ofori & Fuel Theatre’s Portrait looks at the trials and tribulations of modern life as seen through the eyes of a young black woman, inspired by Ofori's own experiences, and Hula House from Permanently Visible, performed at Crossroads Women's Centre, is inspired by true accounts and stories obtained from interviews with sex workers and women at The English Collective of Prostitutes.
Touching on themes of gender identity, drag and transgender, None of Us Is Yet a Robot presents Rituals for Change, a trans-feminist work looking at the physical issues surrounding transitioning, Break Yourself sees Ira Brand experiment with what constructing a male alter ego allows her to say and do, and Joan by Derby Theatre and Milk Presents features Drag Idol UK Champion 2014 Louis Cyfer in a one-woman show inspired by the story of Joan of Arc.
The festival concludes with Tomorrow’s Feminists Today, an afternoon of new feminist theatre by and using teenaged voices.
Calm Down Dear 2015 will be at Camden People's Theatre from 16 September to 11 October.