Barefaced Theatre takes at look at the works of Mary Shelley, Emily Dickinson and Virginia Wolf and explores the presumed madness of the women that created some of literature’s greatest works.

“The world was to me a secret, which I desired to discover: to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own." - Frankenstein, Mary Shelley.

Was madness a means of liberation for female writers throughout history? Barefaced Theatre explores the presumed madness of the women that created some of literature’s greatest works, allowing them the freedom to write as they wished, and paving the way for today’s female writers. Mad Women in Attics examines Mary Shelley, whose sensational personal life and loss of her children found release in her novel Frankenstein; Emily Dickinson, the 19th century American whose poems reached far beyond the confines of her reclusive life; the utopian feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, plagued by depression, whose story The Yellow Wallpaper highlighted the horrors of confinement for women termed ‘mad’; and Virginia Woolf, the modernist genius whose own demons would eventually consume her.

"Pardon My Sanity in a World Insane" - Emily Dickinson