Michelene Wandor

Standard Name: Wandor, Michelene
Birth Name: Michelene Dinah Samuels
Self-constructed Name: Michelene Wandor
Married Name: Michelene Victor
MW is a prolific twentieth-century and contemporary writer of stage plays, radio drama, short stories, poetry, reviews, theatre criticism, and a co-authored novel. A passionate feminist, she became an energetic force in alternative theatre in Britain in the 1970s, involving herself in radical theatre groups in various capacities, including that of playwright. Since then she has been a frequent radio writer, often adapting novels, especially by women, for radio. Apart from her high profile in radio drama and broadcasting, and the warm reception of her recent poetry publications, her editorial work has made a lasting contributio: the first anthology of the British women's liberation movement, The Body Politic, 1972, as well as volumes of women's plays.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Michelene Wandor. http://www.mwandor.co.uk/.
She has recently pursued interests in music, in the working out of Jewish identity, and in recasting work in different forms.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Sara Maitland
SM and Michelene Wandor collaborated on an absurdist epistolary novel entitled Arky Types.
Duguid, Lindsay. “Cinderella’s Walkman”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 4412, p. 1158.
1158
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Anthologization Sara Maitland
The same year, 1983, SM contributed to Michelene Wandor 's On Gender and Writing a slightly fey fairy-tale or allegory called A Feminist Writer's Progress, featuring herself as a little girl who sets out...
Literary responses Claire Luckham
English-speaking critics are divided on the play's politics. Margaret Llewellyn-Jones thought it ideologically somewhat questionable in the way that it combines Brechtian distancing techniques with encouragement for the audience to cheer during the wrestling matches,...
Textual Production Bryony Lavery
BL collaborated with Caryl Churchill and Michelene Wandor in a cabaret entitled Floorshow, written for Monstrous Regiment .
Churchill, Caryl. Plays: One. Methuen.
xii
Family and Intimate relationships Aemilia Lanyer
AL 's father, Baptista Bassano , a Venetian musician who may have been of Jewish descent, had been working at the English court for nearly thirty years when she was born. He fell into poverty...
Textual Production Judith Kazantzis
The collaborative Touch Papers, September 1982, included poems by JK , many of which had appeared already in such places as Spare Rib, Ambit, Tribune, Samphire, New Poetry, and—this...
Textual Production Judith Kazantzis
JK contributed to On Gender and Writing (edited by Michelene Wandor , 1983) an essay entitled The Errant Unicorn.
Textual Production Pam Gems
The play's development was influenced by another project PG was working on at the time, a translation of Uncle Vanya. Her own play, she explains, was much influenced by Chekhov , I had tried...
Literary responses Pam Gems
Although the play seemed to be well received during the previews, it received a bad press on opening night.
Gems, Pam. “Putting on the Style”. Plays by Women: Volume Three, edited by Michelene Wandor and Michelene Wandor, Methuen, pp. 47-8.
47
In his review for Plays and Players, Charles Spencer described it as an intense...
Anthologization Pam Gems
The play was revived under the new title at London's Hampstead Theatre in December of the same year.
Lloyd Evans, Gareth, and Barbara Lloyd-Evans, editors. Plays in Review, 1956-1980: British Drama and the Critics. Methuen.
221
Demastes, William W., editor. British Playwrights, 1956-1995. Greenwood Press.
160
It was published on its own in 1977, then reprinted in Methuen 's first...
Literary responses Pam Gems
This play brought PG 's work to the attention of critics and playgoers alike. While reviews were generally quite positive, some had difficulty accepting the play's feminist perspective. For instance, Ted Whitehead in The Spectator...
Textual Production Alison Fell
AF was a constant source of scenes, burlesques, and improvisations for performance by the Women's Liberation Street Theatre Group . She also wrote for a number of underground or radical papers: Ink, Islington Gutter...
Friends, Associates Zoë Fairbairns
ZF formed a feminist collective with fellow writers and socialists Sara Maitland , Valerie Miner , Michèle Roberts , and Michelene Wandor .
Fairbairns, Zoë et al., editors. Tales I Tell My Mother. Journeyman.
1-3
Textual Production Zoë Fairbairns
The first project of the feminist collective formed by ZF with Sara Maitland , Valerie Miner , Michele Roberts , and Michelene Wandor was to write and publish Tales I Tell My Mother.
Whitaker’s Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons.
(1988)
Fairbairns, Zoë et al., editors. Tales I Tell My Mother. Journeyman.
1-3
Textual Production Zoë Fairbairns
The series was to include writers from the US as well as the UK. The first batch of four volumes (all with cover illustrations by Anita Klein ) bracketed Fairbairns with two of her former...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Wandor, Michelene, editor. Plays by Women: Volume One. Methuen, 1982.
Wandor, Michelene, editor. Plays by Women: Volume Three. Methuen, 1984.
Wandor, Michelene. Post-War British Drama: Looking Back in Gender. Routledge, 2001.
Gems, Pam. “Putting on the Style”. Plays by Women: Volume Three, edited by Michelene Wandor and Michelene Wandor, Methuen, 1984, pp. 47-8.
Roberts, Michèle. “Questions and Answers”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 62-8.
Wandor, Michelene, editor. Strike While the Iron is Hot. Journeyman Press, 1980.
Fairbairns, Zoë et al., editors. Tales I Tell My Mother. Journeyman, 1978.
Wandor, Michelene. The Author is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Wandor, Michelene. The Body Politic. Stage 1, 1972.
Shuttle, Penelope. “The Dialogue of Gender”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 141-7.
Kazantzis, Judith. “The Errant Unicorn”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 24-30.
Wandor, Michelene. The Music of the Prophets. Arc Publications, 2006.
Wandor, Michelene, and Mike Alfreds. The Wandering Jew. Methuen, 1987.
Page, Louise. “Tissue”. Plays by Women: Volume One, edited by Michelene Wandor and Michelene Wandor, Methuen, 1982, pp. 75-103.
Wandor, Michelene. “To Die Among Friends”. Sink Songs, edited by Dinah Brooke and Michelene Wandor, published by the authors, 1975.
Kazantzis, Judith et al. Touch Papers. Allison and Busby, 1982.
Luckham, Claire. “Trafford Tanzi”. Plays by Women: Volume Two, edited by Michelene Wandor, Methuen, 1983, pp. 77-97.
Wandor, Michelene. Understudies. Methuen, 1981.
Wandor, Michelene. Upbeat. Journeyman Press, 1982.
Stott, Mary. “Women in Newspapers”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 126-32.
Wandor, Michelene. “Women playwrights and the challenge of feminism in the 1970s”. Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights, edited by Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 53-68.