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, 1990.
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
Literary responses Sarah Daniels
Feminist playwright and critic Michelene Wandor has asserted that the play's form—the action couched in dramatic realism interrupted by monologues and polemical speeches—has a detrimental effect on its feminist message. She feels that the momentary...
Literary responses Louise Page
Michelene Wandor , this play's first editor, noted its fluid, urgent pace and its darting, daring time-chopping structure.
Wandor, Michelene, editor. “Introduction”. Plays by Women: Volume One, Methuen, 1982, pp. 7-14.
13
Elaine Turner in Contemporary Dramatists remarked how LP had used her painful topic to explore the...
Material Conditions of Writing Louise Page
It was when she contacted the Arts Lab about some royalties for this play that they commissioned her for what became Tissue.
Page, Louise. “Tissue”. Plays by Women: Volume One, edited by Michelene Wandor and Michelene Wandor, Methuen, 1982, pp. 75-103.
100
Michelene Wandor names LP as one of the women playwrights who...
Performance of text Githa Sowerby
In the 1980s and 1990s, Rutherford and Son enjoyed several revivals by feminist theatre groups and directors, including productions by Mrs Worthington's Daughters in June 1980 (abridged by Michelene Wandor ); Southern Lights at the...
Performance of text Caryl Churchill
CC 's collaboration with Monstrous Regiment continued through the summer of 1977, when she participated in their cabaret Floorshow, along with Michelene Wandor and Bryony Lavery .
Churchill, Caryl. Plays: One. Methuen, 1985.
xii
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, 1988–2003.
(1988)
Fairbairns, Zoë et al., editors. Tales I Tell My Mother. Journeyman, 1978.
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...
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...
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...
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 Mary Stott
An essay that MS contributed to Michelene Wandor 's On Gender and Writing, 1983, provides a trenchant summary of a depressing history.
Stott, Mary. “Women in Newspapers”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 126-32.
126
Textual Production Judith Kazantzis
JK contributed to On Gender and Writing (edited by Michelene Wandor , 1983) an essay entitled The Errant Unicorn.
Textual Production Penelope Shuttle
Shuttle and Redgrove contributed jointly to Michelene Wandor 's On Gender and Writing, 1983. Their contribution takes the form, unique in the volume, of a dialogue with Wandor in which the couple speak in unison.
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, 1985.
xii
Textual Production Michèle Roberts
After working on several other collective anthologies, MR joined forces with Judith Kazantzis and Michelene Wandor in another poetry volume, Touch Papers.
Blackwell’s Online Bookshop. http://Bookshop.Blackwell.co.uk.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Wandor, Michelene. Once a Feminist. Virago, 1990.
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.