Founded in 2007 by Susan Croft and Jessica Higgs, Unfinished Histories is a project to gather the oral histories and preserve the archive of the vital alternative theatre movement in Britain from around 1968 to the early 90s. It shares information gathered through its extensive website www.unfinishedhistories.com as well as through exhibitions, discussions, newsletters, readings and publications, and seeks to encourage new work inspired by this history. From 2023 to 2026 Unfinished Histories is working with London Performance Studios on the project FYFFI: Fifty Years of the Fight for Inclusion.
Dr Susan Croft is a writer, curator, arts archive specialist, dramaturg and activist. She is Director of Unfinished Histories: Recording the History of the Alternative Theatre Movement, editor of the Her Inside: Women in the Lockdown, and producer of SuffrageArts. Her publications include She Also Wrote Plays: an International Guide to Women Playwrights (2001), Art, Theatre & Women’s Suffrage (with Irene Cockroft) and, as editor, Black and Asian Performance at the Theatre Museum: a Users’ Guide (2003), the anthologies Votes for Women and Other Plays (2009), Classic Plays by Women (2010), both Aurora Metro, and (with Sherry Engle) Thousands of Noras: Short Plays by Women 1875- 1920 (i-Universe, 2015).
Claire MacDonald is a London based writer, Unitarian minister and sometime theatre maker whose current work takes shape around conversation and place making.
Winsome Pinnock British Playwright Winsome Pinnock was born in Islington, North London. She is an award-winning playwright and dramaturg. Her work has been produced on the British stage and internationally since 1985. She was the first black British female writer to have a play produced by the Royal National Theatre. She is a recipient of the 2022 Windham-Campbell Prize. Winsome was Associate Professor in Drama at Kingston University from 2005 to 2019, and was Senior Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. She has worked as a dramaturg with the Royal National Theatre’s New Views scheme as well as with the Royal Court’s International Department. The prizes awarded to her work include the George Devine Award, The Pearson Plays on Stage Award and the Unity Theatre Trust Award.
Geraldine Pilgrim, director/designer/installation artist and educator, works across theatre and the visual arts. She is also Artistic Director of Geraldine Pilgrim Performance Company, and is known for her evocative, socially-engaged, participatory site-specific performances and installations, which create a contemporary dialogue with occupied and empty buildings, landscapes, and historic houses; often working in collaboration with young people, older people and arts and community groups alongside professional performers. She trained as a fine artist and theatre designer, then co-founded and became Artistic Director of Hesitate and Demonstrate, the influential visual theatre company which toured Britain and mainland Europe, and has since been making large- and small-scale site-specific performances, installations and theatre-based work.
Melissa Murray has won the Eric Gregory Poetry and the Verity Barrage Playwright Awards and a Prix Europa Special Commendation. Changeling, a short story collection, was published by Attic Press Ireland. She has written over thirty original plays for BBC Radio 4 and Radio 3, and dramatised a similar number from writers as varied as Hilary Mantel, H G Wells and Dostoyevsky. She lives in Dublin.
Natasha Morgan was born in Wembley to Ashkenazy left-wing parents and immigrant grandparents. She wrote her first journal aged sixteen, entitled “Les Garcons Dans Ma Vie.” She graduated from Oxford in 1967, before becoming an actor in experimental theatre, a young socialist and a feminist. In protest at Miss World at The Royal Albert Hall, she threw tomatoes at the stage and then started her theatre company, “That’s Not It” with Jenny Carey and Rick Fisher. After Room, which played at The Royal Court Theatre upstairs, Natasha wrote four plays which toured round the UK. She trained to be a psychotherapist and is now in private practice from her home. She wrote “Room” in 1979 in her dressing gown, a new mother with a four-month-old child crying in a pram. She found the confines of her home to be the perfect starting point to realise her urgent need for a room of her own.