(Timberlake Wertenbaker’s article appeared in the Guardian, 5/15/2025; Photo: ‘She had the courage to decide that people were people’ … Emily Dobbs, Sophie Scott, Olivia Poulet and Helena Johnson in Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi at the Finborough in 2013. Photograph: John Watts.)
Pam Gems’ revolutionary 1976 play Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi put ordinary, flawed, interesting women at its centre – a reversal of all the plays by men where women are ‘the problem’
I saw the play on my own, at the Mayfair theatre in London in 1977. There were four women on stage, in very ordinary clothes, in an ordinary flat. That was really unusual. And they weren’t elegant. I don’t remember thinking, oh, these are nice, stylish women in terrific clothes, which I was used to seeing.
At that time there were no other plays like that. I was in my 20s and hadn’t seen anything where the women were at the centre, but not idealised or sidelined. They were the play. And I found that just revolutionary.
Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi are all very different. One is a lawyer. One is a kind of waif who has anorexia. One is a physiotherapist leading a double life. And the other has two children who, during the course of the play, are taken away from her by the husband she has just divorced. He’s not on stage, just kind of present as one of the problems. So there is quite a bit of drama, but it’s done very lightly.
