Robert Shaw, Director, on Sylvia Plath's "Three Women"

I received the following letter from Robert Shaw, Director of the revival of Sylvia Plath's "Three Women". "Three Women" commences a five week run at London' s Jermyn Street Theatre this Monday, 5 January 2009. I am posting it on the blog with his permission. The letter, which was attached in an email from Clare Butler, Press Officer for Inside Intelligence, was titled "Why Three Women".

Dear Peter,

I first came upon the text of Sylvia Plath's verse play Three Women in summer 2006, while I was on holiday in Croatia. I didn't know she'd written a play, so for a theatre director always on the lookout for projects, the best ones that give you that heady buzz of excitement when you think of them, it was like a gift. As soon as I read it, I realised that this was a text to uplift and inspire readers and audiences. I had what Peter Brook calls that instinctive knowledge that this is the play that has to be done and it has to be done NOW.

The word now, of course, is relative… It wasn't that quick to get permission. The final agreement only came through in June 2008. I was really in a hurry by then.

The play was written for radio and was first broadcast on August 19 1962, with a cast including the legendary British screen actor Jill Balcon. It describes the emotional journey of three women through pregnancy. One of them gives birth successfully, one of them has a miscarriage and one of them, a student, has to give her baby up for adoption. There was no legal abortion in the days when Plath wrote.

Plath lays bare the inner lives of these three women. She expresses, I think, what every pregnant woman knows but don't usually find the words for. In a way, she validates the everyday routine experiences of being pregnant. Well, that's what this man believes. And there are some great lines and extraordinary images.

What it certainly does is create a response. People behave differently after reading it. When I asked the receptionists at the Croatian hotel to print it out for me, their only interest was in how much they could charge me per page. There were several pages and their eyes were alight in anticipation of the money to be made from this tourist. When I went back to collect it, they wouldn't take a penny from me for printing quite a long document. Their eyes were alight in an entirely different way. It's been like that ever since.

1700 actors (all of them women, I think) applied for the three roles, from as far away as New York and Los Angeles, a well-known film actor among them. How could I afford to employ a movie star? But what a tribute to Sylvia…

Taking a radio play written in verse and making it work on stage is a risk. I have been blessed with the best cast any director could hope for. It's the sort of risk that has to be taken, thrilling and terrifying, inevitable and impossible to predict the result. Rehearsing this show has provided the excitement that only the theatre at its best can give. And it leaves me with a yearning thought - what wonderful dramatic writing would Sylvia Plath have produced if only we could have had her for longer?

Robert Shaw, Director

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove...

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de...

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last...

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