Sarah Daniels

Sarah Daniels

 Sarah Daniels said the motivation for the play was to give a voice to the women of history that were forgotten. This play highlights a period in Deptford’s working class history and is why it was written in order to attract working class Londoners to the Albany Empire in which it was first performed. Sarah Daniels was asked to write this play by Teddy Kiendl the director at the Albany Empire theatre and because of its close proximity to the old Foreign Cattle market gutting sheds, Kiendl asked Daniels to write about the girls who worked in them, known locally as ‘the gut girls’. He wanted Daniels to write about what happened to them when the sheds where forced to shut down because of new technology at the start of the century. Sarah Daniels also wanted to include the efforts of Duchess of Albany who at this time was setting up a school for these women in order to lure them away from this kind of work as she found it revolting. The Duchess of Albany wanted to take these women and train them into servants as this was a high ranked job for the working class at this time. Kiendl encouraged Daniels to base her characters on the actual ‘gut girls’ and the Duchess of Albany but left the structure and narrative of the play to her own imagination.  Interestingly Daniels found it hard to research much about the women who worked in the gutting factory; this was because at the time being a gut girl was one of the lowest social statuses,

‘There’s only one thing worse than being a gut girl and that’s being a whore’, people were also frighten of ‘the gut girls’ which made Daniels researching even harder. Her research into the Duchess of Albany was a more successful with Sarah Daniels being able to track down the Duchesses diaries.  While most of Gut Girls adds to the basic story that Kiendl outlined, Daniels wanted to keep a historically accurate account in her dramatization of the social atmosphere and period detail. This meant she included references to things like clothes and recent develops that would be happening at that time. I like that she really wanted to keep it true to the period and do the story of these women justice, I also agree that as a writer if they are basing it on a certain period they must do really in depth research about the subject area to make the story believable and relatable to the audience. Being relatable to the target audience was a massive factor for Daniels as she was writing this play for the working class in 1988 about the working class in 1900s, this meant it was so important to get the atmosphere and social aspect perfect or it wouldn’t work at all.

 

As a running theme in Sarah Daniel’s work I have discovered that she likes to explore the idea and periods when women are regarded as social outcasts. This rings true for her other plays such as the group of women in Byrthrite (1986), Claire and Val in Neaptide (1986), and Yvonne in Masterpieces (1983/4). We also see in Gut Girls the themes of female solidarity and community, mother-daughter relationships, female friendships and how the forms of patriarchal oppression, meaning oppression by men in the underlying bias of society, surround the women’s lives. Gut Girls is very similar in structure to the play Byrthrite which Daniels also wrote, they both highlight the importance of laughter and humor as the way of the women surviving and getting through life. Again in both of these plays they follow a reverse pattern.  In Gut Girls the main driving force for the play’s action is economic oppression, throughout the play Daniels continues to show how economic oppression is linked inextricably with class oppression, they both form the central focus of play.

 

Inextricably- so entangled or intricate it is impossible to detach or untie.


Information and research taken from this link. For information on The Gut Girls go to page 109


http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/1835/1/DX193021.pdf