Elizabeth Huskisson’s play Where Have All Our Women Gone was her way of channeling the rage and pain she felt about Sarah Everard’s murder. Huskisson was in her final year at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts when the 33-year-old marketing executive was abducted, raped and murdered by disgraced Met officer Wayne Couzens in 2021. Two years on, she’s performing the play at the Hope Theatre in Islington, where it runs until the end of the week, before Huskisson takes it to Kentish Town. “Stylistically, it’s extremely simple – the stage is covered in newspapers [about stories of violence against women], there’s a box and there’s a microphone and that really is it,” Huskisson says. This simple set-up allows the focus to remain on the terrifying realisation that Everard could have been any one of us, the young actor-director tells Islington Now.
The 23-year-old derides the typical safety advise directed at women. “There’s a few characters that are quite satirical, like a saleswoman character who’s trying to sell rape alarms, little items that say ‘Text me when you get home’, a guide from the Metropolitan police on ‘How to go missing’ so it’s really subverted and challenges people in quite an uncomfortable way.” Huskisson plays 15 characters – including men – during the 45-minute production, calling the experience of bringing them to life from a woman’s perspective “empowering”. The hardest part of staging the one-woman play was toeing the line between being confrontational and respectful to the victims. Where Have All Our Women Gone includes verbatim texts – such as Conservative councillor Laured Kalari’s now-deleted social media posts about Everard and excerpts from statements by former Met commissioner Cressida Dick.
Huskisson says the play takes on new significance following the release of Baroness Louise Casey’s independent review into systemic failings within the Met on 21 March. “There are things that have come out of the Casey review that I’ve somehow already managed to capture in the play which is quite interesting but in a slightly dark, satirical way.” For example, Baroness Casey’s damning report includes a statement from an unnamed Met officer who said the unit’s rape detection rates are so low that “you may as well say it is legal”. “There’s this one character called the Satirist, meant to play the devil’s advocate, who says: ‘Misogyny in this country is so bad, they’ve just decided to do nothing about it,’” Huskisson says.
The danger – with both the Casey review and Huskisson’s play – is that they could be forgotten “because people hear these things, they feel something but not enough to do anything about it”. “There’s one line in the play where I say: ‘Once you’ve heard this, it will mean nothing. Once this room is empty, it’s like nothing came before,’” Huskisson adds. The young playwright is now looking for ways to use her piece as a form of activism – including speaking to women officers in the Met – to push the conversation forward and present it in a different way “because I think it not only captures a lot of the facts of what’s happening, it also captures a real sense of rage and frustration and not knowing where to place all of that”.
