The particular power of female alliances

Photo shoots can feel pretty embarrassing. Keep your face ahead, arms still, try not to imagine how it’s going to turn out. On a shoot last year, the demands of the photographer and my own flexibility could be plotted on separate graphs. But recently, as the camera faced me, and the photographer issued their usual command (“Yes, now stay like that”), I couldn’t care less. In fact, I was proud.

The difference this time was that I was standing between two women. It wasn’t just their literal presence, diluting the intensity. The purpose of the shoot was clear in my mind. We were there to publicise the play adaptation of my novel, little scratch, which is currently on at the Hampstead Theatre in London. Standing next to them — the director Katie Mitchell and playwright Miriam Battye — was strangely affirming. One of them said as much as we stood there. “This is important,” she said. “These are the shoots that matter.” It was empowering, just as the whole project had been.

What I was appreciating were the bare facts. We were working on a project that was feminist, assertive, powerful. There’s nothing extraordinary about women being creative. It’s the creativity, the work, that’s extraordinary. But there was a defiance in the three of us standing there. A defiance, partly, in the ordinariness, in the matter-of-factness, in each of us getting on, working, getting things done.

There is something expected and gendered in reservation and deference. In correcting someone with a veil of linguistic qualifiers; in authority being exercised with gentility and in understating achievement. But I was proud — am proud — and in that moment, particularly, there was no hesitation in the feeling.

I grew up in a very male household, with three brothers and no female cousins, so maybe I am more appreciative of female alliance. There is something communal about working from a shared understanding. Men have long been marked as singular geniuses, women as support. But here we were, each of us a separate authority. The subject matter of little scratch only emphasised the importance. The book tells a day in the life of a woman working as an admin assistant, recovering from a recent assault, trying to find the words to express what has happened to her. Together, director, adapter, writer, we built this character a platform and there was something moving in that experience.

What went unsaid is the way we fit into the texture of her world. The novel (and now play) challenges the dark, uncomfortable, all-too-familiar experience of being a woman: the claustrophobia of powerlessness, the insidious sexism and misogyny that alter how we negotiate the world and how we are allowed to walk through it. A woman knows what it is to be a woman, and in the process of putting the novel on stage, there was never need for grounding or context. The question was only how to bring it to life. That was a release. I approved the script, came into rehearsals to talk to the actors or take them on a research trip, but I could stay apart. I trusted them.

I was struck recently by something a writer, who used to work high up in advertising, told me. The first thing she had to learn, she said, was how to present views in such a way that the men could speak them back with the belief they were their own. With no conflict, she could get the work done. It doesn’t need saying — or is that a euphemism for when someone needs to hear something but softly, as if by accident? — that some men do not suffer from this ego and can work from a place of understanding. But it seems telling that, as I write this column, I am already thinking of the comments section.

When the play was announced, I was asked a lot how it felt. Eyebrows were raised. There was an expectation that I would be worried, that it was a “baby” I ought to be protective of, wary of its safety in other people’s hands. But I never felt a scrap of that. Why would I? Two talented women were working on my novel. It was thrilling.

I had never anticipated when I was writing little scratch how the book would keep on travelling after I finished. Writing is a lonely thing, necessarily. Transferring it to the stage was a wonderful, heart-jolting shift. Of course there are many people working to get the novel into readers’ hands, but the reading remains an intimate experience. Suddenly, here I am in a theatre, actors and technicians working the cogs while I witness the laughter and halted quiet of the audience.

Most nights I think of the actors when they are about to go on stage. I recognise 19:45 as a meaningful time. Mind moving fast, telling me: they’re on! It’s surreal to be at home, in the pub, cycling somewhere, only to be caught by that. I am reminded, each time, of how my book brought me into the company of countless people that I admire. But there is something else, something difficult to pin down, that I can only feel. I felt it as I looked down the photographer’s lens and I have felt it again and again throughout the process. The play allows me a separation: it gives me a slow-shutter view. I can recognise their work, and I can recognise my own within it.

Rebecca Watson is the FT’s assistant arts editor and author of “little scratch” (Faber). The play is at Hampstead Theatre, London, to December 11

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