Female-led arts festival this weekend features works by, about and starring Jewish women

Naomi Sorkin, the dancer and actress who is creative producer of London’s Playground Theatre, has once again assembled an impressive roster of female talent for the 2026 edition of the festival she instigated at the theatre last year in honour of International Women’s Day.

Jewish participants in the 2026 programme, which features 12 plays and four films as well as music, dance, poetry, discussion and stand-up comedy, include the multi-award-nominated Dame Janet Suzman talking about the experience of playing Cleopatra, one of her most famous roles.  BAFTA-winning comedy writer Helen Serafinowicz will talk with her co-writer Lisa Forrell about how a television series comes together, while Ruby Isaacs, daughter of actor Jason Isaacs, will make her London debut as a playwright, performer and director.

Also present as subject matter are two Jewish women whose notorious activities made them the subject of unsavoury headlines – Hedy Lamarr, the toast of Hollywood before a scandal tipped her career trajectory off-course, and Ghislaine Maxwell, whose actions in enabling Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes are the subject of a play written and performed by award-winning actress and playwright Kristin Winters.

This year two very young writers are getting their London debut at Women’s Voices: A Celebration. Isaacs, a 20-year-old who is studying film in Montreal with a special interest in the horror genre, has written a powerful play about rape – Honeytrap, while Who’d Love Lucy, by 24-year-old playwright Molly Stern, is a different kind of revenge drama, with a protagonist who’s looking for love.

Stern’s play was brought to Sorkin by Nicole Ansari-Cox, a co-producer of this year’s festival who will be assuming the persona of Hedy Lamarr, the Jewish actress who left Hungary to captivate Hollywood during its golden age. She will read the one-woman play Seven Seconds of Eternity, in which Lamarr reflects on the scandal – a seven-second nude scene – which changed the course of her career and caused the smouldering star, who played opposite Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and other greats of the silver screen, to be castigated and sidelined.

Ansari-Cox, wife of actor Brian, is also playing Mozart’s wife, Constanze, in the dark comedy Madame Mozart. Here, in the spirit of this feminist festival, the underestimated spouse completes the famous composer’s final musical commission and turns out to be “the only one standing, cleverer and braver than everyone else in her story”. As director, Ansari-Cox is also reprising a multimedia show she brought to the Edinburgh Fringe after its debut in New York. SHE/HER is topically dedicated to the women of Iran who have driven the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement, and will play for two nights during the festival.

Sex and love are a major theme of this year’s programme, with Serafinowicz, co-creator of Motherland and Amandaland, and her Jewish collaborator Lisa Forrell talking about their comedy series around older dating, commissioned by the BBC. But there’s little of either in The Spy Princess, the story of Noor Inayat Kahn, the brave descendant of an Indian prince who spied for Britain and was ultimately murdered in Dachau. The Jewish connection here is the multi-award-winning writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz.

Sorkin, co-curator and co-producer of this year’s Women’s Voices, is also screening Roman Fever, a short film based on an Edith Wharton story she brought to Barbara Stone, the Jewish film entrepreneur who founded the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill, to produce. She stars in the film herself as the more glamorous, flamboyant and malevolent of two middle-aged American women who meet in an Italian villa to relive their shared romantic exploits and air old scores.

From Jasmine Dellal, sister of the acclaimed film-maker Gaby Dellal, whose Park Avenue featured in last year’s UK Jewish Film Festival, comes the documentary Gypsy Caravan, celebrating the music of the Roma. And there is live music, too, from Trio Goya, three Jewish musicians playing pieces by female composers at a Sunday morning coffee concert.

Sebastian Comberti, who plays cello in Trio Goya, is one of the rare male performers in this female festival; another is Iain Glen, star of the short film Vagabond Shoes, which was nominated for a Scottish BAFTA. But every famous man has a great woman behind him, and this work is no exception – the director of this intriguing movie about a homeless man whose story is revealed at a high society gathering is multiple award-winner Jackie Oudney.

Like Madame Mozart, Moon Watch – a one-woman show starring one of Britain’s top musical stars, Janie Dee, and The Elizabeths – which features Caroline Goodall, who played Emilie Schindler in Schindler’s List, as Elizabeth 1,Vagabond Shoes is one of the non-Jewish but enticing offerings in a festival which showcases the wealth of female talent from all over the world dropping into London in March.

As Sorkin says herself: “At a moment when headlines continue to expose the scale of abuse carried out by the rich and powerful against women, Women’s Voices stands as a clear counterpoint. This festival exists to amplify women’s stories through performance music, dance, theatre and conversation – and to insist that women’s voices are heard, believed and valued.”

Women’s Voices: A Celebration runs from 8 – 31 March at the Playground Theatre