About the Play:

Daniels: Plays 2 contains a collection of four plays by Sarah Daniels, "a writer with a natural talent for disturbance" (Observer).

Set in the gutting sheds of the slaughterhouse at the Cattle Market in late Victorian England, The Gut Girls shows how the lives of the girls are changed when their work is made illegal (Cast: 6 women, 2 men,with doubling). "Regarded as little better than whores by their contemporaries the gut girls are ... a boisterous, beer-swilling, strong-minded bunch, handy with a knife both in the gutting shed and outside it, defiantly independent in attitude and scornful of the illusion of male supremacy." (Time Out).

Beside Herself is the first of three plays in this volume that deal with women and madness (Cast: 11 female, 7 male). "...a dramatic analogue of a contemporary social tragedy which exists on a scale we are only just beginning to comprehend" (Observer)

Head-Rot Holiday, commissioned by Clean Break theatre company for ex-offenders, portrays the fate of women detained in special hospitals, a euphemism for an institution for the "criminally insane" (Cast: 9 female). "There is a fine, hard humour, as well as compassion, in the way Head-Rot Holiday examines the contradictions entangling these women's lives."

The Madness of Esme and Shaz is a romantic comedy. Shaz has been institutionalized for many years. Care in the community means she ends up living with an aunt she has never met (Cast: 8 female). "A weird and wondrous black comedy" (Spectator

About the Playwright:

Sarah Daniels is an acclaimed English writer for stage, screen and radio. Known for her unflinching yet humorous examinations of the lives of marginalized groups of women, her work has been produced at the Royal Court Theatre, Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre, the National and the Albany Theatre in South London.