Incarcerating Eve

Incarcerating Eve explores the impact of female incarceration and disempowerment on society from ancient history to the present day.

Through bold theatricality, humour, innovative staging and epic storytelling, the play follows four Eves, four women separated by centuries, continents and culture, yet bound by shared experience. Each Eve carries her own story, shaped by her time and place: a woman condemned as a witch; a Victorian “hysteric” locked away for defiance; a modern woman criminalised for surviving abuse; a contemporary voice fighting the quiet prisons of control, shame and systemic oppression. Distinct in background, race, faith and circumstance, these women gradually discover their stories are not isolated; they are chapters of the same unfinished narrative.

Across more than 2,000 years of patriarchy, women have been imprisoned, silenced, institutionalised, tortured and executed, accused of witchcraft, hysteria, insanity, immorality or simply of stepping beyond prescribed roles. The charges change; the punishment remains. The policing of women’s bodies, minds and spirits continues in new and insidious forms.

Today, women’s freedoms are again under threat worldwide: the rollback of reproductive rights, the brutal oppression of women under extremist regimes, forced child marriage, the rise of misogynistic online movements, and escalating domestic violence. The four Eves come together across time and space to ask: Who controls the narrative? Who benefits from our division? What truths were buried to maintain power?

As Audre Lorde reminds us, ‘I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.’

In reclaiming their stories, the Eves reveal the continuity between past and present. Drawing on indigenous knowledge and anthropological insight, the play reawakens an ancient understanding that feminine and masculine energies were once held in balance, honoured equally, and rooted in reverence for life itself.

By weaving history with urgent contemporary testimony, Incarcerating Eve asks what must change for us to break the cycle of suppression and how we might build a future grounded not in domination, but in equality, compassion, love and care.