Over 70 female and non-binary writers have collaborated to stage an ambitious theatrical piece inspired by the Jeffrey Epstein files.
All The Rage has been set up by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, who also penned the 2022 film She Said, which starred Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan as Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the reporters behind the New York Times investigation that exposed Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual abuse.
The new project – described as “an urgent collective response to the release of the Epstein files” – is being staged in 15 rooms of a former insurance building in London.
The dozens of collaborators have written short scripts and texts that are being performed and used in installations in order to “confront institutional silence, cultural complicity and the enduring history of misogyny”.
Lenkiewicz coordinated All The Rage in a playwriting WhatsApp group, telling the BBC that the project was born out of “anger” at the lack of attention paid to Epstein’s victims in the coverage of the Epstein files, which were released in January.
“Every day was full of the men and the money – so we thought it would be wonderful to have the female perspective on it,” she said.
Lenkiewicz continued: “A lot of the language around sexual violence and rape is about shame, and we want to shift the shame, we want the guilt to be with the perpetrators.”
Epstein and the men who feature in the files are not portrayed in the show, with Lenkiewicz explaining: “Those men have had enough oxygen.”
Her contributions include a poem inspired by Virginia Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, which included details of the abuse she suffered from Epstein and accusations against Prince Andrew, who has denied all wrongdoing.
Lenkiewicz has also penned a letter to a man from her past, which is being shredded after it is performed.
Other playwrights taking part include Lucy Kirkwood, whose play Maryland was adapted into a television film by the BBC after it was staged at the Royal Court Theatre in 2021, and Timberlake Wertenbaker, who has been described as “the doyenne of political theatre of the 1980s and 1990s”.
Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, whose 2005 play Behzti (Dishonour) depicted sexual abuse in a Sikh place of worship and was cancelled mid-run in Birmingham following protests at the theatre, has also contributed.
Lucy Morrison, former Associate Director at the Royal Court Theatre, is the lead director.
All the Rage is at Theatre Deli, Leadenhall Street, London, until Saturday 13 June.
