Peter John Cooper

Escaping the Storm – New play for AsOne Theatre

When Jane McKell first suggested the idea of writing a play about Marie Stopes to coincide with the centenary of the publication of her book “Married Love”, I was thrilled. Here was an opportunity to write about one of the most important women of the twentieth century who spent time on our own Isle of Portland. I started off knowing only that she was the writer of That Book (one I hadn’t actually read and which was still regarded as shocking by people of my parents’ generation) and that she had gifted the people of Portland the cottages that were to become the Portland Museum. However, it only took me a brief time reading wikipaedia to realise that I was dealing with someone who, sixty years after her death, still generates sharply divided emotions amounting to veneration in some and hatred in others; whose personal life was full of complexities and contradictions and whose ideas present extreme challenges to us in the twenty-first century. Marie Stopes was a brilliant scientist whose work is still recognised today. She was a feminist but jibbed against the strictures of the Suffrage movement. but she also openly courted controversy and laid herself bare in the courts and newspapers of the time. (more…)