We've got the power

‘Theatre Uncut started as a very responsive idea,’ say Hannah Price and Emma Callander, co-artistic directors of the Arts Council England-funded group. Theatre Uncut prides itself on doing things a little differently: political playwriting is its lifeblood, which is so deeply ingrained that when Price founded the company in 2011, she did so as a response to the coalition government's cuts to arts funding. Since then, it has been commissioning leading and emerging writers to create plays which, according to the Theatre Uncut website, ‘tackle political and social issues’.

The current group of plays have been aptly named the Power Plays, and have been written by women. Available to download rights-free, these latest commissions have been written in response to the #MeToo movement and the increasingly politically-charged era. At the launch of the Power Plays in London's Young Vic, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan performs her play, A Coin In Somebody Else's Pocket. By turns eloquent and funny – and also aware of its own irony – A Coin is a tour de force of powerful writing, which challenges the very notion of being an ‘outspoken' Muslim woman. In it, Manzoor-Khan argues that she's not vocal all the time; sometimes she doesn't want to be, and other times she does. Does that then make her less of a feminist?