Script: Robin Hood

I'm sure we’ve all seen various versions of Robin Hood over the years, but I was excited and intrigued that a modern play version was available, with a female Robin at its helm. Yes! That's what we want – a gutsy, brave, gung-ho girl who saves the day.

Unfortunately, in Laura Dockrill's re-telling of this famous story, her ‘girly’ Robin Hood is not a good depiction of a modern heroine. In fact, she's not a very good version of a woman at all. She's pretty whingy, was a bully at school, (which she seems to brush off as an unimportant fact), and her band of ‘Merry Many’ dislike her immensely. Although she does redeem herself as the play goes on, as an audience member I'm not really rooting for her, which is where I think Dockrill has missed the point. Young impressionable minds want women to look up to, and this version of Robin is not someone they’d want to become.