While researching into the play The Bogus Woman I began to look into the idea around human rights acts, which in the past I had not spent much time contemplating. The play I am directing is largely based upon the human rights of the young woman, who had to run away from her own country as she was a human rights journalist. The government back in her country were hunting her down because of her journalistic views on human rights and had killed all of her family, including her new born baby.

My lecturer gave me a magazine at the beginning of the semester called Amnesty International Magazine. When I started to investigate who they were I discovered that they were, ‘ordinary people from across the world standing up for humanity and human rights.’ (Amnesty, 2014) The group aim to defend freedom of expression, plea for justice aimed at crimes against humanity, and most importantly in my theatre company’s case, protect women’s rights.

Upon studying the real life stories within the Amnesty magazine I was shocked to discover that stories like The Bogus Woman were in fact true. I had a vague understanding of what happened in other countries but was not expecting it to be as severe and unjustified as within our play. ‘Most women’s experience of human rights violations are gendered, and many forms of discrimination or abuse occur because the victim is female. Women whose rights are being violated for reasons other than gender often also experience a particular form of abuse based on gender, such as sexual assault.’ (Peters, 1995, P.12) This helped me realise that the young woman in our play would have been prosecuted for being a female and also being a human rights journalist.  Therefore, as a human being she would be broken and I had to get across to the audience how traumatic her situation was. I discovered that in some countries woman are stripped of basic human rights such as their own health, body and sexual lifestyle. It is stated that in so many countries woman are forced to have a life threatening birth as it is illegal to perform terminations in their own country. ‘In every part of the world, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, there are women working for human rights, (Amnesty, 2014) which gives a sense of hope to women in these countries that do not have basic human rights, just like our young woman in The Bogus Woman.

As a company we had already decided to do a collection of donations at the end of our performance for a group that helped protect woman and their basic human rights. Without any hesitation we all realised that it was Amnesty we would choose for our donations. Reading the powerful and truthful stories within the magazine and on their website made me appreciate the impact groups like this have on protecting women’s human rights. It also helped me to comprehend how the young woman in our piece would perhaps be feeling. I was able to direct Fran (who plays the young woman) in a much more realistic way as I understood what woman like her go through on a daily basis.

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Amnesty . (2014). Womens Rights . Available: http://www.amnesty.org/en/womens-rights. Last accessed 1st May 2014.

Peters, J. and Wolper, A. (eds) (1995). Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives. London : Routledge.