About this Archive

Administrative/Biographical History

Sue Frumin is a British playwright, born in Manchester in 1949. Sue Frumin is a penname, and some of her early work can be found under the name Susan Jamieson. Sue began her career in 1975 as an administrator at the Albany Empire, Deptford. She moved to the Soho Polytechnic and decided to take advantage of the encouraging environment and started writing plays.

Sue and her twin sister were daughters of a Jewish Czechoslovak refugee mother, and many of her plays draw on her family history. For example, her one-woman show, "The Housetrample", evokes the experience of her mother as a refugee arriving in war-time Manchester, working on the buses and in factories, confronting prejudice and isolation, and fearing for friends left behind in Prague.

Furthermoe, Sue's plays also draw on her experience as a lesbian. In 1985, Gay Sweatshop Theatre Company commissioned Frumin to write "Raising the Wreck", which used song and storytelling to rediscover the hidden history of women pirates, escapees from social convention and sexual oppression, haunting a sunken galleon. The performers were all female, and for the first time in the company’s history, the play had a multi-racial cast.

As well as writing plays and scripts, during her career, Frumin was involved with the formation of a comedy team, "The Red Bucket". She also formed her own theatre company in London called, "Shameful Practice". Their first production was "Home, Sweet Home" (1987), which was first performed at the Duke of Wellington Pub in London.

Frumin's work has been critiqued in various publications such as, "Putting Your Daughters on the Stage: Lesbian Theatre from the 1970s to the 1990s", by Sandra Freeman, and an essay by Rose Collis regarding lesbian theatre featured in, "British and Irish Women Dramatists since 1958", edited by Trevor Griffiths and Margaret Llewellyn Jones.

Scope and Content

Various papers and scripts relating to plays and sketches written, directed, and/or performed by playwright Sue Frumin, and theatre companies, venues and events that she was involved in [c.1975-2008]