LOW LEVEL PANIC Aitor Bori Ibáñez Grupo
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By: Claire McIntyre
Author's Bibliography:
Clare McIntyre, who has died of multiple sclerosis, aged 57, was one of an extraordinary
generation of British female playwrights who emerged in the 1980s. Before then there
were really only two nationally known women writing in the British theatre, Caryl Churchill
and Pam Gems. By the end of the decade, there were two to three dozen. Although her
first play, I've Been Running, was performed at the Old Red Lion theatre pub in Islington,
north London, McIntyre's two best-known plays were presented – like many other plays by
women at the time – by the Royal Court theatre under the artistic directorship of Max
Stafford-Clark.
Born in Harrogate, north Yorkshire, McIntyre was brought up in Woldingham, Surrey, and
studied drama at Manchester University. She began her career as an actor, at first taking
drama into schools as part of Nottingham Playhouse's theatre-in-education team, and then
as a performer and deviser with the pioneering feminist Women's Theatre Group. Her
experience as a jobbing actor in rep, on film and on television (playing small parts in The
Pirates of Penzance, Hotel du Lac and A Fish Called Wanda) led her to change career and
join the growing number of female writers who addressed the issues raised by the feminist
movement in plays with mostly or entirely female casts.
McIntyre's first Royal Court play, Low Level Panic, was a deft and funny all-female three-
hander, set in a bathroom. (Although one character spends the opening scene in the bath,
the set description reassures designers and performers that "nobody goes to the toilet in
the play so there's no need to have a toilet in the set"). The play was directed in 1988 by
Nancy Meckler with Caroline Quentin, Lorraine Brunning and Alaine Hickmott in the
principal roles. The panic of the title is provoked by omnipresent pornography and a sexual
assault on one of the characters. But the play's originality and boldness lie in its treatment
of the characters' complex relationships with their own sexual fantasies, their bodies and
each other. Apart from her stage work, McIntyre wrote for EastEnders and the short-lived
soap opera Castles. Low Level Panic was televised in 1994 (with Charlotte Coleman, Beth
Goddard and Nicola Sanderson).
