Nancy Diuguid

Nancy Elizabeth Diuguid was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her parents were Gex Lillard Diuguid, a Carroll Co. tobacco farmer, and Elizabeth Bailey Lineback Diuguid. She attended schools in Ghent and Carrollton, Kentucky, and Indiana University Bloomington, before moving to London, England, to study at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 1972.{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Zc0eBgAAQBAJ&q=nancy+diuguid&pg=PA274 |title=The Encyclopedia of Northern Kentucky|date=17 October 2014|publisher=Paul A. Tenkotte and James C. Claypool|isbn=9780813159966}}

After leaving the Central School, Diuguid did street theatre and worked with the fringe group A Plum Line which rehearsed in the ballroom of an Eaton Square squat (next door to Lord Boothby's home). From there, it was a short step to the recently formed Gay Sweatshop{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ifFwBgAAQBAJ&q=nancy+diuguid&pg=PA152|title=British Theatre Companies 1980-1994|first=Graham |last=Saunders|date=26 February 2015|publisher=Bloomsbury |isbn=9781408175507}} and, in 1976, a three-month tour of Jill Posner's coming-out play Any Woman Can, which provoked bomb threats.{{cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/may/28/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries|title=Nancy Diuguid obituary|work=The Guardian|date=28 May 2003 |last1=Woddis |first1=Carole }} In 1979, she directed her last production with this company, The Dear Love of Comrades by Noël Greig, about the 19th-century socialist utopian, and early LGBT activist, Edward Carpenter.{{cite web|url=http://www.unfinishedhistories.com/history/companies/gay-sweatshop/dear-love-of-comrades/|title=Unfinished Histories|publisher=Susan Croft}} The following year, at her instigation, the first women's festival was held at the Action Space (now the Drill Hall) which trailblazed the future of lesbian theatre, such as Susan Griffin's Voices staged by Diuguid.{{cite book|url=https://archive.org/details/contemporaryfemi0000good|url-access=registration|quote=diuguid.|title=Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own|publisher=Routledge|first=Lizbeth|last=Goodman}} She also formed the Women's Project Company (with Kate Crutchley, 1979){{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=dgbZAgAAQBAJ&q=nancy+diuguid&pg=PA51|title=Modern British Playwriting: The 1970s: Voices, Documents, New Interpretations|first=Chris|last=Megson|date=20 March 2014|publisher=A&C Black |isbn=9781408177891}} and directed several other plays: Louise Page's Tissue (1978), the first play about breast cancer; Noël Greig's Angels Descend On Paris (1980), concerning the Nazi persecution of gays and Jews; Timberlake Wertenbaker's New Anatomies (1981); and Patterns (1984), by her own company, Changing Women.{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=21yQAgAAQBAJ&q=nancy+diuguid&pg=PA42|title=Carry on Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics|first=Michelene|last=Wandor|date=31 July 2004|publisher=Routledge |isbn=9781135794866}}

Diuguid had a strong alliance with Clean Break, a women's theatre company formed by ex-prisoners, directing the plays The Easter Egg (1983) by Chris Tchaikovsky, a prison reformer, and Lin Coghlan's Apache Tears (2000). Other major productions included Howard Brenton's Sore Throats (1979); Darrah Cloud's The Stick Wife (1991), about the wives of three Ku Klux Klan members; and Request Programme, by Franz Xaver Kroetz (1986) with actress Eileen Nicholas, for which Diuguid won a best director award. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, she travelled extensively in Australia, Brazil (as a guest director, at the British Council Theatre Group, with Luiz Päetow), Japan and Israel (where a traumatic personal experience led, 10 years later, to her shortfilm Aftermath). Furthermore, she became a staff director to the English National Opera and also worked as an Associate Director at the Hampstead Theatre.

In 1999, Diuguid settled in South Africa and started an arts and drama group with male prisoners at the Leeuwkop Maximum Security Prison. "Doing work about people who are at the edge, is for me second nature," she said. The next year, having been diagnosed with breast cancer, she started a project in Alexandra township using dance, drama, art and movement to help empower and heal traumatised children. The name of the project was Voices, and the name of her company, "Dedel'ingoma" (which means Release your song). In 2002, she directed the techno-opera Earthdiving in Cape Town. Diuguid continued working until shortly before her death in 2003. Her companion of 17 years, South African filmmaker Melanie Chait, and their foster son Desmond, survived her.{{cite web|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/nancy-diuguid-5384658.html |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220618/https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/nancy-diuguid-5384658.html |archive-date=2022-06-18 |url-access=subscription |url-status=live |work=The Independent|title=Obituary|date=13 July 2003 }} She left instructions to spread her cremated remains in England, South Africa and Kentucky. Diuguid was memorialized by a plaque in St Michael's and All Angels Church, Guiting Power, Gloucestershire, England, and with a cenotaph in the Diuguid family plot in Ghent Cemetery in Carroll County, Kentucky.

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Category:1948 births

Category:2003 deaths

Category:American theatre directors

Category:American women theatre directors