Curtainup

Groundbreaking comedian Jan Ravens tells Kate Copstick why she’s glad she left it late to make her Fringe solo debut

Feminism comes in many forms. Sadly many of those forms exist nowadays only on stages, social media and T-shirts. Jan Ravens is from a time when women were still storming the metaphorical barricades of the literal boys’ clubs.

“When I was in the Cambridge Footlights, no women were writing,” she says, over a pot of tea. “We got to pop up in the sketches and be the sort of “your laugh is here, Mr Smith” feeds, but that was it.”.

When Jan, Emma Thompson and Sandi Toksvig did their female review in 1980, it was the first time women had written for the Footlights. “Miriam Margolyes told us in quite vitriolic terms,” says Jan, “about how she wasn’t allowed in the Club Room. She could be in the show but she couldn’t be a club member.” But not only did Jan Ravens get membership, she became the first ever female President of the Cambridge Footlights. She frowns. “Once I started I wondered why they had not got a woman before … there was really quite a lot of drudgery involved.”

She followed up her pioneering presidential office by directing Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery in the Footlights Review which won the inaugural Perrier Award. That, she freely admits, was “intimidating” but her success gave her the clout to lead womankind