The Other Side of the Underneath

Jane Arden was born in Wales in 1927 and left for London in her teens.

She trained at RADA and quickly began working as an actress and playwright. It was there that she met her future husband, Philip Saville, who is now perhaps most known for his work Boys from the Blackstuff (1982) and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1986). They had 2 children, Sebastian Saville and Dominic Saville and one step- child, Elizabeth Saville.

Jane Arden’s plays include Armchair Theatre: The Thug (1959) which starred Alan Bates, The Party (1968) which was directed by Charles Laughton and gave Albert Finney his first role in the theatre, Post Mortem (1999), The New Communion For Freaks, Prophets and Witches, De illusionist (1984) and Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven (1969).

Jane Arden began tracing female oppression in 1966 when she wrote a script for the film Six: The Logic Game (1965). It was described as a “surrealist puzzle” attempting to locate the isolation of women in the context of bourgeois marriage.

Arden’s film career includes her original script and her performance in Separation (1968), which featured the song “Salad Days” by Procol Harum and was directed by Jane Arden’s collaborator Jack Bond. In this film, womens’ exploitation was exposed as their personal dilemma began to take on a political context.

Arden formed the feminist theatre group “Holocaust” and then wrote a play with the same name. In 1972, she adapted and directed this for the cinema as The Other Side of Underneath (1972).

Before her involvement with the Women’s Liberation Movement, she appeared on TV talk programmes like Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life (1964) as a speaker on women and politics. As an actress, she was best known for her performance as “Inez” in a BBC-TV production of Jean-Paul Sartre Huis clos (1965) (TV), opposite Harold Pinter as “Garcia”.

Two more films, both co-directed with Jack Bond, followed in the later 1970s, the experimental Vibration (1974), made in the USA in 1974, and Anti-Clock (1980) which opened the 1979 London Film Festival. It was the fist film to use video techniques in an experimental way. Her poetry books include You Don’t Know What You Want, Do You?. Jane Arden committed suicide on Dec. 20, 1982 in North Yorkshire and is buried in Darlington West Cemetary. She was 55 years old.