Women Centre Stage Festival, Hampstead Theatre

Glass ceilings and gender pay gaps aren't confined to the boardroom. Male dominance in theatre goes back to a ban on woman actors right up to 2016's latest figures about an average £29k discrepancy between male and female salaries in London's top theatres.

There may be a new generation of feminist playwrights and a rise in gender blind casting, but there's still a whole canon of classics clogged with male leads and female bit parts. Backstage isn't looking much better: between 2012-14 only 67% of directors and 72% of writers in UK theatre venues were male.

Sphinx Theatre Company exists to redress the balance and have been 'promoting, advocating and inspiring women in the arts' since 1973. After storming the Hampstead Theatre stage with 'Heroines' theatre festival in 2015 featuring the likes of Barney Norris, Timerlake Wertenbaker and Roy Williams, Sphinx return with a full feminist takeover and a manifesto for new roles for women.

Women Centre Stage: Power Play features six programmes running throughout the day in which leading writers, actors and companies participate in showcases, scratch and work-in-progresses.

Along with showcasing the new talents, the festival aims to have a more longterm impact in workshopping and the creating more diverse, high quality and frequent roles for women working in UK theatre.

This year's line-up is here and it's clear that there's plenty of theatre bigwigs more than happy to lend their talents to bringing women centre stage.