Greenwich-born Alice Trueman will return to Greenwich Theatre in the first week of March with the world premiere of Three Generations of Women co-written with Anna Jefferson, joint founder of Broken Leg Theatre.

The narrative of the play – which will tour for the rest of March after a week of performances in Greenwich – is based on the stories of hundreds of women in the UK who responded to a website set up by Alice and Anna or told first hand of their experiences.

“It was amazing how people’s eyes lit up as they told us about extraordinary skeletons in their cupboards,” said Alice, who was born and brought up in Greenwich. “We felt privileged that people confided so much online. It was clearly quite cathartic for some of the women and often very heartrending.”

Broken Leg limited the project to the UK but still have nearly 2,000 stories uploaded on to their website, threegenerationsofwomen.co.uk.

“We had the quite daunting task of trying to construct a narrative and remaining true to what were often confessional and very emotional stories,” said Alice. “It’s very much a narrative rather than a verbatim piece and there were quite clear overriding themes of family secrets kept throughout the generations.

“There were great areas of responsibility and guilt, and we tried our best to create something that’s accessible and did justice to the lives of so many amazing women.”

Alice had moved to Brighton but came back to London in 2012 to take an MA in script writing at Goldsmiths. “I needed some work so I went to Greenwich Theatre as an usher,” she said. “At the same time they were looking for new pieces of work for an emerging theatres festival and Anna and I had already won an award at the Brighton Fringe for our first collaboration, called My Second Life, which transferred to Greenwich in 2012.

“We first started talking about Three Generations of Women in 2013. This was during the first murmurs of what became known as the fourth wave of feminism. I was very interested in strong female figures at the time, including the amazing Gulabi Gang in India who struck out brilliantly against domestic violence.

“We were really just waxing lyrical about all of this and came up with the idea of getting funding to write a play about women outside of our own objective experience, through real testimonies from different generations of women who grew up in the UK.

“We did a reading at Greenwich Theatre 10 months ago and it has moved on a great deal since then. We’re so lucky to work with such a strong creative team now, including producer Becky Smith and director Ria Parry, from the National Theatre Studio, who have taken us up a level.

“We can’t big up Greenwich Theatre enough. James Haddrell has just been fantastically supportive to us as a company. We wouldn’t be here right now but for Greenwich Theatre. It’s a real blessing.”

James, the theatre’s artistic and executive director, said: “it’s a delight to see someone progress from tearing tickets to co-producing their own show with us. Three Generations Of Women represents a big step forward for Broken Leg Theatre. It’s their biggest project by far and we are proud to be able to support such an inspirational piece of work.”

*Three Generations of Women runs at Greenwich Theatre from Tuesday, March 1, to Saturday, March 5, at 7.30pm with a matinee on March 5 at 2.30pm. Tickets £16 (concessions £13.50), including £1 booking fees. Call 020 8858 7755.