Alice Birch’s feminist play, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. (2014) ends on a note of failure. The disconsolate tone of the play’s final lines undermines the excitement of the feminist revolution the characters are attempting to incite, as if it has failed before it has even begun. This chapter dwells on failure as a political and aesthetic strategy of resistance to a neoliberal, post-feminist status quo. It builds on Ellen Berry’s concept of ‘negative aesthetics’ as writing that combines ‘extreme content with formally radical techniques’, applying this to contemporary feminist theatre. Experimental theatre is understood here as theatre that pushes the boundaries of form, courts the unstageable and embraces a real risk of failure. In Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., Alice Birch pushes the form of the play to its limits to contemplate the failures of and the continued necessity for feminist activism, mobilising various strategies and poetics of failure. However, I argue that the radicalism of Revolt was tempered by the success of its reception, suggesting that it failed in ways that were acceptable to an audience. As a counterpoint, I consider Birch’s collaboration with RashDash, We Want You to Watch (2015), which was received by the mainstream press as a failure. Considering the case of We Want You to Watch, which combines movement and text in ways that unsettle conventional formal distinctions, sheds light on why some theatrical experiments are more acceptable than others and illuminates the gendered nature of risk in theatrical programming. In both plays, a feminist dramaturgy of failure is used to make seemingly impossible ideas – the abolition of pornography in We Want You to Watch; a total feminist revolution in Revolt – thinkable. Their activism and experimental aesthetics are galvanised by the seeming impossibility of the attempt.