This review was originally written for The Reviews Hub.
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| Photographer: Marisa Knight |
Writer: Beatrice Hyde
Director: Anastasia Revi
This play about events
over a hundred years ago is a play for right now.
Beatrice Hyde’s debut tells
the extraordinary story of the militant suffragette campaign and its devastating
personal consequences for the Pankhurst family.
The imperious Emmeline Pankhurst
(Georgie Rhys), once evocatively described by the feminist writer Rebecca West
as a ‘reed of steel’, is first encountered as a reforming Poor Law Guardian
championing the cause of poor women locked up in a workhouse. Recently widowed,
Emmeline is spurred to act when the local Independent Labour Party erect a hall
in her husband’s name – and then bar women from entering.
Emmeline founds the
Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) to fight with ‘deeds not words’ for
votes for women, and her three daughters eagerly enlist as activists in the
cause. The eldest, Christabel, is her mother’s indulged favourite, the middle
daughter, Sylvia, is the romantic artist, while the youngest Adela strives for
attention amongst the other more charismatic Pankhursts.
Government
intransigence results in the WSPU escalating its militant tactics, hauntingly
depicted in this performance. Imprisoned suffragettes place birdcages over their
heads, simultaneously evoking the claustrophobia of the cells and a classic
nineteenth century metaphor for women’s oppression (“She’s Only a Bird in a
Gilded Cage”). In the background, the cast incant lyrics written by a
suffragette imprisoned in Holloway.
Some of the most chilling scenes are those
depicting police violence against the suffragettes. Watching this after Sarah
Everard, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, the suffragette struggle suddenly
feels very close and unfinished. This is no longer a play about the past, but
about the urgent need for women’s equality today. The lyrics to another
suffragette song performed by the cast remind us: “The vote in itself is just
nothing, / ‘Tis only a means to an end. / Look round you – look under the
surface, / And see what we’re seeking to mend.”
At the heart of the play is the
fraught relationship between Emmeline and Sylvia Pankhurst. It shows in detail
how the failure to win a speedy victory posed dilemmas for them about their
loyalty to their ideals and family. Emmeline responds to these pressures by
abandoning her socialist politics, endorsing proposals to enfranchise a wealthy
minority of women. She becomes increasingly autocratic, demanding absolute
loyalty from a relatively small group of militant activists.
It is Sylvia
Pankhurst (played earnestly by Charlie Hansen), who appears in the most
sympathetic light as she struggles to navigate her loyalty to her mother and the
women’s cause on the one hand and her commitment to working-class emancipation
and her love for the married Labour leader Keir Hardie on the other. In place of
an elitist struggle, Sylvia calls for a democratic mass movement – for which she
pays a painful personal price.
Given the play’s focus and Sylvia’s call to make
working-class people agents of change it is surprising that her breakaway
campaign in East London is only alluded to and not dramatized beyond a few
awkward crowd scenes. That Sylvia starved herself on the steps of the Houses of
Parliament and nearly achieved a breakthrough in negotiating with the
government, forcing the Prime Minster to meet working-class East Londoners face
to face, is surely important evidence that her alternative, more radical
strategy could have been effective – and it would have made good theatre.
In
general, the play is overly narrative: too much is told when it would have been
more effective to show. But no one will leave the theatre without feeling that
we can better confront the injustices of today with the inspiration of the
suffragettes in the past.
Runs until 14 November 2021
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