TEA WITH MRS PANKHURST. To 25 August.
Edinburgh - Fringe
TEA WITH MRS PANKHURST
by Ruth Urquhart and James Duncan
New Strides Productions at Calton Theatre Cafebar To 24 August 2003
Runs 1hr 15min No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 24 August
Fascinatinglook at different strands behind the fight for women's votes.New Strides is a professional-led community group. Going by this piece, it has a social/political interest which, fortunately, is worked out through debate rather than declaration.
Emmeline Pankhurst famously campaigned for women to have the vote. She was at odds with her daughters, particularly here with Sylvia who insisted on working among East London working-women - not the type by whom her mother wanted the Women's Social and Political Union to be represented.
Selina Cooper campaigned for women's voting rights to be recognised, quite a lot less famously. She was a working-class woman, a Lancashire millworker who didn't go home to the comforts that allowed Emmeline to separate her single-issue campaign from the advance of rights more widely.
One problem with the short scenes pursuing her story is we find out too little abouit the interesting Selina. Did she have a husband or children (presumably yes to the first - she's referred to as Mrs Cooper)? If so, did she combine being wife and mother with political activity? If not, did this separate her from the vast majority of working women with families?
Did she carry on as a millworker? For how long? Did her activities not get her into trouble with the bosses? They could well have done so, when you consider that World War I patriotism turned even Emmeline into a government spy, leaking the names of trade union 'agitators' to the authorities, who promptly conscripted them.
Yet this was the woman who came near death by hunger-strike for her own cause. Some more idea of what made her tick, and tock, one way or another, would be illuminating.
Still, the story's fascinating, and Mrs Cooper, given a striking performance, is someone who deserves her hour and a quarter on the stage to strut and fret for rights from inside the working masses. Her enthusiasm for Bolshevism might now seem naive, but Emmeline's fear of Bolshevik organisation during her visit to post-Czar Kerensky Russia is telling.
Sympathies lean one way, but without obliterating the Pankhursts. Acting is secure if technically limited and hardly seeking to go beneath the surface of rapidly-moving incident. But it's a neat idea to present this in a cafe, with tea served pre-show at cafe tables by waitresses with suitable Edwardian demureness and an anachronistic 'Enjoy'.
There's also dry white bread served to us as workhouse inmates (Emmeline and Selina were both Poor Law Guardians, unusual both in being women in this position, and in seeing themselves as representing the interests of the poor rather than ratepayers).
And there's cake, for Mrs Pankhurst's 1911 Scottish census boycott rally (why fill in a census form when women are denied full citizenship?).Three years later she's asking us to forego cake - we all have to make sacrifices when there's a war on.
Emmeline, the disruptive suffragette, died while seeking to be elected as a Tory MP. Selina, the non-violent suffragist, was expelled from the Labour Party aged 84. Which of them won the vote? The point seems to be that if we, the recumbent audience, had played our part instead of sitting through history being served tea and cake, the question would never have need to be asked.
This is the kind of show the Edinburgh Fringe should always accommodate - not the most polished, but always individual, a valuable shared experience for a cast that's clearly ejoyed putting the piece together, and an audience who are given a view of an inriguing corner of the tensions that lie behind the making of modern society.
Cast and credits not available
2003-08-24 19:30:41