Up the women!
WNO’S music-hall romp through the suffragettes
The first and perhaps most important thing to note about this entertaining show – a vaudeville in the manner of Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a
Lovely War – is its redressing of a gender imbalance: taking as its subject the life of a pioneering suffragette and feminist. It is performed by an allfemale cast and devised by an allfemale team of creatives. About time too, many will say, but my job is to judge the immediate artistic result.
It’s been commissioned by David Pountney, head honcho at Welsh National Opera, to celebrate the centenary of men allowing women the vote. To get us in the mood, the company’s chorus calls on the audience to join in Ethel Smyth’s March of the Women – a rousing anthem that Smyth memorably conducted with a toothbrush while she was incarcerated in Holloway prison – and continues to tell the story of Margaret Haig Thomas, later Viscountess Rhondda.
Born in 1883, the only child of a radically reformist mother and liberal-minded father, who was also a wealthy industrialist, Margaret enjoyed a progressive education that took her to Somerville College, Oxford. She drove a car – an unusual accomplishment for a woman at the time – and with the support of her parents, if not her ill-matched husband, she joined the more aggressive wing of the suffragette movement. In 1913, this led her to plant a bomb in a letterbox in Newport – a crime for which she was briefly imprisoned and went on hunger strike.
Undaunted, she began working on the management side of her father’s business and at the outbreak of the First World War she ranked among the highest-earning women in Britain. While travelling back from the US, where she was helping to negotiate a munitions deal, she survived the sinking of the Lusitania. Having become Lady Chairman of the Sanatogen Company, and lost her inconvenient husband, she then set up home with her Scottish lover Helen Archdale. Together they established
Time and Tide, a weekly journal with an agenda to promote the feminist cause that commissioned work from the likes of Virginia Woolf, Nancy Astor, George Bernard Shaw and DH Lawrence. She also promoted the cause of equal pay and the rights of unmarried women and abused children.
Her attempt to sit in the House of Lords as rightful heir to her father’s title may have been thwarted, but she broke into another male bastion when she was elected the first female president of the Institute of Directors.
It’s a fascinating and inspiring story but a jerkily episodic one without obvious operatic potential, and the librettist Emma Jenkins fails to mould its chapters into a coherent narrative, leaving too much unexplained or unexplored. Instead she skates through Margaret’s life as a music-hall pageant, led by a cross-dressed Emcee, pluckily played by Lesley Garrett – almost voiceless now, but still irrepressibly energetic and exemplary in diction.
The score is an engagingly fresh and unpretentious affair knitted together by Elena Langer, whose Figaro Gets a Divorce was such a critical success for WNO in 2016. She provides a clever, fluent pastiche of popular musical styles of the day, including a hauntingly modal folk-song for Margaret’s beloved Helen (about whom we regrettably learn almost nothing).
That excellent mezzo-soprano Madeleine Shaw sings and plays Margaret most sympathetically, but she gives little sense of what must have been a forceful personality. Around her the ladies (dare I call them that?) of WNO’S chorus have great fun playing a variety of roles. The band of 10 is also exclusively female.
The sum of it is a jolly, rumbustious affair, directed with imaginative gusto by Caroline Clegg and resourcefully designed by Lara Booth, that doesn’t outstay its welcome. The audience at the Hackney Empire appeared to enjoy every second but, despite everyone’s best intentions, I was left uncomfortably feeling that Margaret Haig Thomas’s remarkable achievements had been rather undersold by its levity.