Tea with Mrs Pankhurst

Calton Theatre, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Group: New Strides Productions

Tom Ogg

Ms Pankhurst is a militant suffragette leading the revolution for women's suffrage for the vote. The play revolves around Ms Pankhurst and Mrs Cooper, a socialist leader also campaigning for women's suffrage, although with a principled stance of non-violence.

The play follows the struggle of these two movements, exploring the non-violence issues and the history and reasons for the suffragette movements. Ms Cooper is a strong socialist of working class background, who stirs the masses in protest, although not as successfully as Ms Pankhurst. Ms Pankhurst's suffragettes use some far more headline grabbing, and consequently populist techniques including hunger strike and even terrorism (which may or may not be historically correct).

Ms Pankhurst is however of the upper and middle classes, who's rallying cry is that 'we may be at war, but we need our best women for the battle', which means that only the upper classes can have any effect upon the parliament. The exploration of the peaceful and pacifist movements of the feminist movement for the vote is quite interesting, and the class conflict aspects are not tiresome as many of these explorations can be.

The development in the plot comes with the break out of the first world war, and the suffrage movement is once again split along political, class and pacifist lines. The contemplate refusing to do work supporting the war as 'our boys' become 'murderers' as opposed to 'soldiers'. The links with Russian Bolshevism are explored and interestingly discussed as well. There are many interesting and relevant discussions of problems analogous to our own in today's difficult times.

Nonetheless, it is without doubt true that the best bit of this production was the tea. Tea, served with cakes and rolls is distributed throughout the performance during mid-afternoon, and your much harassed correspondent was loving every minute of it. Moreover, the tea and cakes were surprisingly quite nice.

This is not an overly taxing or stressful production, for it fills an afternoon making it interesting and enjoyable. Little thought is needed as you are guided through the issues and are informed and entertained. A charming, easy going and lovely little production.

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