A Sleepless WomaN, a Soldier on Leave... and a post In memory of Kate Kerrow

Kate and I selling 'The What The Frock Book of Funny Women' at the WOW Festival, Southbank Centre, 2016

Recently had some sad news that playwright Kate Kerrow has died after a long illness. We were friends and colleagues for over a decade and met through the feminist production hub Scary Little Girls. As a feminist writer Kate was interested in my research into suffrage theatre, and when I created the Stage Rights! living literature walk with Scary Little Girls to promote my first edited collection of suffrage plays in 2013, it was wonderful to commission a monologue from her about the 1911 Census boycott. 

Stage Rights! A Living Literature Walk was performed across two  weekends in April 2013 and featured five extracts from plays in the edited collection, and two new monologues. The walk began in the foyer of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, led the audience through and around Covent Garden and ended in the upper room of the Nell of Old Drury pub.  Each location and performance was carefully chosen and the route guide included points of interest related to suffrage history and theatre history. In all there were twelve performers in nine locations. 

Immersed as I then was in my second year of doctoral research, the creation of this walk was an exciting public engagement opportunity and one that connected with the ideas of collaboration, creativity and education that were the tenets of the AFL. The devising process was one that that Scary Little Girls had been refining for many years across a number of literary topics and locations. For me it involved thinking carefully about how to represent the research through interactive means, bring suffrage stories and plays to life outside of a traditional theatre setting, and not assume audiences would have any prior knowledge about the suffrage movement, theatre history or Edwardian London.

The Sleepless Woman monologue is set in the morning after the 1911 Census boycott event at the Aldwych Rinkeries, a large and very popular roller skating rink nearby. I sent Kate a mixture of original sources - contemporary press reports, performance texts and some visual material from the event -  as inspiration to work with alongside her own research.

Decima Moore performing in the Aldwych Rinkeries as part of the 1911 Census boycott event there

[From the Route Guide]
​Leave the Theatre Royal by walking down the steps.
​Once outside turn to your left. Walk down Catherine Street towards the stage door of the Novello Theatre. You are passing the site of the Gardenia Restaurant at number 6 Catherine Street, a vegetarian restaurant that opened in 1908. Meetings and breakfasts were held here by both the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and the Women’s Freedom League (WFL), and in February 1912, the Actresses’ Franchise League performed two plays here as part of a ‘Hard Up Social’ evening of entertainment. 200 women and 30 men had breakfast here at the Gardenia at 3.30am on the 2nd April 1911 when they opened to suffragists who were staging a Census boycott at the Aldwych Rinkeries on Kingsway.

The performer playing The Sleepless Woman was wearing roller skates and waiting opposite the Novello Theatre stage door at the corner of Catherine Street and Tavistock Street in Covent Garden. She interrupted the audience groups by skating excitedly towards them whilst they were walking down Catherine Street.

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  "She holds an audience member’s hand to steady herself and bends over double, in a strong squat position, hands on thighs, and tries to catch her breath.
(Laughing and pointing to her skates) I’ve had these things on all night. I’ve skated right through – nine hours I was in the Aldwych Rink. Nine hours! My feet will be black and blue, but I don’t give a damn (she straightens up) not after such a night."

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The Sleepless Women greets the audience and tells them about her experiences:

​"(She stands up tall and bellows courageously)
'This is an organized movement throughout the country by women who refuse to be numbered among the people,' Emmeline Pankhurst said, all high up on her platform.
(Sudden self pride)
Actually, I was quite like her then. Gosh, I’m rather good at it.

(She holds her flask high)
“Women are people for the purpose of being numbered, taxed and punished, but not when it comes to the rights of citizenship!”
(Sighs) Oh, she was fine. (To a woman in audience) Did your stomach feel all warm when I said that? It feels lovely, doesn’t it? Like a fire growing.

(Back to the speech) 'Until women are recognized as people in the full sense of the word, we refuse to be numbered as people!'

(With real empathy) Sometimes I look at the Anti-suffragists and I feel so sorry for them, fighting to keep themselves in obscurity. Fighting because it feels real when a person fights,
but forgetting they’re fighting to keep their cages forever locked, their voices forever silenced. Fighting for their own extinction.
Not me. Emmeline’s words crept right into my soul last night, they did. They sit there for always, that warm fire inside me.

Whenever my sisters speak to me like that, the words go right inside me and pile up like little gems, one on top o’ the other, until I’m filled up full and I can’t hold it in any longer and I scream out at the top of my beautiful big lungs, right up to the heavens –

(Shouting) This is a civil war, and there will be no peace until we get the vote!

And off my tongue, all those perfect, precious gems fall out, for others, ready to be collected and treasured.

That’s how it works, you see. Together we all get braver and braver, and together we can go on all night, every night, until that day comes when we can stand up and say we did it."

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The monologue ends with her skating away, encouraging the audience to join the suffrage movement.

The Sleepless Woman was played by me in 2013 and Sarah Annakin when we revived the walk in in 2016. I was incredibly moved when Kate sent me the first draft of the monologue - the energy and positivity and freedom of the character was immediately engaging, and performing it was exhilarating. To make such an immediate, playful, and personal connection with the audience brought the words and the story to life.

Research-wise it was also an opportunity to introduce the audience to the importance of shared experiences, camaraderie and sisterhood within the movement, the role of non-violent direct action in resistance, the popularity of vegetarianism and vegetarian restaurants among suffrage campaigners, and the Edwardian craze for roller skating.

But most of all it was fun to perform and helped challenge stereotypes of suffragettes as buttoned up, serious and formal!

The second commission was for the living literature walk A particular theatre: Shakespeare, suffragists and soldiers which was created for the 2016 Being Human Festival and performed on the 19th November 2016. 

 ​The theme of the walk was the Shakespeare Hut, which was built by the YMCA in Bloomsbury in 1916 on land owned by the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Committee. Intended to be the site of a monument to celebrate Shakespeare’s tercentenary and eventually to be the location of a new National Theatre, the land was offered to the YMCA as a contribution to the war effort and the Hut, which was unique in having a dedicated theatre space, was built for the use of ANZAC soldiers on leave in London. Working in collaboration with Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson from the University of Brighton, an expert on the Hut, and Scary Little Girls we created an interactive performance walk around the site and broader area. 

Images of the Shakespeare Hut from 'Blighty!', published by the New Zealand YMCA in WW1

​Audience groups met at Senate House and then encountered performers and performances throughout the walk – including pieces we know were performed at the Hut and from feminist histories in the area. We also tried to give a glimpse into other factors affecting the lives of performers in wartime – particularly for those interested in spiritual groups and practices like Theosophy or the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. We therefore set one piece in Treadwells - a bookshop that specialises in magic, esotericism and the occult. 

We also added some unexpected elements of interaction - for example, one actor was embedded with each group for the start of the walk, someone in each audience group was given a letter that would later be needed in a scene, and someone a key, to be used to access the final location. At the end of the walk we provided hot cups of Gunfire tea, a mix of rum and black tea that was familiar to British and ANZAC armies during WW1, and something that was very welcome in chilly November! Audience groups were then given the opportunity to ask Ailsa and I any questions they might have about the Hut.

Kate was commissioned to write a monologue for a New Zealand soldier on leave in London, who audiences would encounter asking for directions in Russell Square. We gave her extracts from Blighty! a guide book for New Zealand soldiers, newspaper reports about entertainments in the Shakespeare Hut, interviews from key participants, as well as extracts from two memoirs from women who had served in The Woman Police Service in WW1. She created A Soldier on Leave which was performed by New Zealand actor Tyler Read as part of the walk. His character was a 'Digger' on his first leave to London.

Tyler Read as 'A Soldier on Leave' in Russell Square, 2016

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"You from here? I’m looking for the Shakespeare Hut – don’t have a map but I know it’s on the corner of Gower Street and Keppel Street… Do you know the one? Where they do all the shows? I went last night, but today I had to come a different route –"

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The soldier describes his experience of seeing entertainments at the Hut - from Shakespeare recitals to singalongs. At the end of the monologue he leaves the audience, wishing them well. As with The Sleepless Woman, this encounter brought one individual to life in a vivid and personal way for the audience in a piece that was embedded in research but written with a light touch.

Working with Kate on both these walks inspired me as a writer and as a performer, something that came to fruition in a subsequent living literature walk in 2017 called Women and War as part of the Vote 100 project and the Being Human Festival. She was a tireless campaigner and advocate for feminist causes, and celebrated historical women through her organisation The Heroine Collective. 

Kate's most recent book was Out of the Darkness: Greenham Voices 1981-2000, co-written with Rebecca Mordan and published by The History Press in 2021. 

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I'm very fortunate and grateful to have known and worked with Kate, and am sending all love to her family, who have set up a JustGiving page to raise funds for Against Breast Cancer here: www.justgiving.com/page/katehughes?

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There's more blog posts about my work with Scary Little Girls - including the online salons - in the blog topic tabs here.

​If you're interested in finding out more about the living literature walks I've done with Scary Little Girls can be found in my chapter: 'Reaching Out in Both Directions: Suffrage Theatre in the Twenty-First Century' in The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre, co-edited with Adrian Curtin, Nicholas Johnson and Claire Warden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 2023