“What’s a suffragette?” asks my niece, Eva, on the way to this musical adaptation of Kate Pankhurst’s picture book. The older niece, Martha, is pre-adolescent and in no mood to explain terms to her six-year-old sister. I summarise 20th-century gender inequality (“That’s so rude”) but it is harder to convey the meaning of governance and suffrage.
Chris Bush’s adaptation does a fantastically great job of explaining it, beginning as a schoolgirl, Jade (Kudzai Mangombe), wanders into a museum wing in which the great women of history come alive to sing, dance, wisecrack, and become life coaches, of sorts, to the troubled Jade. Ten minutes in, Amelia Earhart (Renée Lamb) has zoomed in wearing pilot goggles and Gertrude Ederle pops out of a box to tell us of her cross-Channel swim. Both talk about overcoming odds to do the thing you want to do in life – “the best way to do it is just to do it”. Eva taps me to add her thoughts: “Arifa, I like it.”
