Though this hip-hop musical about Emmeline and Sylvia Pankhurst’s struggles – for female emancipation and with each other – is delivered with verve and panache, Hamilton it most definitely ain’t. Written, directed and choreographed by Zoo Nation’s Kate Prince, to music by Josh Cohen and DJ Walde, it aims to be larkily tongue-in-cheek but often seems plain silly.
Fortunately, it has the magnificent Beverley Knight and the very impressive Sharon Rose in the full-throated lead roles, leading an ensemble of powerful voices and dynamic, well-drilled bodies, doing the kind of punchy, shoulder-rolling moves pioneered by Janet Jackson and Madonna. So you stifle your giggles. Mostly.
It’s well-nigh impossible to set the name of the Women’s Social and Political Union – which Emmeline founded in 1903 with help from her three daughters and son – to music. But Prince tries, setting a precedent for gauche or lumpy rhymes throughout. “I was hoping to be found, but you were being crowned,” moans Sylvia, inappropriately, of her married lover, Labour leader Keir Hardie.
The score is through-written so almost everything is sung. The bass-driven funk of the early numbers is effective, the sibling chat-song Hey Sis clever and funny and the final anthems Stand Up/Rise Up irresistibly rousing. Kelly Agbowu delivers some slightly harder-edged rap as a suffragette ‘General’.
But there are too many soupy ballads and too many attempts to hammer political history or suffragette/suffragist schisms into a jaunty chorus. The doo-be-doo love song Sylvia, Silvio, sung to the protagonist and her Italian lover by a chorus of undulating East End matrons is hilarious but utterly derails the narrative. An anti-war number (“it’s the POOR who DIE!”) is mortifyingly awful.
And oh dear, the characterisations. Emmeline advocated violent protest to win wealthy, older, married women the vote: Sylvia wanted universal suffrage for men and women, by peaceful means. Here, their ideological differences have the air of a domestic spat. Knight and Rose (and Ellena Vincent as Christabel) transcend the stilted relationships through sheer charisma and vocal power.
But Alex Gaumond’s Hardie is a waffly, ageing hipster, Jay Perry’s Winston Churchill a simpering boy, arranging the arrest and force-feeding of women in public, henpecked at home by his mother Jennie and wife Clementine. Well, sort of. He refers to Sylvia as “that hideous lunatic Pankhurst girl”. Clementine corrects him: “Hideous, lunatic Pankhurst WOMAN.” That’s the level of sophistication here.
I dunno, maybe we need a by-the-numbers musical to remind us of the heroic, flawed pioneers of UK feminism. Prince at least stages the show with huge energy and skill. The dance routines are impeccable, and Ben Stones’s set and costumes are strikingly monochrome with flashes of socialist scarlet: literally black and white and red all over. There will doubtless be an audience for this poppy, peppy, pappy piece of work, but the Pankhursts surely deserve better.
And so does Beverley Knight. This is the third major show in a row, after The Drifters Girl and Sister Act, where she’s elevated inferior material. She’s an absolute star. Can’t someone write her a role worthy of her talent?
