On Wednesday 12th June, a new play from Cambridge Devised Theatre entitled Emily Wilding Davison; The one who threw herself under the horse comes to Manchester for a matinee performance at the People's History Museum.
In these extracts from an interview conducted by Kate Connelly, the playwright Ros
Connelly, director Kath Burlinson and actor Elizabeth Crarer discuss how and
why they chose to devise a play about a suffragette hero and the continuing
relevance of the suffragette movement.
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| 'Emily' in rehearsal |
Why do you think it is
important to produce a play about Emily Wilding Davison today?
Ros: One of the reasons
I am fascinated by the suffragettes and think they are so important is because
they demonstrate the heroism of ordinary people. Emily Wilding Davison seems to be the supreme
example of someone who under ordinary circumstances would have disappeared from
history but, because of the particular circumstances of the time in which she
lived and the strength of her beliefs, she ended up acting in a way which most
of us would think is out of the ordinary.
I also think it is a very good time to be reminded about how people have
used public protest in the past when the government doesn’t seem to be
listening to the people. I think there
is a lot of modern relevance to what the suffragettes and Emily Davison
did. They saw people were not properly
represented and they realised the government wouldn’t act unless people forced
them to.
Kath: We need to
continue to keep women’s history and political struggle in the forefront of
people’s consciousness because the minute we forget it, it disappears. Having studied the women’s movement in the
nineteenth century, the early twentieth century and second wave feminism, I
feel that we are now living in a very interesting time. I am meeting women in their twenties who are
very interested in these debates and it feels like things are on the move. But I am acutely conscious of the losses that
can happen in between periods of obvious activism. For example, in the early 1940s my mum was an
undergraduate at Bedford College where the College colours were those of the
suffragettes: purple, green and white.
But my mother, who was born in 1926, did not know the significance of
those colours until 6 months ago.
Although she was born so soon after those suffragette campaigns, and was
a woman studying at a college that had been at the forefront of the movement
for women’s higher education, that she did not know about that colour symbolism
is symptomatic of what can happen.
I also hope this particular
story of Emily Davison is going to open up a whole series of debates about
activism that are very current: violent versus non-violent action; the reaction
of the powers of the state to peaceful or non-peaceful protest; martyrdom; the
fate of political prisoners. All of these
questions are as relevant today as they were then and all of them appear very
directly in the play.
Lizzie: For me personally Emily is a very
interesting way of really thinking through my own attitudes about
politics. For years I have felt
a-political and I didn’t grow up connected to a political narrative and I was
ashamed and a bit afraid of that.
Meeting Emily Davison, researching and understanding the way that she
did things was a way into politics through empathy and imagination. I hope that
through making her story into a play, we might offer other people an
opportunity to feel how these events at these beginning of the twentieth
century connect with them.
Emily Davison was one of the
most mysterious of the suffragettes, rarely revealing her motives for her
militant actions. How did you find out
about Emily and decide what motivated her?
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| 'Emily' in rehearsal |
Ros: We used the process of devising which entails lots of research before starting. We tried as much as possible to find what Emily herself said and what others said about her. The director created different scenarios for the actress to explore, sometimes using Emily’s words, sometimes starting with physicality, feeding in imagery from the time – the art of the time, the music and what was happening culturally. There is very little of her private writings, so we tried to get through to the private person from her public writings.
Kath: Part of the discussion between Ros,
Lizzie and me has been inventing our own Emily Davison – not fancifully without
evidence, but there is an interpretive necessity. We are creating our own woman who is not
Emily Davison. As every actor will
create their own Hamlet, we are creating our own Emily Davison.
Lizzie: I don’t think I’ve decided anything yet
and I hope I don’t. It’s not my place to
do so. I can only work with the clues
and have to keep exploring and discovering.
There is always more to find out.
Of course there are a few things that I feel are important; at the
moment I keep coming back to Emily Davison’s relationship with her father, the
moment of transition in her introduction to radical politics and her
relationship to her faith. But through
this encounter I hope that Emily teaches me to extend the range of things that
I consider to be important. Part of my
job as an artist is to question my own preconceptions. We’re not producing the definitive
version. I am thrilled that there are
two other plays and an opera coming about Emily. This is really appropriate and necessary
because there needs to be a conversation.
Why did you choose to devise this piece and what
difference do you feel devising makes?
Ros: I
chose to devise this piece because I think it’s important to get the input of
other people and not just to have one person’s view. When you get the input from the writer, the
director and actor at the same time in the creative process you get very
different points of view and different ways into the material. This story is particularly appropriate for the devising
process because there are so many important physical actions, not expressible
through words - Deeds not Words!
