Brighton play revives pioneering woman trade union leader
Lottie Walker brings her solo show Chopped Liver and Unions to Brighton's Lantern Theatre on February 28 and March 1 in celebration of a remarkable woman rather lost from history.
She plays pioneering union leader Sara Wesker in J J Leppink's highly-rated play, and she does so in a significant year. Wesker took part in the Battle of Cable Street 90 years ago on October 4 2026, and the General Strike took place 100 years ago this May.
The show, which launched in 2023, has received an OffFest nomination and played New York, Edinburgh and many theatres in England including full-houses at Hereford-based Courtyard Theatre, Brighton Fringe and Cheltenham's The Everyman. In fact it was at the Brighton Fringe three years ago that the play launched and returned there the following year in a revised version.
Lottie said: “I'm a great one for championing the underdog. Sara Wesker worked so hard and achieved so much and yet she had a tragic life really and has been rather written out of history. I just think that's not quite right. There is so much that's so interesting about her.
“What everyone says about is that she was (English dramatist) Sir Arnold Wesker’s aunt but that's really not the most interesting thing even though he did use her as inspiration for a play. She was a refugee and she came from Russia when she was about five. She grew up in the East End of London and decided to fight for better working conditions for her fellow workers. From a very early age she was a really powerful speaker. She was really tiny, only four foot nine or ten, but people used to say that she spoke with the voice of six men!
“She led all these strikes and I think she got sacked everywhere she worked. There were no trade unions for women at the time so she set one up and she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and sat on the board for a while but they decided that they had had enough of her as well. She had a really rather sad death. When the Communist Party said thank you very much and goodbye, I think that really broke her. She didn't have any fight left in her anymore and she went to live with her sister. She had two strokes and the second one left her without the power of speech. She was 70 when she died, and sadly a lot of what she achieved was attributed to other people. I think she lost her spirit in the end.
“When we first started this, I spoke to Lady Wesker, Sir Arnold's widow, and she was talking about auntie Sara. She told me some nice little anecdotes but the first thing she said was ‘I feel sorry for anybody that is going to play her on stage because she was quite a formidable woman!’ But she said that she was great fun and used to join in all the family parties.”
Her rejection by the Communist Party was awful for her: “She also hand a rather sad love life. She fell in love with a young man eight years her junior and he became a very big deal in the unions but without telling Sara he became engaged to someone else, absolutely without telling her, and I think that broke her too. It was all rather sad but that's not the side to her that we want to show. We want her spirit to come out.”