Southwick drama: breaking out of the repressive roles women were given in Victorian England

They are promising a powerful play based on historic events which hit a deep connection to its director. Olivier award-winning playwright Jessica Swale’s play is set in 1896 and is based on an historic event when the female students of Girton College, Cambridge campaigned to be awarded degrees in the same way as their male counterparts.

The action of the play also follows the struggles of four young women. It brings to life their battles and love of fun as they try to navigate the pitfalls of university life and break out of the restrictive and repressive roles women were given in late Victorian England. The young men view their presence with suspicion and see them as a challenge to male entitlement and supremacy. The stage is set for a monumental struggle.

Director Harry Atkinson said: “I have assembled an incredible cast and production crew to tell the Blue Stockings story.”

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He said he wanted to direct the play “in recognition of my grandmother and three great aunts who were all born in the 1880s.

“I knew them as a child in the 1950s when I used to stay with my grandmother in Middlesbrough. They all left school at the age of fourteen and had to work in their father’s jewellery and watchmaking business.

“They married, had children, lived through two world wars and the Great Depression. Two lost husbands in the first war. My grandmother lost three of her four children in the flu epidemic of 1918.

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“All that, and yet they were strong women, no sign of self-pity in them. I wondered what they might have achieved had they been given the opportunity of a university education. So far out of the reach of that generation of women”.

Harry said the play was “fun, poignant and resonating through to the struggles of women’s movements to this very day. I’m very proud to say that my own daughter is a head teacher, and my granddaughter is now studying at Cambridge. These achievements have been, in some way, thanks to the generation of the Blue Stockings women.”

Tickets £12 from southwickplayers.org.uk, by phone on 0333 666 3366.

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