Remembering a political powerhouse airbrushed from history - Chichester Festival Theatre

Suzanne has previously been at the CFT as Maria in Twelfth Night (Festival Theatre) and Lady Macduff in Macbeth, Lydia Cruttwell in In Praise of Love and Beth in Three Women and a Piano Tuner (Minerva Theatre). Now she is helping to recreate a genuine landmark moment in the history of our nation: the post-war Labour government and its creation of the National Health Service.

Suzanne is playing Violet, wife of the incoming Labour prime minister Clement Attlee: “She was very supportive towards him. He was a terrible driver and so she drove them around but she was not actually very much better! But actually she voted Tory. She was never a socialist. She joined the Labour Party once they got married but she voted for Winston Churchill. She was a Winston Churchill supporter. I've done a bit of reading about her but actually there's not a huge amount to read about her. She was a supportive wife. She was not a political wife. She was never a mover or a shaker. She was a mother and a wife. She's described as being kind and supportive and quietly dynamic. She looked after him and was very concerned about his health but actually she died before he did. She collapsed in the kitchen in their cottage.”

As for the play itself, it is hugely timely. 1945. In a country exhausted and crippled by debt after six years of war, time is up for Winston Churchill’s Tories. With a rallying cry for change, Labour wins an astonishing, landslide election victory.

There are echoes indeed. But as Suzanne says, the play also brings a great sense of discovery particularly in the character of the passionate and courageous radical Ellen Wilkinson, a key player in drama which unfolds: “I had heard about this government but I didn't know very much about it and I'd certainly not heard of Ellen Wilkinson. She died so young but she was so prominent. I spoke to my very elderly mother and she had not heard of Ellen Wilkinson either but she was such an important figure in the Labour government.”

And it was all happening at a time when the country was demanding change: “It's not to say that there are parallels between then and now but in 1945 everybody needed a big change, coming back from the war and people were not prepared to go back to the roles that had been assigned to them before the war. People wanted change and they wanted hope.”

In a way the play is perhaps a plea not to take the NHS for granted but equally it's a plea not to take anything for granted: “But it is also about Ellen Wilkinson and it's so interesting that she was such a powerhouse, somebody that was so important to the Labour movement but somebody who has been completely airbrushed from history.

"She did die so young, it is true, but the point is that women are constantly struggling to be heard and to be seen and we're rather shocked by the fact that we just didn't know anything about her.”

Tickets from the CFT.