The first
thing we noticed when we went to see Blue
Stockings at the Globe (21/9/13 at 2pm) was that the audience, overall, was
shorter than usual. Perhaps there were proportionally more women in the
audience, with this being a play about women’s education. It’s funny, though,
isn’t it: would a play about men’s education attract a predominantly male
audience?
But for an
audience of modern, educated women (and modern, educated men), Jessica Swale’s
new play Blue Stockings hit all the right
notes. You could feel the audience bristling with indignation at some of the
male characters’ attitudes towards women. And that indignation manifested
itself in audible gasps – and even erupted into boos at certain points of the
play.
I do love a
Globe audience – never mind the fourth wall, they’re a real part of any play.
No passive spectators here. As the actors at the Talking Theatre afterwards
said, the audience and actors at the Globe are ‘all in it together’.
Another
thing I always enjoy at this theatre is the jig at the end of the play. They
kept that here in Blue Stockings,
despite the play being a more naturalistic piece than is usually seen at the
Globe – and it worked beautifully.
Choreographed
to reflect the themes of the piece – with the women sometimes taking the
traditionally ‘male’ roles in the dance, and the choreography getting
progressively more modern – the jig provided a strangely cathartic end to the
play. It certainly left the audience on more of a high note than the script
would otherwise have allowed. It felt as if we were celebrating the women and
acknowledging how far we have come.
And I do
think sometimes we forget how recent this all is. As someone who has been to university
myself, and who never questioned my right to learn or to graduate, I was
shocked that women were not given the right to graduate from Cambridge until 1948.
1948!
I still
feel a bit sick at the thought of the way these women were treated. And yet, in
some pockets of our society, similar attitudes prevail. I’ve never understood
why women aren’t allowed to be bishops, for example. And judging by some of the
abuse levelled at women online, there are quite a few people whose views haven’t
changed much from the views of their counterparts in 1896, when Blue Stockings is set.
So it’s not
even over. There are still battles to fight and votes to win; there are still
attitudes to change – of both men and women. And that’s just in the UK – the
education of girls and women is still a contentious subject in many countries
around the world. Thinking back to Persepolis, I can see some remarkable parallels with Blue Stockings.
Someone
suggested (and I’m not sure who it was) that Blue Stockings would make a great Call The Midwife–style television series.
I think
that’d be brilliant. After Jessica Hynes’ not-as-good-as-I-wanted-it-to-be
suffragettes comedy recently, maybe pioneering turn-of-the-century women need
redeeming on TV. And maybe we need reminding of what they battled against and
how they set us on the path we are walking today.
It wouldn’t
be as good as a Globe production of course (there’d be no jig for a start), but
I could definitely see Blue Stockings
working on TV...
