Suffragettes: Deeds Not Words – Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Suffragettes: Deeds Not Words is available via online via the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Player.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Introduced via a male ‘chorus’ of one, bedecked in Union Jacks, we are invited to a time in Britain’s history where women have few rights. Followed by a vignette of Punch and Judy, the tone is that men wield brutal control over their women.

This is another epic show from Nuworks, Australia, full of ritualised movement, ensemble work that is superbly drilled, accompanied by a musical score that ranges from rousing anthemic choral numbers to gentle, lyrical pieces.

The show focuses on the union of women forming around Emmeline Pankhurst: the fight for suffrage has been continuing for a number of years and there are calls for the confrontations to escalate. The escalation involving damaging property and even learning self defence techniques lead inevitably to imprisonment and the subsequent hunger strikes.

The scene depicting force feeding is very well written with a soliloquy of heightened language painting a vivid picture of how the women were force fed. This is a pivotal scene in the play and is in direct contrast to the solo ballad that follows: it’s almost a lullaby, dreaming wistfully of a better future.

This is an epic piece in a style that perhaps Brecht himself would have recognised. The ‘distancing’ between the audience and the action is a deliberate choice from the director, David Dunn, to force the attention on the issue over the characters.

There are a few missed opportunities to vary the pace and tone: although full ensemble work is very effective, it might have been used more sparingly to leave scope for deeper development of key individual characters. This may engender stronger connection to the issues examined in the show.

In this online video the sense of live performance has been realised very well, particularly when projections are used onstage with archive footage of key events in the struggle for suffrage. Occasionally, sound is a slight issue with words and lyrics being lost. It is a difficult balance to strike in keeping the performances ‘as if live’ whilst needing to focus the ear as much as the eye.

This show has great potential: the message is very clear and could use a little more meat on the bones to reach the level of engagement for an audience that heightens the effect of ensemble distancing as a tool in storytelling.

Fiona Orr