When equality is not the norm: Cork’s Studio 13 Production’s Blue Stockings

A new play shows how the suffragettes still have relevance for many women today, writes Colette Sheridan

ASUFFRAGETTE-THEMED play still has relevance today, says director Carol O’Donovan of Cork-based Studio 13 Productions. O’Donovan is directing Blue Stockings, written by Jessica Swale, which had its first professional performance at the Globe Theatre in London last year.

O’Donovan, a law graduate, says the play focuses on four women who are ‘outside’ what was considered normal for females at that time. “They want to be educated and recognised in the same way as their male counterparts. In a way, there’s a trade-off there. They either choose education, or love and marriage.”

Studio 13 Productions, a self-funded company producing two plays a year, was formed by members of the Gaiety School of Acting in Cork to produce theatre “that is thought provoking and makes people see the world in a different way,” explains O’Donovan.

There is a cast of 14 in Blue Stockings, which centres around four young women studying at Girton College in Cambridge in 1896.

The two teachers in the play represent the two sides of the suffragette movement. “There’s the more radical Emmeline Pankhurst anarchist-type, who is willing to use violent means. In the play, Miss Blake is more radical than Mrs Welsh. While Mrs Welsh wants education and recognition for women, she doesn’t want to rock boats or upset the societal norms.”

The main character in the play, Tess, has been sent to university by her father. She becomes romantically involved in what O’Donovan describes as a ménage a trois with Will, a friend from home and a student at Kings College, Cambridge, and Ralph “who is something of a player”.

O’Donovan says that much of the play is about Tess’s desire to learn without knowing why exactly she wants to be a scholar. “Her life becomes complicated by her romantic entanglements which are almost her undoing in terms of her academic career. Her head is turned and she is distracted from her studies temporarily. As the play unfolds, Ralph’s secret comes out.”

Blue Stockings “has resonance for the times we live in.” While the right to education may not be a burning issue in our part of the world, people like the Pakistani schoolgirl and activist, Malala Yousafzai, is fighting for the education rights of girls.

“There are places such as in the Taliban-influenced part of the world where an educated woman is seen as a dangerous thing. In some African countries, there is a very patriarchal society. Education is key for girls to escape the cycle of marriage at an exceptionally young age.”

O’Donovan says that apart from the fact that Blue Stockings is well written, she wants to bring this play to Cork to make people realise how difficult life is for girls in certain parts of the world.

While the play is issue-driven, it is not without humour. A character playing Dr Henry Maudsley, a serious commentator from the era in which the play is set, “promotes the idea of hysteria and the ‘wandering womb’ as reasons why women are not fit for being mentally taxed or stimulated. Because we know that arguments like that are outmoded and ridiculous, they’re actually quite funny when we hear them spoken with conviction by characters such as Maudsley.”

Men like Maudsley may come across as monsters, but they genuinely believed their point of view. “They were of their time,” says O’Donovan.

-Blue Stockings is at the Firkin Crane, Cork, from August 14-16.