Sylvia review, Old Vic: hip-hop homage to the suffragettes is no Hamilton
There’s a lingering misperception of the suffragettes as orderly middle-class women in high-necked blouses politely handing out leaflets in support of women’s suffrage. In fact, many of them were radical firebrands who waged a war of terror across the country; inventors of the letter bomb, who tried to blow up the house of the chancellor of the Exchequer and who attacked cathedrals and other public places with bombs and guns.
So it’s a sharp move from ZooNation to cast this biopic of leading suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, initially conceived as a dance piece, as an in-yer-face hip-hop musical. The fit between Britain’s biggest ever protest movement and the urban revolutionary language of hip hop is a richly fertile one, just as it proved to be in Hamilton, the American musical behemoth to which this show is conspicuously in debt to and overshadowed by.
Director and choreographer Kate Prince begins the story in 1913, with Sylvia’s dismissal from the Women’s Social and Political Union, the organisation founded by her mother Emmeline a decade previously out of growing disenchantment with the Independent Labour Party. Then it spools back to 1903 to give, with the help of a narrator cum MC (an antic, terrific Todd Holdsworth), a potted history of the women’s movement, and of the growing split between the communist pacifist Sylvia and her more militant-minded mother (a formidable Beverley Knight) and sister Christabel, both of whom increasingly championed violent action.
Josh Cohen and DJ Walde’s stirring, funk-muscled hip hop score is a powerful character in its own right here, although it needs a serious edit and in truth yields only a few stand-out tracks, including the show-stopper Be The Change You Want To Be that ends Act 1. Anachronistic sights as body-popping women in Edwardian dress and Churchill’s mother Lady Randolph as a rapping West Indian matriarch are both subversive and entertaining.
The show is also strong on the political and cultural resistance the women faced: the failure of Labour to support them (there’s a nice turn from John Dagleish as an owlish Keir Hardie, with whom Sylvia had an affair) and the opposition of Churchill (Delroy Atkinson), here a buffoon utterly under the thumb of mummy who rejected an inquiry into the brutal police attack on a suffragette protest march in 1910.
Rehearsals for Sylvia were derailed in part by the illness of its lead actress – it’s now billed as a work in progress, with a fully developed production expected next year. Leaving aside the fact understudy Maria Omakinwa is still on the book in parts (and yet to grow into the role of Sylvia), the propulsive song-and-dance routines don’t feel under-rehearsed at all.
The problems lie deeper. It’s not just that Priya Parmer’s book is often muddled, it’s that Prince leaves it to the music’s call-to-arms rhythms and her own slogan-style lyrics to do the talking. For a story packed with incident, there’s precious little actual dramatising going on. Blink, and you’d probably miss the death of Emily Davison, who threw herself in front of the King’s horse Anmer at the 1913 Derby. Sylvia and Christabel argue over terrorist tactics, but it’s as though no one thought that a campaign of violence – and its moral implications – might make a rewarding subject to, you know, theatricalise. The narrative emphasis is also pretty blunt: many women opposed women’s suffrage, but you’d never know it from this show – or why.
At heart, Sylvia feels more interested in deriving its power from the galvanic language of hashtag politics and by harnessing an awakened, modern-day anger about women’s rights than it is in exploring the complexities and multifaceted nature of the suffragette’s story or thinking about how to physically put them on stage. The Old Vic has been admirably honest in admitting that the show isn’t yet ready, but on the evidence of this, it needs a rethink, not a few more weeks’ rehearsal.
Until Sep 22. Tickets: 0844 871 7628; oldvictheatre.com
