It is all too easy to forget the sacrifices that women had to make in order to gain a university education, to consign them to footnotes and Wiki-stubs. Women, like the redoubtable Sophia Jex Blake, who had door after door slammed in their faces, who had to fund their own lectures, or Vera Brittain, going against her father’s wishes, giving her whole self over to her studies, enduring the sad soup and cheap meat so disparaged by Virginia Woolf, the segregation and disdain, because what they were doing mattered, both on a personal and wider societal level.
Jessica Swale – who, as a director, has made a name for herself with her joyous reworkings of eighteenth century plays, The Belle’s Stratagem and The Busy Body – makes her debut as a writer with a piece that celebrates those women and their determination, their drive, their passion.
Blue Stockings is set at Girton, England’s first residential college for women – which was intended by its founder Emily Davies to be a college ‘like a man’s’, where women could study the same subjects as male undergraduates, albeit a safe distance away, first in Hitchin, and then when that building proved too small, in new premises on the outskirts of Cambridge (the potentially calamitous mixing of the sexes being a step too far).
Swale shows the vast amount of pressure the Girton girls were under, their education still viewed by many as transgressive, unnatural, even biologically unwise, a threat to the institution of marriage and the sanctity of the home. Every misstep, academic or moral, could be used as a weapon against them and their cause, something of which they were acutely aware. And at the end of it all, they couldn’t even formally graduate.
It’s this debate, this demand for their achievements to be recognised, which provides the backdrop to Swale’s play as we follow the stories of four female students. The writing never oversimplifies, elegantly condensing a lot of information: the various challenges faced by these women, the need to avoid being seen as radical, to disassociate their cause from that of the suffragettes, the acknowledgement that class and money create a whole different set of barriers to education, are all present and yet Swale also finds room to explore what it is to be a young woman tasting independence for the first time. Her characters are not exceptional; they’re recognisable, human, flawed.
Of the central quartet, the play’s main focus is on Ellie Piercy’s astrophysicist Tess, a fiercely bright scholar who is tripped up by love, tumbling (rather too rapidly to be entirely plausible) into a relationship with dashing young chap who quotes Dante. The other three aren’t given quite as much room to breathe and grow; I wanted more of Celia, the Charlotte Lucas to Tess’s Lizzie Bennett, the pragmatist who accepts that her commitment to her studies may well make her unmarriageable, and no-nonsense Maeve, whose struggle is made all the harder by family commitments and her comparative poverty.
Gabrielle Lloyd’s performance as Miss Welsh is perhaps the most nuanced of the lot, as the Mistress of Girton she is obliged to balance her belief in her girls and all they are capable of with a willingness to comprise, to concentrate on fighting one small battle at a time. And while there’s some proper boo-hiss villainy from a few of the male undergraduates, Swale also takes pains to show that a number of men were sympathetic to the cause, to the point where they were obliged to make sacrifices of their own.
But Swale’s decision to focus and finish on a love story seems like a dilution given what has gone before. More potent by far were the genuine and audible gasps of shock from the audience at some of the things with which the characters have to contend: being barred from lectures, dismissed as hysterical for daring to voice an opinion, and the final revelation that their battle for recognition would not be won until as late as 1948.
John Dove’s production is pacey and makes good use of the space at the Globe but it does feel as if the play could benefit from stronger character development and more in the way of narrative momentum; the romantic subplot in particular feels like a concession, and one which runs almost counter to the spirit of the play. But in a world where it still seems like the most noteworthy thing a woman can do is shake her bikini-clad ass at a dude in a Beetlejuice suit, where hyenas on Twitter still use rape as a weapon against anyone with even vaguely feminist leanings, and perhaps most upsettingly where a teenage girl can be shot in the head – shot in the fucking head – for campaigning for the education of girls, the play’s exploration of how hard women fought is both timely and charged and a reminder that we’ve in no way reached a place where we can just sit back and relax and say we’ve won.
