Writers: Amy Leigh-Matthews and Vikki Thompson
Director: Amy Leigh-Matthews
In the early years of the 20th century, the fight for women’s suffrage was dominated by the middle classes. One of the principal figures in the movement was Emmeline Pankhurst, whose suffragette movement (motto, “Deeds, not words”) adopted approaches that today we might call direct action: breaking windows, disrupting politicians’ lives, committing arson and going on hunger strike when arrested.
Amy Leigh-Matthews and Vikki Thompson’s Hourglass takes place in this timeframe, with Lady Caroline Braithwaite (Thompson) joining the fray. Her involvement inspires her daughter and angers her husband, who locks her up in her room as punishment.
The politics of the time are introduced to Leigh-Matthews and Thompson’s script with a heavy hand, with names such as the Pankhurst family and David Lloyd George dropped here and there to give the impression that Lady Caroline exists, Zelig-like, at many of the great moments of the suffragettes’ fight. And while there’s nothing spectacularly zinging about the dialogue, the setting does at least provide some level of elucidation. And while Penny Bosworth’s housemaid Kitty is drawn with the most stereotypical of brushes, the sharp contrast in how they are treated when arrested at a demonstration does at least mirror how the legal system treats those with money very differently to those without.
But somewhere in the first act, the theme of suffrage is sidelined, instead focussing on the pain and suffering inflicted upon women by men. James Stephen Finn’s interpretation of Sir Hugh may be as an ineffectual fop, but he is a willing participant in oppressing his wife, going so far as to have her committed to an asylum run by Paul White’s Doctor Lockhart on account of her wilfulness.
And it is Lockhart with which the play becomes most obsessed, depicting him as a man of anger whose smooth talking erupts into fits of fury when a woman dares go against him. It is also clear from the outset that his asylum is not on the level, making the mystery-thriller element to which the play descends maddeningly predictable.
Any sense of propulsion through the story is stymied by lumpen direction and performances which struggle to come across as anything other than wooden. Hardly any of the actors are able to come up with convincing portrayals. Thompson’s Lady Caroline, in particular, has a perpetual wide-eyed mania that somewhat undermines the effect of Lockhart’s diagnosis of “hysteria” – a diagnosis that was often used to undermine women’s independence of thought and function.
With Caroline’s committal, much of the suffragette storyline is abandoned in favour of her daughter Cordelia (Larissa Pinkham) and Kitty – now having been transformed, Eliza Dolittle-like, into a university lecturer – searching for the missing woman. It’s a bewilderingly pedestrian Act II that lays out all its twists in plain sight, with on-the-nose dialogue repeated between scenes to make sure that we are all following along.
By the end, it almost seems as if the actors have surrendered to the ridiculousness of it all, with Finn playing his character’s alcoholic stupor for laughs and a gunfight-based climax that only works if one is to believe that a former policeman could somehow miss a slow-moving, portly target at point blank range.
The final scene, when it eventually comes (there is no need for the play to drag on for nearly three hours), does loop back around to the theme of women’s suffrage, and to the recognition that the Representation of the People Act of 1918 only allowed the wealthy, privileged few to vote.
That last scene does remind us that there are themes and histories worthy of exploration. That’s particularly true as the fight for equality has been long, slow, and ongoing since. But Hourglass: A Suffragette’s Story’s melodramatic potboiler takes a very different path – and does little to encourage us to join it.
Continues until 26 June 2024
