Librettist and Lyricist: Caitlyn Burt
Composer and Lyricist: Amir Shoenfeld
Director: Georgie Rankcom
Think you know the story of A Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen, full of sentimental Victorian poverty and elegant suffering? Well, the real match girls at the Bryant & May factory in 1888 are here to reclaim their agency in Caitlyn Burt and Amir Shoenfeld’s new musical When We Strike performed by the British Youth Music Theatre at Southwark Playhouse. Alive with attitude and angst, this 80-minute in-yer-face musical, and the women-led strike it depicts, stakes a claim to inspiring the Suffragettes, the formation of the Labour Party and the Equality Act. And with fierce performances from this company of 11–21-year-olds, you won’t dare disagree.
Working in a match factory at the height of industrial Victorian Britain, the East End factory of Bryant & May is hardly interested in workers’ rights, telling its new recruits that they’ll be used up and then replaced. But when 11-year-old Mog dies from a toothache that turns out to be white phosphorus poisoning, the match makers decide they have had enough, particularly when Sarah meets a campaigner from the Fabian Society campaigning for workers’ rights.
Burt and Shoenfeld’s musical works hard to turn stereotypes about nineteenth-century factory workers and their victim status on its head with intense rock tunes and toe-tapping choreography that ensures its characters leap from the page. Structurally it leans into all of the Dickensian stereotypes of Victorian workhouses with an evil male foreman terrifying the match makers, lots of poverty and an ‘us’ and ‘them’ attitude with the cliched rich people whose hearts bleed for the poor until they get distracted by a new hat or a poorly prepared tea.
But from this When We Strike builds investment in the different factions emerging within the factory from Ellen who tries to keep the manager on side by flirting with him even if the other girls hate her, to Kate who wants to fight but believes nothing will ever change and Sarah who steps up to speak for the factory workers about the dangers of their role, the scandal of shareholder profiteering and the value of staff wellbeing to productivity. All of this is wrapped in some fist-pumping tunes that give Burt and Shoenfeld’s musical contemporary resonance and plenty of political bite.
Performed by around 30 members of the British Youth Music Theatre, the small stage of the Elephant branch at the Southwark Playhouse is filled with their energy and excitement, mixing some impressive acting and vocal performances by the leads with a large ensemble playing multiple roles. A Music Hall scene is a highlight, a wonderful song for the central performer that captures the spirit of the time but in MGM style takes over both levels of the stage for a proper knees-up as the song’s title suggests.
With Jane McMurtrie’s choreography thoughtful and impressive throughout and director Georgie Rankcom keeping things flowing smoothly using the venue’s multiple entrances this rousing musical can shake off the dust of the sentimental vision of match girls and show how they started their own revolution.
Reviewed on 31 August 2024
