It gets my vote

Sylvia, the Old Vic’s musical about the Pankhurst clan, has had a troubled nativity. Illness struck the cast during rehearsals. Press night was postponed by a week. On the evening of the delayed performance, the show was cancelled just before curtain-up. We were told that a ‘concert version’ would be presented with understudies filling certain roles and with scripts on stage to prompt imperfect memories. I saw no scripts. And the absence of key performers made no discernible difference. This looked to me like the A-team. The director, Kate Prince, has a terrific show on her hands and although the introductory run has ended, the material can only get stronger as she continues to refine and improve it.

The story focuses on the tensions between Sylvia, a pacifist, and her mother Emmeline, who favoured direct action and had a weird fetish for violence. When the first world war broke out in 1914, Emmeline cancelled the suffrage campaign and ordered her supporters to distribute white feathers to unenlisted men. Because the show makes no claim to be a documentary it takes copious liberties with history. One example. The National League For Opposing Of Woman-Suffrage is presented as an all-male group when in fact its board was balanced between the sexes, and its general membership was predominantly female. To dramatise the political struggle, the script singles out Winston Churchill as the chief opponent of the Pankhursts. Not everyone will sympathise with Delroy Atkinson’s portrayal of him as a swaggering buffoon who seems frightened of his mother and is sneakily discourteous to his wife. In one puzzling scene the two women join forces and compel Winston to refrain from adding extra sugar to his tea. But the whole world knows that he drank whisky from daybreak onwards so it’s unclear why his glucose levels should be a cause of concern.