It is just about possible to tell the history of democracy and the history of the theatre concurrently. Ostensibly, both were invented in Ancient Greece. The agora was once the public space par excellence. And so, in front of everyone, democracy and theatre grew up together. They endured the same teenage tantrums, the same midlife crises. They became institutionalised, corrupted, contested, engaged in cycles of overlapping development that repeat over and over. But is theatre necessarily democratic? Sometimes it has been an expression of popular dissent, at other times an expression of elite power. More often, it sits somewhere, queasily, between the two. A confused, idealistic thing, subject to immense censorship and control. 

Plato once speculated that the worst form of government was “theatocracy.” Government by rabble-rousing, by mob rule and audience choice, was not to be trusted. Anarchy resided in the theatre, he said, and what is democracy if not a form of anarchy? Others have agreed whilst arguing the opposite. For Tennessee Williams, theatre’s ability to be both civilised and wild makes it an essential experience, a sort of beautiful witchcraft or, as he describes it in one essay, a “benevolent anarchy.” But the benevolence of either is surely down to the success or failure of the people to assert their right to free expression and the ability of a society to understand, to be comfortable with and able to interrogate acts of performance. Representative democracy is ultimately still a form of representation and the construction of politics depends on all modes of contestation, both formal and informal. It requires an intermingling of politics and performance, a politics aware of its own imaginary and confident in its own storytelling. 

From Plato onwards then, theatre has been a form through which democracy was fought over and understood. Oskar Eustis has spoken of theatre as the “essential art form of democracy.” But if this appealing theory is to advance any further, it must at some point contend with the rise of mass democracy. Did theatre play a role in the extension of the franchise? Was the right to vote preceded by the ability to perform, to act, to bring people together in public space? Or is the notion that theatre had any substantive effect on politics in the age of the printing press, let alone in the age of the camera or the computer, a little far-fetched?

Much has been written about the way in which print culture cleared the way for mass democracy. National newspapers and cheap pamphlets gave ordinary citizens access to political debate and encouraged them to form opinions on the minutest details of governance. A thriving literary culture gave birth to the Enlightenment, with all its grand ideas of liberty, tolerance, and, at its most radical fringe, universal suffrage. But whilst the democratising effect of print culture is now accepted, a lot less has been written about the role of the theatre. Perhaps, some might say, that is because of its declining role in the public sphere. But did print culture really supplant the dominant culture so entirely? The Chartists of the nineteenth century certainly placed huge importance on the ability to read and to write, founding hundreds of journals and newspapers devoted to the cause. Yet at the height of the Chartist activity, a huge proportion of working men and women were still illiterate.

For most ordinary people, the struggle for democracy was not won via the printing press, it was articulated through an older and more familiar oral culture, through spectacle, performance, ceremony, and sociability. Chartist associations organised countless public meetings and sprawling outdoor rallies. They founded alternative schools and hosted regular entertainments: concerts, balls, raffles, dinners, tea parties, literary soirees, poetry recitals, and theatre. Chartism was a social movement, in every sense of the word. The people expected freedom, sure, but they also expected belly laughs and cheap booze. Local activists clubbed together and staged plays in theatres and pubs. “Drama served the Chartists in many fashions: as a means of political education, a way to raise money, and a method of bringing their democratic message to the broader public”, writes Gregory Vargo in his survey of Chartist theatre. “But perhaps most importantly, it granted opportunities for creativity and self-expression, encouraging both participants and audience members to engage in acts of imagination akin to the movement’s efforts to transform society.” The theatre was a space in which radical ideas could still be spoken aloud, but the attachment went deeper. To be a Chartist was to perform one’s freedom, whether in the streets or on the stage. It was an essential and creative act.

Most Chartist performances were amateur and informal, taking place as one part of a larger event, but a few groups had loftier ambitions. Chartists in London hosted over two dozen official performances at some of the city’s most important working class theatres; one performance at the Victoria Theatre, today known as the Old Vic, was seen by over two thousand people. In Leicester, three thousand people watched a Chartist performance of Hamlet. This thriving theatrical culture complemented their print output; the Northern Start, the preeminent Chartist newspaper, even ran a theatrical column that claimed to deduce Chartism from Shakespeare, and Chartist groups read and discussed plays alongside novels, essays, and newspapers. There was a crossover in personnel too; London’s radical presses were positioned near the royal theatres and it was usual for journalists and printmakers to be avid theatregoers, such as the editor of the radical journal Black Dwarf who was also the first weekly editor of a periodical called The Stage. Naturally, Chartist poets were keen participants. In 1842, the working class poet Thomas Cooper was accused of acting in a theatre without a royal license; he was acquitted on the condition that he end his theatrical ambitions immediately. His most famous rival, the more gentrified Ernest Jones, wrote at least ten unperformed plays over the course of his lifetime. One of his plays, St John’s Eve, was reworked and published in The Labourer, another Chartist publication.

At the same time that mass democracy was struggling to be born, the English theatre was undergoing enormous change and had become the subject of much controversy. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, strict censorship laws remained in place and the Licensing Act of 1737 still restricted the production of drama to a few London theatres with royal patents. In 1809, the “Old Price Riots” took place at the newly opened theatre in Covent Garden, known today as the Royal Opera House. It was a spectacular affair. For months, audience members rioted in the stalls. They danced on the benches, dressed in elaborate costumes, mimicked the actors, sang songs and staged performances of their own, disrupting the plays night after night until the theatre finally agreed to lower their ticket prices. In Britain, cheap theatre was now seen as an inalienable right but, drawn from all social classes, the politics of the rioters were at times contradictory. Their concerns ranged from the morality of the subject matter to the social function of the theatre, from the architecture of the building and the behaviour of the upper classes to the style of the acting and the language being spoken. Many of the rioters were xenophobic, some were openly racist and outright anti-Semitic. They saw themselves as standing up for a distinctly British freedom, fighting for a public sphere under enormous pressure from the sharp reorganisation of capital, empire, and new technology. And yet, in amongst all the pomp and the bigotry, the theatre was being figured on all sides as an important place of national debate. One passage quoted extensively by the rioters was from Charles Churchill’s poem ‘The Rosciad’: “The stage I choose – a subject fair and free, / ‘Tis your’s – ‘tis mine – ‘tis public property”.

Popular resistance on the one hand and state repression on the other significantly shaped the development of British theatre, and thus the cause for further democracy and the movement against theatrical censorship became one shared battle. As the working classes returned to the cheap seats, the English stage became a powerful symbol of an emergent mass democracy. For some, it was a nightmarish vision of things to come; for others, it was a utopian space of possibility. Jane Moody has chronicled the rise of the minor theatres in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that fought back against censorship and, in doing so, became highly politicised. These illegitimate and alternative stages fostered an array of experimental genres in order to frustrate the patent monopoly, reinvigorating the theatrical scene with a dizzying programme of burletta, pantomime, and burlesque. The rise of melodrama was of particular importance to the movement for mass democracy; it took the lives of ordinary people and turned them into great tragedians, making heroes of factory works, peasants, and farmers. It was perhaps inevitable that these same theatres staged plays in favour of political reform, able to confidently push back against state interference in politics having become so accustomed to state censorship onstage. In 1848, a typical scene played out; when detectives suggested that the proprietor of the Milton Street Theatre should not lease his theatre to the Chartists, he was so annoyed that he offered the activists a much lower rate.

In Theatre and Disorder, Marc Baer tells us that some Victorian historians mourned the disappearance of the theatre riots, because audiences no longer seemed to have the courage nor the desire to express themselves theatrically. Suddenly, the stakes felt so much lower. “Unlike the French revolution, where theatricality contributed to social and political transformation, it is possible that in Britain theatricality helped maintain the status quo”, Baer writes. “Theatre as a form of entertainment for plebians confirmed and sustained disorder, but it did so theatrically.” It could be argued that the riots represented a shift from violent action to institutionalised opposition, as theatre was itself shifting from a raucous, activist affair to a more repressed, silent form of spectacle. Just as trade unionism became a means of conflict resolution and the modern social movement emphasised its strategy of peaceful disagreement, so the English stage can be seen as a place of compromise, of managed conflict and suppressed radicalism. “Few scholars have asked, much less answered, the obvious question”, Baer writes: “Why were there such serious disorders in theatres before the Victorian era but not afterwards?”

The Covent Garden theatre riot was not, however, the last theatre riot in Britain. In 1812, a group of Yorkshire mill owners were attacked in their theatre boxes causing the Huddersfield Theatre to be temporarily closed. Their assailants were Luddites, angry workers demanding compensation. Was this, perhaps, the real turning point in the history of theatre and mass democracy, the moment in which a theatre riot and a real riot became all but indistinguishable? The Luddites were a theatrical bunch. They marched in broad daylight, sent stylised letters to their bosses, and carried out symbolic acts of sabotage that were, in their own way, remarkably restrained. The Luddites claimed to be followers of the legendary “Ned Ludd”, a fictional character who they styled as a captain, a general, a king, and as a spiritual successor to another legendary figure, Robin Hood. “Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood,” ran one Luddite song, “I will sing the Atchievements of General Ludd.” So quickly after the theatre riots, the Luddites were rioting for real but borrowing many of their tactics from the disturbances in Covent Garden. Collective, ritualised, and performative disruption was the order of the day. “Luddite songs and poems performed special functions, most of which are evident in the works themselves”, writes Kevin Binfield, “Some are celebratory or self-congratulatory. Others are inspirational, the literary equivalents of a fortifying pint of ale before a raid.”

At this time, the creation of a fictional or eponymous leader for a protest or a riot was relatively commonplace. In Ireland, Captain Rock wreaked havoc and in the English countryside Captain Swing struck fear into the hearts of landowners. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these rebellious and enigmatic characters were soon treading the boards. Captain Rock appeared in John Banim’s play Captain John Rock, and Captain Swing starred in both Robert Taylor’s Swing and Charles Zachary Barnett’s satire of the same name. Robert Taylor’s version was performed at the Rotunda, a building run by the radical Richard Carlile, whilst the Swing riots were still ongoing. The play was performed by Taylor himself, who also appears rather self-importantly as a character and is listed in the text as: “Robert the Devil, or The Genius of Reason”. Here, the real and the fictional intermingle. “The stage”, he proclaims, is “The people’s House of Commons.” Taylor was a conman and a drunk, but neither stopped the state from taking his theatrical ambitions seriously. A Government spy attended every performance of Swing and the Rotunda was at one point stormed by police officers. If the stage belonged to the people, as Taylor once claimed, then democracy was not in particularly rude health. Nonetheless, the interplay of politics and theatre on the subject of reform was affecting change and shaping the nascent movement for further democracy. And it was influencing professional playwrights, too.

Frederick Burwick has detailed how these riots affected British theatre history more generally, which he describes as “inextricably intertwined with the rise of the labour movement and reform agitation”. As the reform movement took off, so too did the number of plays depicting weavers, farmers, and factory workers; John Walker’s The Factory Lad was a Chartist favourite. Other plays depicted radical activity in the period, such as Douglas William Jerrold’s The Mutiny at the Nore, or were inspired by past rebellions, such as Edward Fitzball’s Hofer, the Tell of the Tyrol, James Sheridan Knowles’ William Tell, and William Barrymore’s Wallace, all of which were performed by the Chartists. The pantomime Wat Tyler: or Jack Straw’s Rebellion also falls into this category; in the play, Wat Tyler is referred to as “the great and original Chartist.” Robert Southey’s version of the same story, a dramatic poem also called Wat Tyler, has a particularly fascinating performance history. Southey wrote the play when he was young, drawing parallels between the French Revolution and the Great Rising, but the play was left unpublished until 1817. Southey had at this point become poet laureate and had turned his back on radicalism, regularly writing against reform in the Tory Quarterly Review. The play text was published in order to embarrass him and embarrass him it did, yet Wat Tyler became one of the most widely read works of the period. Despite never being performed in a royal theatre, the play was staged and excerpted by the Chartists on many occasions. “Ye are my brethren all; Englishmen, met in arms to advocate the cause of freedom,” says the rebellious priest in Wat Tyler. “Be bold – be resolute – be merciful.” Kept alive by these performances, Wat Tyler became an important character in the radical imagination, so much so that a Chartist calling himself Wat Tyler led a riot in Bradford in 1848, over four and a half centuries after the real Wat Tyler lived and died doing the same.

As political unrest was beginning to have such a profound effect on the content of British theatre, the case for parliamentary reform and the case for theatrical reform were gathering support. “The political dimension of reform of the Royal Patent theatres was widely understood as a mature cultural metaphor for the more general political Parliamentary reform of the electoral franchise”, writes David Worrall. “The reformist discourse of the one was simply mapped onto the reformist discourse of the other.” The issue eventually came to a head in 1832 with the publication of a Parliamentary Report from the Select Committee on Dramatic Literature, a proxy for the democratic struggle which recommended abolition of the patent monopoly. This report was presided over by Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, a maverick politician from an aristocratic background and a self-proclaimed Chartist. Duncombe had apparently prepared for a political career by reading the speeches of great orators and his own speeches were reported breathlessly in the daily newspapers. He was a snappy-dresser, good-looking, and a true dandy. The public loved him. “Few Members of Parliament have elicited as much laughter as he”, wrote one obituarist, “The public have lost a character, an odd sort of man, all points and angles, who made himself wonderfully popular.” Duncombe was often to be found in a theatre green room. He was a former lover of the pioneering actress Madame Vestris and allegedly once gave a “severe horse-whipping” to a newspaper editor on the boards of the Drury Lane Theatre. He typified a new breed of politician, a performer and a populist through and through.

Quick on the heels of Duncombe’s parliamentary report on the state of British theatre came the Reform Bill of 1832, which proved horribly insufficient to English radicals. And so, with the cause for theatrical reform and the cause for parliamentary reform both seemingly at a dead-end, a new movement was born to continue the struggle. In 1838, The People’s Charter was drafted by William Lovett with assistance from his fellow radical Francis Place. Place was married to the actress Louisa Chatterley and had previously organised some of the “Old Price” theatre riots. He was a man of the theatre and it had shaped his politics. If Chartism provided the template of a modern social movement, then we should not ignore the profound influence of the theatre upon its tactical repertoire at every stage of development. Take, for instance, the political document at the centre of the movement, which was presented to parliament in the most theatrical manner. In 1841, it was carried from the Chartist meeting rooms near St Paul’s Cathedral by a team of stonemasons, who rolled it “like a giant snowball” through the blockaded streets and through the doors of the House of Commons. In 1842, the petition was introduced again to parliament by Thomas Slingsby Duncombe and had now grown so large that at this point it got stuck, requiring the doorframes to be broken off in order to pass into the House of Commons. Official Hansard documents recall that “when unrolled, it spread over a great part of the floor, and rose above the level of the Table.” It was the perfect theatrical prop.

With its repertoire of petitioning, of pamphleteering, and of the mass public march, the Chartist movement was deeply invested in the art of rhetoric and of spectacle. Chartist marches were colourful affairs, with improvised stages, flags flying, ornate banners, music and song swelling in the air. The processions were carefully marshalled by the organisers and often followed by a dinner, dancing, or other amusements. In this respect, they had much in common with a festival-day procession. Nowhere was this more obvious than along the route of a protest march, a demonstration of popular will that raised the spectre of violence and harkened back to both earlier food riots and election festivities, but which was tightly choreographed. Indeed, it was in this period that the word “demonstration” came to be used for political protests and the Northern Star often described the Chartist rally as a kind of performance: a “gallant show”, a “grand display”, a “moral fete”, a “glorious exhibition”, a “most imposing spectacle”. Robert George Gammage, in his 1859 history of the Chartist movement, frequently compares the orators at a march to actors on the stage: “His rare powers of imitation irresistibly drew peals of laughter from the gravest audience. His versatility, which enabled him to change from grave to gay and vice versa and to assume a dozen various characters in almost as many minutes, was one of the secrets of his success.”

Wedged between the poetry column and an advertisement for the theatre, one review in the Northern Star cast Chartist leaders as “highly-important actors in this democratic drama”. To attempt to tell the story of Chartism, they wrote, with only passing reference to the newspaper’s editor Feargus O’Connor was as if to stage the “play of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet omitted.” Once again, it was through theatre that Chartists understood their movement, and O’Connor represented a part of the movement that was happy to flirt with violence. At points of high tension, such as the defeat of the Second Reform Bill or the repeated rejection of the Charter, protests often devolved into window-breaking, mud-throwing, and fire-setting. After a political meeting, a nineteenth-century crowd might parade through the town with an effigy of a local politician, before burning the effigy or hanging it from a lamppost. It might sound perverse to the modern reader, but the violence, even here, was to some extent symbolic. In Wales, the “Rebecca Riots” took off as Chartism was in full swing. These riots were led by groups of impoverished farmers who smashed up toll-gates across the country, but not before indulging in a little role-play. The men who took part in these riots dressed as women, wore masks and blackened their faces. They even rehearsed a short script. “Shall we come and move it out of your way, mother Rebecca?”, asked the rioters at the toll-gate. “Off with it then, my children”, shouted their drag-queen leader.

Some Chartists argued that democracy was not going to be won without a fight. A real fight, not only a theatrical one. Amidst a backdrop of revolution abroad, anti-colonial uprisings, and intense radical activity at home, the decade after the Reform Bill saw the Newport Rising, the first General Strike, and multiple attempts by the Chartists to have their petitions heard. But all to no avail. “Petitioning for pity is most weak,” says Wat Tyler in Southey’s play. “The sovereign people ought to demand justice.” This line must have struck some Chartists as particularly prophetic. After the Newport rising in 1839, the period in which the vast majority of Chartist performances took place, the movement was itself engaged in a ferocious debate on the efficacy and the ethics of violent action. At the same time, their activity was being closely monitored by an increasingly censorious state and a huge number of extra policemen were mobilised to suppress their protests. Chartists had now died and been martyred for the cause; this was no longer a theoretical debate, it was an urgent and pressing concern. A little ironically, then, theatre became a good way to advance their conversations, a stage upon which failed rebellions could be examined and successful uprisings could be imagined. In fact, most Chartist plays grapple with the question of violence. These plays interrogated the ability of a peaceful petitioner to affect change under the current system, and in shifting the conversation to tactics also questioned the efficacy of theatre, of words over deeds. Of course, even the productions that were most explicit about the limitations of performative politics reaffirmed the importance of the stage on which they were performed. “During a period in which assembly of workers was prohibited by the Combination Acts, the theatre was one place where they might safely come together,” writes Frederick Burwick.

In 1841, the Chartist writer John Watkins wrote a play that explicitly dealt with the Newport rising. The play John Frost was named after his eponymous hero and it recasts the fallen martyrs of Newport as committed revolutionaries, so much so that John Frost himself is reduced to something of a side character as Shell, a working class militant, is hailed as the rising’s true leader. In John Frost, the Charter is also the subject of much ridicule. “The members stared aghast awhile, and then, burst into laughter fit to shake the house,” recounts one privy-councillor, “this huge bomb fell dead and could not burst, and now it sleeps in peace beneath the table.” At another point in the play, Shell declares: “Petitions do no good, but harm.” When he dies, the crowd swears revenge. “Vengeance!”, cry the revolutionaries, “Silurian Frosts again shall lead us on, and Freedom’s baffled battle yet be won!” The play proved so controversial amongst leading Chartists that Watkins failed to find a radical publisher that would endorse it. Watkins fell out with O’Connor, stopped writing for the Northern Star, and publicly contemplated assassinating his opponents. It was a proper meltdown. However, even at his most cantankerous, Watkins takes a breath to lobby for theatrical reform. In the introduction to John Frost, he asks: “what theatre will bring this piece on the stage while the present government-censorship exists?”

A few years later, Watkins would have been unable to rely on the same excuse. In 1843, the patent monopoly was finally abolished and all licensed theatres were now permitted to stage legitimate drama. This was not necessarily good news, however, for the status of radical theatre in the long term. In fact, if anything, legitimacy sucked the life out of it. The new laws abolished the patent monopoly only to replace it with another kind of theatrical hierarchy, this time between a theatre licensed for dramatic performances, in which alcohol was prohibited, and what would become known as the music hall, buildings licensed to sell alcohol but not to perform plays. The informal alliance between English radicals and illegitimate theatre owners was thereby slowly eroded, just as the rowdy, activist crowds of the early nineteenth century gave way to the stifled, silent spectators of Victorian England. The electrification of theatres in the late nineteenth century and the trusting proscenium stage didn’t help much either, further separating the actor from the spectator. By the end of the century, Henry Irving had become the first actor to be knighted for his services to drama and theatre appeared to achieve real legitimacy. Radical theatre was still possible, but it was more dispersed and insular, relegated to activist enclaves and esoteric subcultures. For most of the nineteenth century, British theatre seemed to be on the cusp of a revolution but by its end, and much like the Chartist movement itself, the subversive elements had been extinguished. Mass culture did not necessarily mean mass democracy.

Nonetheless, there was a short pocket of time when what happened on the stage and what happened in the streets was a matter of national importance. There was always a large working class audience in London for theatre, but suddenly audiences everywhere were able to access cheap theatre alongside other entertainments. At the minor theatres, programmes sometimes featured up to five separate plays every night and were compiled quickly, often reflecting the urgent concerns of the day. If a play about a factory striker was successful one week, the theatre down the road would try to replicate it the next. Jane Moody writes that these minor theatres, catering to younger, poorer audiences, came to represent “the frightening consequences of cultural democracy: a theatre of sensation ruled by the mob.” Henry Arthur Jones, lecturing on The Theatre and The Mob in 1852, thought that the success of melodrama was such that “the more a play has resembled a medley of these incidents and accidents which collect a crowd in the streets, the more successful it has been.” These criticisms now sound pearl-clutching and laughably overblown, but it is true that in the nineteenth century there existed a close relationship between radical theatre and popular protest. Theatre was important, and its subjects were too. “The Old Price Riots came to represent a huge nail in the coffin of patent monopoly”, writes Moody, “Covent Garden and Drury Lane alike began to be condemned by their critics as the cultural symbol of an unreformed Parliament: aristocratic, corrupt and unrepresentative of a modern nation.”

The story of mass democracy and its arrival in Britain is a complicated and bumpy one, but just as the Chartist movement paved the way to further reform and modelled a new form of political organisation, so too did the rise of illegitimate theatre in Britain anticipate a more vibrant theatrical culture to come. What is interesting, and so often untold, in both cases is the profound effect of violence in hastening reform. It might seem absurd to a twenty-first century reader that democracy, which we associate with peace and dialogue, or contemporary British theatre, which we assume to be the domain of softies and hippies, were originally ushered in by a campaign of contestation that comprised all manner of different tactics: debate, petitioning, uprisings and riots. The struggle for further democracy and the struggle against theatre censorship became one and the same, and their opponents railed against the “mob culture” that both built. As democracy strains and groans under the weight of gross inequality today and theatres continue to close across the country, does a rejuvenation of both require a raising of the mob once again? We must hope that the values of democracy are now so deeply embedded, so rooted and resilient, that we do not require the spectre of the mob to loom over us, even as we attempt to embrace its highest values. But perhaps there is something to rediscover in “mob culture”. Feargus O’Connor, the Hamlet of Chartism, insisted on the moral force of the movement but was not against raising the spectre of insurrection as a disciplining tool for the elite. As such, he had a strange ability to both endorse and reject violence in the same breath. “A true application of moral force would effect every change, but in case it should fail, physical force would come to its aid like an electric shock — and no man could prevent it”, he proclaimed. “God forbid that I should wish to see my country plunged into the horrors of physical revolution. I wish her to win her liberties by peaceful means.” That violence is the alternative to dialogue, to democracy and to theatre, was sometimes an alternative worth making clear.

It is also worth remembering that mass democracy is a relatively new and untested thing. Its successes were hard won by generations of activists who told stories about progress, about a better future and a coming day in which freedom would reign. The stage was a place of political contestation, where social movements were brought to life, rehearsed, and then buried, decently. In 1852, the Northern Star ran an article on the decline of the Chartist movement. “We are now between the acts of the great drama”, the editor writes, “The curtain dropped on a scene of wasted energy and aimless talk. We cannot now create a great movement, but we can prepare one. We cannot call forth an army to battle, but we can train one.” In 1909, a hundred years after the Covent Garden theatre riots, George Bernard Shaw wrote Press Cuttings, a topical farce that poked fun at the British government’s attempts to resist the suffrage movement. The play was originally banned by the state censor but it was tweaked and restaged, helping to raise funds for the Women’s Suffrage Society. “Do you suppose this damned democracy can be allowed to go on now that the mob is beginning to take it seriously?”, asks the Minister of War. “We should disfranchise the mob, and, if they make a fuss, shoot them down.”

Far more significant, however, were the plays written and performed by the Suffragettes themselves. In particular, How the Vote was Won by Cicely Hamilton and Chris St John was incredibly popular, and was also produced in 1909. In How The Vote Was Won, a dismissive clerk is won over to the Suffragette cause after women throughout Britain go on strike and turn to their nearest male relatives for financial support. It is a wildly funny play. “Votes for Women!”, cry the men, suddenly inundated by their female relatives. “If this rotten Government think we’re going to maintain millions of women in idleness just because they don’t like the idea of my Aunt Lizzie making a scratch on a bit of paper and shoving it into a ballot-box every five years, this Government have reckoned without the men!” The previous year, the Actresses’ Franchise League was formed when nearly four-hundred actresses came together to pledge their support for the cause. Within five years, their membership had grown to around nine-hundred and together they put on plays, pageants and other amusements that raised funds for the movement and propagandised on its behalf. “One play is worth one thousand speeches”, declared one prominent member. These plays were sometimes performed in theatres, but more often they took place in public halls, schools, restaurants, and private homes, just like the Chartists. And, just like the Chartists, they were staged in defiance of state censorship, avoiding the laws that dictated all professionally performed plays should be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s office for approval. The Suffragettes also used their stages to debate the efficacy of direct action and the limitations of peaceful protest. “Within a campaign, the most prominent members of which had espoused performance as a means of drawing public attention to female disenfranchisement, it was perhaps inevitable that many in the profession identified with the theatrical actions of the suffragettes”, writes Susan Croft. That their politics was performative is part of the appeal.

Cicely Hamilton, the writer of How The Vote Was Won, claimed that the suffrage moment “was the first political agitation to organise the arts to its aid.” So whilst the Suffragettes may not have consciously built on the theatrical legacy of the Chartists, their aims and their tactics were uncannily similar, deeply embedded within the model of the modern social movement. “The end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, like the Renaissance, has been read as a period of transition and instability in which drama, in particular, sees the emergence of new cultural forms”, writes Katharine Cockin. “Suffragists were questioning what theatre was.” Just as melodrama developed alongside Chartism, the Suffragettes embraced new forms of theatremaking, writing short, absurd plays that paved the way to modern sketch comedy. The rise of the music hall had already incubated the revue form, which would later boom with the emergence of alternative theatre and the post-war Fringe, and it was through this new sensibility, anarchic and cool, that the Suffragettes chose to express themselves. Theatrical innovation has often gone hand in hand with periods of intense political change, responding to the shifting social currents of the day, but Chartist and Suffragette theatre went even further, necessitating change in both the cultural and the political realm. “Theatre, as the most public of the arts, is second cousin to politics, and even when the relationship is a forbidden one - as it was on the English stage, until recently, under the Lord Chamberlain’s regulations - there is a two-way traffic between them”, writes Raphael Samuel. The activists of yesteryear seem to have understood this well.

So, did theatre play a role in the extension of the franchise? Decisively so, and in a number of different ways. As a distinctly democratic form, theatre opened a space for dialogue, for debate, and for compromise, but more often it spoke to activists already engaged in the struggle. It spurred on supporters, intervened in tactical discussions, and provided financial support to the movement. Above all else, it helped to construct the movement’s imaginary, to define its nascent aesthetics and to raise a “mob culture” that stood in opposition to the dominant one. The influence that theatre holds over the public sphere has obviously changed since the days of the Chartists, but there is still power in the stage, not least because theatre is an ancient form that has stayed the course through countless reigns, regimes, and revolutions. Theatre synthesises words and images in a way that other forms are unable to do. It brings people together in public space, challenging their shared ethics and holding a mirror up to the modern world. “In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message”, wrote Marshall McLuhan in 1964. If the theatre has a message it is to come and to congregate, to experience stories together. And in a world of technology designed to instil the exact opposite, togetherness can be a revelation. Give it a push, or a movement to energise it, and it could be revolutionary.

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