Ethel Smyth: Grasp the Nettle

Weaving together Dame Ethel Smyth’s music, including her greatest opera The Wreckers, with anecdotes from her confidants, her letters and her own writing, this new play features performances by contralto Lucy Stevens and pianist Elizabeth Marcus. Imprisoned with Mrs Pankhurst, Smyth was the writer of the anthem for the suffrage movement The March of the Women and a composer, writer and Suffragette who was the living embodiment of the courage and passion with which Victorian women challenged the ‘male machine’.