Red Ellen 4 stars
Lyceum, Edinburgh
4 May 2022 to 21 May 2022
How do you write a play about someone’s whole life? How do you fit a person’s complete history into a script? And how do you do it if your subject lived so intensely that her life could conceivably fuel a dozen dramatic productions?
These were presumably the questions that Caroline Bird—an award-winning poet and playwright—asked herself when she embarked on the writing of Red Ellen, her new play about the firebrand socialist politician Ellen Wilkinson. How well she answered them may be judged by audiences at the Lyceum, where the play runs throughout May.
Ellen Wilkinson was a remarkable woman. Born to a working-class family in Manchester in the last years of the 19th century, she went on to become a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, an activist for women’s suffrage, a reporter in the Spanish civil war, the organiser of the Jarrow March, a Labour MP and Minister for Education in the Attlee Government. Along the way, she consorted with a host of the period’s outstanding characters, including Einstein, Trotsky and Nehru, and enjoyed many romantic affairs, usually, it appears, with married men.
It’s a lot to pack into a couple of acts—Bird notes in the programme that her first draft ran to five hours—but the play does its best to cover the ground, presenting the audience with a succession of disconnected scenes that function as a summary of the highlights of Wilkinson’s career. We learn about her early life and personal relationships through scenes with her sister and a series of friends and lovers—some invented for the purposes of the play, others real people, such as Herbert Morrison, Labour Home Secretary, presented as perhaps the most significant of Wilkinson’s attachments.
This approach succeeds in getting across the important biographical and historical information in easily digestible portions, but, perhaps inevitably, the end result lacks a narrative pull, and the overall impression occasionally brings to mind that Alan Bennet line: “History—it’s just one fucking thing after another.”
The extent to which the play avoids that problem is largely due to the dynamic staging of the director, Wils Wilson, and most of all to Bettrys Jones’s powerful performance as Wilkinson, emphasising the unrestrained energy and rhetorical powers that earned the diminutive politician the nicknames The Fiery Particle and The Mighty Atom. The rest of the cast tower over the lead actor but never overshadow her energetic, effervescent presence.
