THE SKINNY
Talkin’ Bout a Revolution Theatre
Award-winning poet and playwright Caroline Bird chats to The Skinny about turning the life of workers' rights activist Ellen Wilkinson into a play Interview: Rachael O’Connor
W
ho was Ellen Wilkinson? She may not be a household name but when poet and playwright Caroline Bird began writing a play about the prolific socialist, she ended up finding out so much it resulted in a five-hour long first draft. “I really let my head fill with as much soup and noise and complexity as possible,” explains Bird, speaking of the five-year period she spent researching Wilkinson’s life after being commissioned by the then Artistic Director of Northern Stage. Eventually, Bird decided to narrow it down and focus only on the final 15 years of Wilkinson’s life. “Ellen’s life encapsulates what happens to a person when they’re really trying to fight for everything at once,” says Bird, “and how that can tear you apart.”
Ellen’s story Wilkinson was born in Manchester in 1891, a time when there were no maternity or unemployment benefits and no welfare schemes. Her life was plagued by the consequences of childhood scarlet fever and chronic asthma, not helped by smoking, which was then believed to be beneficial to health. Photo: Matt Crockett
May 2022 – May Day Special
Red Ellen: Leader of the Workers' Movement Bird’s play Red Ellen will have already toured from Newcastle to Nottingham by the time it hits Edinburgh’s Lyceum stage on 4 May – but the timing couldn’t be more perfect. May Day is traditionally a celebration of spring and the
resurrection of nature after winter. But when workers first marched for an eight-hour working day in 1865, 1 May became known as Labour Day, formalised as a national holiday under a Labour government in 1978. Wilkinson first came to national attention when she played a prominent role in the 1936 Jarrow March. Two hundred unemployed men walked from the town in the North of England to Downing Street over a period of 26 days. They were marching for the reestablishment of industry in their hometown, following the closure of their local shipyard – and at the helm, leading them all, was a tiny, 4’8”, red-haired woman by the name of Ellen Wilkinson.
Red Ellen by Caroline Bird
— 22 —
Wilkinson had a patchy education, disrupted by illness, but perhaps these formative, early experiences were partly what drove her. She had a fierce desire to be treated like an equal and was spurred on by the poverty and unemployment she witnessed all around her. The small, sickly activist who once led hundreds of men on a weeks-long march rose from local agitator to Education Minister under Churchill, and only stopped fighting when her ill health finally betrayed her. Bird’s play invites us to bear witness to Wilkinson’s energy and vitality. “This was a woman who always acted as though time was running out – and it was, for her, in terms of her health,” she notes. Wilkinson’s extraordinary life and nature proved to be good dramatic material for a play. “[Wilkinson was] constantly tripping and falling in the House of Commons, being chased by MI5 for associating with communist spies, driving at 80mph, crashing her car into ditches or lorries, and turning up to work with a fractured skull,” says Bird. Like many well-meaning activists, she tried to spin too many plates. “She was never working on one thing at a time, because that’s not the way the world operates,” Bird explains. “She’d be organising the Jarrow March but at the same time war is breaking out in Spain or she’ll be running to Berlin to report on Hitler’s march on the Rhineland or flying to Belgium to apologise to Einstein for nearly getting him killed. She wanted to make change as quickly as possible because she constantly believed she was just about to die.” Wilkinson wasn’t perfect. Because she wanted to get things done quickly, she often made terrible mistakes. When her communist lover presented her with a book called The Brown Book of Hitler Terror and told her it had been endorsed by Einstein, she rushed to get it published with Einstein’s name on the front. Consequently, Einstein became known as a public enemy of Hitler and had to flee Germany. She was seen as flighty and an irritant, constantly raging against apathy. “She had this Cassandra thing of running around shouting ‘Troy will fall’ and [feeling like] no one was listening,” says Bird. “It made her fight even more fiercely for what she felt was right.” What spurred her on in the face of so much apathy? Wilkinson “really believed in her ability to save the world,” muses Bird. She points out that “there was an element of narcissism” in it too: “she needed to believe she could change the world, and
