A WOMAN writing a play in 1912 – whatever next? Before you can say Emmeline Pankhurst, they’ll be giving them the vote.

KG Sowerby was the toast of the London theatre scene after her first play Rutherford and Son, the story of a tyrannical Northern industrialist and his family, was premiered at the Royal Court Theatre.

Critics hailed an outstanding new playwright. Then it was revealed that KG was Katherine Githa Sowerby – a female writer in the days when a woman’s place was in the home.

Writer-performer Hannah Davies explores Githa’s life and times in her play being presented in the Studio Theatre. The piece provides a perfect partner for Northern Broadsides’ excellent revival of Rutherford and Son in the main house.

Davies plays Sowerby, stepping outside her to play the other characters in the story of the Northern industrialist’s daughter who moved to London with her sister (and later another sister foisted on her by her hard-up father) and earned a living writing children’s stories. She later married and had a daughter.

The play, which was staged through an actress friend, was an immediate hit, although her other plays never achieved such success.

What Davies paints is a portrait of someone who led two lives – as an independent woman working as a writer and, later, a wife who fashioned her life to conform to the conventions of the time.

She clearly was a remarkable woman who achieved a lot, not so much through strident rebellion as by playing men at their own game.

Until Saturday. Box office 01904-623568