Tyneside-born playwright Githa Sowerby has been airbrushed from history, according to Pat Riley who wrote her biography and is now acting in one of her plays, as Steve Pratt reports

THE more Pat Riley researched the life of Gateshead-born 20th Century female writer Githa Sowerby, the more she became convinced she had been “airbrushed” from history.

Having written a biography of the woman called the female equivalent of Chekov and Ibsen and the Dickens of her time, she now finds herself acting in one of Sowerby’s littleseen plays, The Stepmother for York Settlement Community Players (YSCP).

It’s a dream role for Riley, who’s 72 and has been acting in amateur theatre since her twenties.

The play centres around Lois Relph, an orphaned young woman who inherits a large sum of money and marries Eustace Gaydon, whose sole intention is to get his hands on her inheritance. Lois has to juggle being a stepmother to two girls with running a business and overcoming the social prejudices of the day.

The Stepmother was only performed once, for a private club set up by actors to give work that was not being produced professionally a public airing. No other theatre at the time was willing to put on further performances. The play was revived at the Orange Tree Theatre in London last year.

This production follows Northern Broadsides’ acclaimed staging of another of Sowerby’s plays, Rutherford And Son, with Barrie Rutter last year. It was that play that first brought Riley and YSCP together in 2009 when Northern Stage presented the first professional production on Sowerby’s Tyneside home patch. At the same time, Arts Council funding enabled Riley to write a biography of the playwright.

“I was in the audience one afternoon and a member of YSCP came and had a chat after the performance. They were keen to do Rutherford And Son and asked me to do a talk about Githa Sowerby,” she recalls.

“They did a reading of the play and I ended up taking part because one of the actors was not available. I’m 72 and had to read the part of a young girl – so they had to suspend belief.

I know the play very well so that wasn’t a problem for me.”

After Northern Broadsides decided to stage Rutherford And Son, YSCP turned to The Stepmother.

“I said I’d help them any way they wanted. They happened to send me information about the auditions so I thought why not have a go at Charlotte,” says Riley.

“At the time she wrote the play in 1924, even after decades of protest only a very small proportion of women in this country – those who were property owners aged 30 or over – had the vote, and the finances of many women were still routinely controlled by male relatives. I play an elderly maiden lady in this situation,”

says Riley.

She hopes more of Sowerby’s work will be seen in the future. Despite being involved in amateur theatre all her life, reading Rutherford And Son was the first time she became aware of Sowerby.

Sowerby’s daughter, then in her early nineties, entrusted Riley with a lot of her mother’s memorabilia, including programmes and business correspondence. “I didn’t set out to write a book about her, but the more I looked into her background, the more angry I got that she’d been airbrushed out of history. I had to tell Githa’s story,” she says.

“She was a woman writing ahead of her time. In my opinion because the British theatre was male-dominated, and continued to be male-dominated, plays presented from a female perspective, particularly themes that made men uncomfortable, were not necessarily going to get support.

“The public perception of women was that they were not capable of producing creative art and could only run the house, bring up a family and service blokes.”

Githa Sowerby was part of the industrial dynasty that owned the Sowerby-Ellison glassworks in Gateshead, one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of pressed glass. Eventually she went to London where she lived with her sister Millicent and they successfully published children’s books. But it was Rutherford And Son, which originally opened for four matinee performances at the Royal Court, that put Sowerby on the map. She was billed as KG Sowerby and the play received great reviews.

The Discovery Museum, in Newcastle, has some of her original manuscripts with researchers coming from all over the world to see them. Her plays have been performed in Canada, too.

“It’s in the hands of the theatres themselves to see how this woman’s work is in the theatre.

I think it works extremely well. She writes fantastic dialogue, which is very easy to speak – and I’m saying that as an actor now. Her dialogue feels natural.”

The YCSP production of The Stepmother is directed by Maggie Smales, York-based St Peter’s School drama teacher, with the leading role of Lois Relph played by Claire Morley and James Martin as her husband Eustace.

  • Performances are in The Studio at York Theatre Royal from March 5-15. Box office 01904-623568 and online yorktheatreroyal.co.uk