Gateshead playwright Githa Sowerby wowed the West End in Victorian/Edwardian times – but that was before they realised she was a woman. Steve Pratt reports.

IN Githa Sowerby’s time, a woman’s place was in the home – not writing plays. But the Gateshead-born woman defied the conventions of Victorian/ Edwardian England not only to write a play, Rutherford & Son, but to see it staged at London’s Royal Court Theatre and earn rave reviews that compared the writing to Ibsen and hailed it as the best play to be staged in the West End for a decade.

What none of those cheering as the curtain came down on that first night performance was that the author, billed as GK Rutherford, was a woman. That sort of thing wasn’t done in those times. The critics simply couldn’t believe it that this daughter of a North-East industrialist – whose Ellison Glass Works on the banks of the Tyne was a market leader in Europe and the US for mass-produced glassware – was capable of penning such an accomplished piece of drama.

She never repeated this success as a playwright, although she did continue writing children’s books.

Githa died in 1970, aged 93, believing no-one was interested in her or her work. She was wrong. In the years since there have been productions of Rutherford & Son in both this country (including London’s National Theatre and Newcastle’s Northern Stage) and abroad. It was named as one of the top 100 plays of the 20th century by the National Theatre.

This week there’s a Githa Sowerby double at York Theatre Royal. The touring revival by Northern Broadsides of Rutherford & Son, directed by Jonathan Miller, is in the main house while a play about the writer’s life, called simply Githa, is in the Studio.

Writer-performer Hannah Davies, who first staged her one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year, knew little about Githa until York Settlement Community Players asked her to take part in a reading of Rutherford & Son. “I read the play and thought, ‘wow, this is fantastic, this is an amazing, incredible strong piece of writing’. I just thought it was so powerful, especially being written by a woman in that time when women did just not write plays,” says Davies.

“On the same day as the play reading, Pat Riley – Githa’s biographer – came to do a presentation about her life. So as well as reading the play I got a glimpse into her own life and it was fascinating to hear about the interesting life that she’d had. I was listening to Pat talk and thinking this would make a great story.”

Riley’s book was an obvious source of research while researching her play. She also read plays from the era and other writing by women of the time. “But Githa burnt most of her letters and personal correspondence shortly before she died because she thought nobody really cared about her achievements or her work,” explains Davies.

“So it was quite a challenge to unlock her as a person because you never got her in her own words really.”

She also met Githa’s daughter Joan. “It was quite something to be in the same room as her. I felt like I had a hotline to Githa. I saw some pictures, including a fantastic one of Githa in a hat and a big fox fur stole which was a family photograph, and it really helped me formulate what she was like. I didn’t copy it because it was a family picture, but I took a mental snapshot,” she says.

Davies’s play focuses on the early part of Githa’s success as a dramatist and children’s author until her first hit Rutherford & Son. Once the reviews came out, it was revealed GK Sowerby was a woman.

“After Rutherford, she never had a great success. She always earned her living as a children’s author and wrote plays but struggled to get them on, whether that was because everyone then knew she was a woman, I don’t know. Then the First World War arrived and the whole world changed,” says Davies.

“The other plays are fantastic plays. She’s an amazing writer. That was what really pushed me to write this piece. I thought how can an incredible woman from such a restrictive and oppressive period be writing such fiery plays and yet everyone has forgotten who she is. It’s a travesty.”

ONE of the questions her play asks is where Githa found the impetus to write.

“It probably gave her an outlet because she was so restricted as a Victorian and Edwardian woman.

Women in those days weren’t allowed to think, to have opinions, to be educated. You were educated in sewing and accomplishments like piano playing. To have that intellectual inner life was not possible so I think she wrote,” says Davies.

There must be an autobiographical element to Rutherford & Son which tells of a ruthless industrialist who sacrifices his family in favour of his business. The daughters in Githa’s play are not conventional, with Davies noting that one asks, “must I sit with my hands in front of me like a lady all day long?”

“In the play, she doesn’t – she’s feisty and just gets on with it. Writing was an outlet for this huge intelligence Githa had. She was a hugely intelligent woman and had to get that out somewhere.

“Although her ideas and plays are very forward-thinking for the time, as a person and a woman, she was quite conventional. Her husband worked for a publication that openly mocked the new woman and she married a man like that.”

Githa herself was unmarried when she moved to London with her sister in 1905 and earned her living writing children’s books. She became engaged to poet and dramatist John Kaye Kendall, who wrote for Punch magazine, after knowing him only three weeks, and married him two months later.

“He was smitten with her as an artist and as a woman as well. Probably just because of the expectations of wifely duty and their characters – he was a lot more extrovert that she was – his career took the limelight and hers drifted away, which is really sad.”

Davies, a writer and actress who’s studying for a PhD at the University of York, says that while Githa is a very different person to her she can certainly relate to her situation.

“That’s why the play makes sense today as well because it’s exploring art and womanhood and the relationship between the two. The restrictiveness of certain aspects of being a woman makes being an artist hard.”

Githa and Rutherford & Son continue at York Theatre Royal in the studio and the main house until Saturday. Box office 01904-623568 and online yorktheatreroyal.co.uk