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Jennie Lee: Tomorrow is a New Day

Lochgelly Centre

Three stars


If ever a strong political voice for the arts was needed, it is now. The fact that there isn’t currently one emanating from either Holyrood or Westminster brings shame on both Houses. What better time, then, to be reminded of Jennie Lee, the Fife firebrand who became the first ever Minister for the Arts, and who founded the Open University, championing education for all. 

 

Lee had quite a life before such epoch making activity, as is brought home in Matthew Knights’ epic dramatic biography, which premiered at the weekend a stone’s throw from his subject’s birthplace 120 years ago. Coming at a time when arts buildings are fighting to survive, it is telling too that Knights’ play opened in a venue that might not have existed without Lee’s vision. 

 

Knight sets out his store in Emma Lynne Harley’s production for the Angus based Knights Theatre in the variety theatre and hotel where Lee grew up, as the show’s three actors raid the dressing up box to tell her story. With Trish Mullin the older Jennie, and Kit Laveri the younger, Knights’ script moves through Lee’s early political activism, her first stint as an MP, and her personal and professional partnership with Nye Bevan, all before her grandest of finales. 

 

Rather than opt for documentary naturalism, Knights and Harley revel in the sort of knockabout theatricality Lee was immersed in from an early age. Her various Westminster amours are demonstrated by way of a vintage take on Blind Date, capitalist economics are personified as a New York wise guy, while Winston Churchill is a cigar-wagging buffoon in a comedy bald wig. The devil of the press, meanwhile, is depicted by George Docherty as a moustache-twirling villain in one of several quick fire costume changes. 

 

As Lee’s principles are tested, young and old Jennie spar their way through such ideological contradictions on Ali Maclaurin’s topsy-turvy set. The result is an ambitious stab at music hall agitprop that tells the story of a politician who changed her own life as much as those of others. 


The Herald, November 5th 2024

 

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