By Bethany Davies
Kimberly Campanello is Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University, where she is currently developing a play called Constance and Eva. The play tells the stories of Constance Markiewicz and Eva Gore-Booth, two Anglo-Irish sisters who were active in the campaign for women’s suffrage. Constance and Eva, directed by Luke Davies, will be staged between 17th and 27th September at the Bread and Roses Theatre, London (tickets here). Bethany Davies, whose review of the recent York Theatre Royal production Everything is Possible is available here, caught up with Kimberly to discuss the project and examine the contemporary importance of the suffragettes.
Bethany Davies: Why do you think, as artists, we enjoy retelling lost tales? History has a way of sweeping certain stories under the mat, but why do we relish in the thought of revisioning them?
Kimberly Campanello: This is such an interesting question! A lot of my poetry writing stems from a desire to excavate hidden stories and ideas. I did my PhD poetry collection (Strange Country, The Dreadful Press) on the Sheela-na-gigs – stone carvings of naked female figures exposing their vulvas, which are found on medieval churches, castles and town walls in Ireland and in some places in Britain. The significance and purpose of these strange things intrigued me and because it’s impossible to actually know (they don’t enter the written record until the 19th century), I suppose I was trying to reinstate them in some way in our consciousness through poetry. I think it’s a similar process with my play Constance and Eva. The Gore-Booth sisters – Constance Markiewicz and Eva Gore-Booth – are highly significant historically, but no one knows about them. The people who do know about them don’t necessarily have the full picture. Constance was the first woman elected to Westminster (though as a member of Sinn Fein she did not take her seat). Eva was a major figure in the battle for suffrage and in securing women’s worker’s rights. As a writer, I need look no further than these real people for a ripe nexus of themes to explore creatively. In terms of research, I went to most of the archives to view the writings of Eva and Con, as well as to sites in Britain and Ireland relevant to their lives. I also had fantastic expert support from historians Pat Quigley (author of Sisters against Empire: Constance Markiewicz and Eva Gore Booth 1916-1917) and Dr. Sonja Tiernan (Associate Professor in History at Liverpool Hope University and the leading expert on Eva Gore-Booth). Eva herself was a poet and playwright who re-envisioned Irish myths through feminist and pacifist lenses, so, as you say, this is a common approach for writers to take.
BD: How revelevant do you believe your play is to our current political situation? What can the play aim to achieve by being shown now in a ‘post-Trump’ and ‘post-Brexit’ environment?
KC: Constance and Eva is relevant to our contemporary politics because of its focus on real people who got down to business and did things against the overwhelming status quo of patriarchy, heteronormativity, British imperialism and capitalism. The sisters were privileged in terms of their background—their family were wealthy Anglo-Irish landowners who owned Lissadell House in County Sligo in Ireland. Some generations of the family contributed significantly to the suffering of their Irish tenants. However, the sisters renounced all this and committed themselves to working against the interests of the powerful class into which they were born in favour of ‘the many’ of Ireland and Britain. In addition to her combat role in the 1916 Rising in Ireland against the British Empire, Constance was a committed socialist who worked alongside James Connolly during the 1913 Lockout in Dublin. Eva’s work against protectionist legislation that would have denied working class women the right to work in certain trades (such as barmaids and acrobats, for example) demonstrated a capacity to conceptualize politics outside her own situation as a wealthy woman. I feel like right now we are actually seeing a huge surge of political involvement, particularly among young people. As we were developing the play, the actors and director and myself were very interested in the idea of political paralysis, how people tend to feel paralyzed to act politically, and how Eva and Con continually flout this despite an opportunity to live leisured lives of privilege and power. We can learn from this, I think, and consider what actions we might take as individuals with varying positionalities. There has been a big surge of this activity recently, from the protests of Trump’s Travel Ban to the youth turn-out in the last General Election in the UK behind a socialist Labour Manifesto with the tag line ‘for the many, not the few’. People have turned out in support of the needs of people other than those who are ‘like them’. I hope this continues and grows.
BD: Your play appears to discuss the combination of the fight for LGBTQ and Women’s Rights. In Everything is Possible, a scene/story is dedicated to this also. To what extent were these rights both fought for during the time of the Suffragettes?
KC: We might not recognize what was being done at the time as a fight for LGBT ‘rights’ as we are familiar with them today (e.g., marriage or non-discrimination in housing and work) because those rights were, at the time, embedded in workers’ and women’s’ struggles. However, Eva Gore-Booth and her partner Esther Roper founded Urania, a radical queer magazine that, again, I think we should all know about! Eva and Esther were definitely ‘queer’ in their approach, continually pointing to the arbitrariness and constructedness of sex/gender. In each issue of their magazine, they had a page with the phrase ‘sex is an accident’, as well as this statement: ‘There is a vista before us of a spiritual progress which far transcends all political matters. It is the abolition of the ‘manly’ and the ‘womanly’. Will you not help to sweep them into the museum of antiques?’. This shows how ‘queer’ their approach was, which might seem surprising to us today. I highly recommend Dr. Sonja Tiernan’s The Political Writings of Eva Gore-Booth as it gives a real sense of how radical Eva was on this and other fronts.