Sylvia review

You’ve never seen the suffragettes quite like this before – yet there’s plenty in this new musical that will seem familiar. Seen as a work-in-progress five years ago and created, directed and choreographed by Kate Prince for her female-led dance-theatre company ZooNation, it’s a hip-hop take on history, with a score by Josh Cohen and DJ Walde that also encompasses funk, soul and R’n’B.

Prince’s motormouth lyrics are adroitly crammed with intricate stacked rhymes, as the performers undulate, grind and pop their way through a whistle-stop tour of the Sylvia Pankhurst story. The obvious comparison is with mighty musical blockbuster Hamilton. But with its cartoonish tone and fist-pumping, feminist-lite energy, the show is a closer sister to Six, which puts a similar girl-power gloss on the wives of Henry VIII. Prince and Priya Parmar’s book sacrifices nuance to high-voltage freneticism. Still, it’s rambunctious fun – and at its best, it captures enough of the euphoric passion of protest to make you, too, want to take to the streets.

Beverley Knight is resplendent as campaigning mastermind matriarch Emmeline Pankhurst, her voice a molten, golden glory as she propels her daughters on to the front line. Chief foot soldiers are Ellena Vincent’s firebrand Christabel, defiantly radical in both her activism and her personal life as a lesbian; and luminous Sharon Rose as thoughtful art student Sylvia, less temperamentally inclined to hurl herself into direct action.

Among the men of the establishment is Alex Gaumond’s sympathetic but hypocritical married Labour Party founder Keir Hardie, with whom Sylvia has an affair, and who – though he’s chary of “mansplaining” – sparks in her the broader socialist ideals that set her at odds with her mother’s more narrowly female-focused cause. Then there’s Jay Perry’s popinjay Winston Churchill, nakedly ambitious and self-regarding, timorously caught between Verity Blyth as his steel-butterfly wife Clementine and his formidable mother (magnificent Jade Hackett, growling and spitting bars).