Directed by Amy Phillips
Wednesday 29th March – Saturday 1st April 2023 7.30pm
(Saturday matinee, 2.30pm)
“Some tattered notes from your brother? Some village dunce school for girls? You think that – that joke of an education – gives you a right to set foot here? At Cambridge? Cambridge!”
“Love or knowledge: which would you choose?”
Blue Stockings is the engaging, spirited and shocking story of four young women fighting for their right to a university education in a world that assumed women belonged at home. First produced professionally at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2013, and a sell out success, it is now regularly performed throughout the UK and beyond, and widely studied by GCSE drama students.
1896. Girton College, Cambridge, the first residential college in Britain to admit women. The Girton girls study ferociously and match their male peers grade for grade. Yet, when the men graduate, the women leave with nothing but the stigma of being a ‘blue stocking’ – an unnatural, educated woman. They are denied degrees and go home unqualified and unmarriageable.
Tess Moffat and her fellow first years are determined to win the right to graduate. But little do they anticipate the hurdles in their way: the distractions of love, the cruelty of the class divide or the strength of the opposition, who will do anything to stop them. The play follows them over one tumultuous academic year, in their fight to change the future of education.
Tickets £15/£13 concessions
Recommended for anyone over 11 years old.
The play is approximately 2 hours 20 minutes long (including a 20 minute interval).