Rebecca Lenkiewicz on Her Naked Skin
I used to work at the National Film Theatre as an usherette and on my breaks I’d often go out to the river with a cup of tea and scour the bookstalls under Waterloo Bridge.
One large paperback volume Shoulder to Shoulder cried out to me to be bought. It was by Midge Mackenzie and was a documentary account of the suffragettes. It had a wealth of incredible photos and many personal accounts of the militant period just before the First World War when the women’s struggle for the vote reached its height. It was a battered copy and cost a tenner.
I spent minutes debating whether to buy it then the bookstall owner said “I always see you here, you can have it for eight, get me into a film sometime.” And from devouring that book came my urge to write about the period and a desire to put those women into the foreground once more; their bravery and brilliance.
When I started writing the play I read countless other great books and articles by historians ranging from Diane Atkinson to Roger Fulford. I visited the archive at the Museum of London which has an incredible collection of photographs. And the Womens Library in Whitechapel is a shrine for female literature and history. I like also to immerse myself in the literature of the time to try and key-in to the psychology and language so I read Virginia Woolf, Vera Brittain, D.H. Lawrence, and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness which was the first novel to give an intimate account of a lesbian affair. It was moving and touching.
It was that first book though, Shoulder to Shoulder, which accompanied the 1970s television series of the same name, which threw me into the world of the Pankhursts, the horrors of force-feeding… the lives of Emily Wilding Davison, Kitty Marion, Annie Kenney, Constance Lytton and the thousands of women's faces with no names attached that I felt a debt to.
Her Naked Skin, part of the Travelex £10 season, is in rep in the Olivier theatre from 24 July until 24 September.
View plays by Rebecca Lenkiewicz available through the National Theatre's bookshop.
Views others book related to the play...
Pankhurst: Life and Times by Jade Adams
A biography of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. Her battle cry "remove the political disability of sex" is as relevant now as it was explosive then.
The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
A powerful novel of love between women which brought about the most famous legal trial for obscenity in the history of British law.
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