The Boatswain's Mate

The Celebrating British Music Theatre series continues with a fully costumed production-without-décor of the comic opera by Dame Ethel Smyth, composer and suffragette, and widely regarded as the first female opera composer.

Written in 1914 and unseen in London for more than 50 years, The Boatswain’s Mate is Smyth’s fourth and most obviously feminist opera. A witty and inventive battle of the sexes, it features a feisty heroine – supposedly based on Emmeline Pankhurst – who outwits her suitors in a series of entertaining and resourceful deceptions. Mrs Waters is a wealthy widow whose first husband has left her with a country pub and a determination never to remarry. When the retired boatswain George Benn devises a scheme to win her hand by ‘saving’ her from a burglar whom he has in fact paid to break in, he reckons without her bravery and quick-wittedness.