I hate musicals but hip-hop suffragette story Sylvia is amazing – Janet Christie

It’s not the singing and dancing (I’m not a complete killjoy) but there’s something about the way the plot and dialogue is sometimes sung – “would you like another cup of tea-ee-ee” – that grates and makes me resent my neighbour’s box of Violet Creams.

That is until I watched Sylvia, the hit musical about the Suffragette movement, which is at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre until Saturday. It’s phenomenal. Go before it heads back south on its way to the Royal Albert Hall.

READ MORE: 'Forgotten' daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst would have 'loved' hip hop retelling of her life

Soundtrack of my kids’ teenage years

I was won over to go and see it by Beverley Knight when I interviewed her ahead of her appearance in the show. We know she has an amazing voice so the quality of singing was never in doubt, plus she won her Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actress for this role of Suffragette matriarch Emmeline Pankhurst.

But the way she championed the story then revealed the music was hip-hop, funk and soul, with a bit of garage and R&B saw me sold. This is the soundtrack to my kids’ teenage years (I’ve never been the same since they spent our panto money on Public Enemy, Wu-Tang Clan, and De La Soul at the Hydro).

And the story of how women and the working class struggled to get the vote will shame anyone who ever fails to make it to the polling station or vote online.

READ MORE: The 'radical' tea set served by Glasgow suffragettes acquired for the nation

Billed as Sylvia – A Musical Revolution, this is a musical for 2026, about inclusion and rights and using your voice, worthy in itself, but worthy doesn’t have feet stomping and an audience whooping, and this does.

Then it has them up on their feet (a mid-week Edinburgh crowd too) before the interval, with a note-perfect cast, led by Knight and Naomi Katiyo as the eponymous campaigner, and dazzling choreography, costumes and staging all handled with a lightness of touch that belies the subject matter.

READ MORE: The five 'forgotten' women who shaped Scotland – including the youngest suffragette

Churchill booed out of Dundee

You wonder how they will stage Emily Wilding Davison being trampled trying to pin a Votes for Women rosette on the king’s horse, then it unfolds in an electrifying spectacle delivered with poignancy and grace. Ditto the force feeding of the first UK hunger strikers.

Yet the history is all in there, the split among the Pankhursts over tactics – peaceful protest or violence. There’s Keir Hardy, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill – you can see why women heckled Churchill’s speeches when he spoke to his constituents in Dundee and he was booed out of the city and vowed never to go back – as well as a family torn apart.

Come for the music, singing and dancing, stay for the history, and you’ll never take your vote for granted again. So, from now on it could be more musicals for me. I see Dirty Dancing is due. This could be the time of my life – I might just carry a watermelon.