Theatre reviews: Sylvia | It Walks Around The House At Night

Joyce McMillan hails a show about a rebel with a cause fuelled by the street music of 21st century rebellion

Sylvia, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★

It Walks Around The House At Night, The Studio, Edinburgh ★★★★

Hip-hop is the artistic response to oppression, says the leading American music writer Alonzo Westbrook. So for writer, lyricist and director Kate Prince, it made every kind of sense to take the hip-hop, funk and soul music genres in which her ZooNation company has been working for the last 20 years, and to use them to shape her explosive 2023 musical about the story of the great suffragette, socialist and activist Sylvia Pankhurst, now on a UK-wide tour.

Sylvia (1882-1960) was the youngest daughter of the famed suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst; but unlike her mother, and her sister Christabel, she saw the campaign for votes for women as part of the wider struggle for social and economic justice for all, and spent many years in the East End of London, running organisations that provided practical support for working-class women and their families, as well as campaigning for their rights.

Her story is therefore one of a triple rebellion, against the blatant economic and social injustice of the world into which she was born, against her own family as their political differences deepened, and against conventional expectations about how women should live their lives; and in Kate Prince’s astonishing musical – with a book co-written by Priya Parmar, and music by Josh Cohen and DJ Walde – her life is whipped up into a ferocious soul-and-hip-hop journey through the British politics of the early 20th century, featuring 23 musical numbers all sung and spoken with a mind-blowing intensity, and superbly choreographed by Kate Prince herself for a mainly female company of 20, backed by a six-piece band.

Beverley Knight is stunning as the indomitable Emmeline, Naomi Katiyo vocally brilliant and deeply moving as Sylvia. In the end, though, this fine show is overwhelmingly an ensemble piece, celebrating the collective power of those throughout history who unite to fight for their rights; and it’s also, like Hamilton, a powerful demonstration of how the street music of 21st century rebellion can help transform and re-energise the art of the big stage musical, this time from a female perspective that’s both thrilling and joyful.

There’s a real edge of class politics, too, in Wigan-based company ThickSkin’s 2025 show It Walks Around The House At Night, now on tour. In this show, ThickSkin bring their outstanding physical theatre skills to bear on Tim Foley’s play about an out of work actor called Joe, gainfully employed as a barman, who takes on an exceptionally well paid acting job that involves a few nights impersonating a 19th century ghost in the grounds of a stately home, Paragon Hall.

It Walks Around The House At Night therefore emerges as a very 21st century tale of haunting and horror, set on an eerily tilted stage co-designed by director Neil Bettles and Tom Robbins, and delivered both through the first person narration of Joe himself – played in tremendous, self-absorbed style by George Naylor – and through a chillingly detached and authoritative voice-over narration by Paul Hilton.

The show also, though, boasts all the physical, visual and aural thrills associated with ThickSkin’s work. There’s an encounter with the dancer Oliver Baines as an ancient survivor of the house’s horrors; there is spectacular design, sound, and lighting, evoking dark woodland walks haunted by nameless evil, and disturbed nights in Joe’s room at the gatehouse lodge.

And the story that finally takes shape – in something of a terminal rush – is one of horrifying class exploitation and human sacrifice across almost two centuries; although whether Joe is really one of the exploited, as he assumes, or a man finally more than privileged in the love and support he receives from those he barely values, is a question that remains open, as the play ends. Sylvia at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, and It Walks Around The House At Night at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, both until tomorrow.