Grasp the Nettle will be performed at Sterts Theatre on Feb 8th at 7.30 pm

Tickets: Full £10/Concession£8/£15 add a 2 course meal

To book visit www.sterts.co.uk

Following her hugely successful productions Kathleen Ferrier Whattalife! and Shakespeare In Song professional contralto and actress, Lucy Stevens presents – Ethel Smyth – Grasping the Nettle.

Dame Ethel Smyth, the composer, writer and suffragette, was the living embodiment of the passion with which Victorian women challenged the “male machine”. As an activist, she was imprisoned in Holloway with Mrs Pankhurst. This feisty lady was not only a talented composer but also a political activist.

She played an important part in the suffragette movement and was jailed for smashing the windows of an important politician. As a composer, she wrote the anthem for the suffrage movement The March of the Women as well as composing 6 operas and many sonata’s, quartets and song cycles.

In 1902 she was the first female composer to have an opera performed at Covent Garden and, in 1903, she was the first female composer to have an opera performed at The Metropolitan Opera House in New York. The next opera by a female composer to be performed at Covent Garden was in 2012 and at The Met was in 2016.