The Scotsman Sessions #428: Kit Laveri, George Docherty and Trish Mullin

Jennie Lee: Tomorrow is a New Day | Contributed

Jennie Lee was born 120 years ago this month, on 3 November 1904, in the Fife mining village of Lochgelly; her father was a miner, her family as poor as most of their neighbours.

Yet before she was 25, this working-class girl from Fife became a member of parliament, the youngest woman ever to sit in the House of Commons, and a sensational star of the Westminster political scene. She went on to marry the Labour politician Nye Bevan, founding father of the NHS; and after his death, she not only continued her own work as an MP, but - in 1964 - became the UK’s first-ever minister for the arts, presiding over a massive upsurge in spending aimed at making the arts accessible to everyone, and over the creation of the Open University, perhaps her most remarkable legacy.

It’s a story of a lifetime of struggle to improve the lives of working people, and to insist on the role of women in public life; a political journey which, by the time of Jennie Lee’s death in 1988, had seen her appointed to the House of Lords as Baroness Lee of Asheridge. And now, Knights Theatre of Angus is celebrating her 120th birthday with a new play, Jennie Lee: Tomorrow Is A New Day, which opened in Lochgelly earlier this month, and seeks both to tell her remarkable story, and to explore some of the tensions that shaped her life.

Matthew Knights’ play - researched and workshopped in Fife over the past few years - tells Lee’s story through song, dance, and highly stylised satire, as well as more conventional dramatised scenes; and in this sequence, specially filmed for the Scotsman Sessions, the three actors - Kit Laveri as the fiery young Jennie, Trish Mullin as older Jennie, and George Docherty as male characters real and imaginary - gather at the start of the play to face the task ahead.

On film, the actors are gathered in the main theatre space at Lochgelly Centre; but on stage, this scene is set among the debris of the old Arcades music hall building in Cowdenbeath, where Lee’s family once lived, introducing her as a child to the magic of theatre and the glamour of performance. The play suggests that while Lee largely set aside her passion for music and the arts during the years of socialist struggle and high politics that occupied her from between the early 1920s until Nye Bevan’s death in 1960, in her grief she reconnected with that aspect of her life, in ways that helped her become a uniquely passionate and dynamic arts minister.

“Jennie was and is an inspirational woman,” says Matthew Knights, “and I hope that this play - both the show itself, and the process of creating it - is helping people in this part of Fife to reconnect with a story that is really one of the founding myths of their community. I’ve been both encouraged and deeply moved by the enthusiasm and support for the play we’ve experienced here, and I’d like to thank everyone for that.

“Working on this play, I’ve felt that there is such a thing as society, after all; here in the community that made Jennie Lee, and is still here to celebrate her remarkable life, 120 years on.”

Jennie Lee: Tomorrow Is A New Day is at the Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline, 12-13 November