THE life of a pioneering suffragette and business woman is set to be told in a spectacular production from the Welsh National Opera when its tour brings it to Worcestershire later this month.

Rhondda Rips It Up! Is a new all-female music hall style production which heads into Malvern’s Forum Theatre on Tuesday, June 26.

This WNO production will bring to life the story surrounding Lady Rhondda, Margaret Haig Thomas and will star Lesley Garrett as Master of Ceremonies (Emcee) and Madeleine Shaw as Lady Rhonda.

This new commission has been composed by Elena Langer with libretto by Emma Jenkins and featuring an all-female cast and creative team led by director Caroline Clegg and music director Nicola Rose and it premiered in Margaret Haig Thomas’s home town of Newport before beginning a tour of Wales and England

Rhondda Rips It Up! is unlike anything previously presented by the WNO.

Performed in a classic music hall style, with original songs inspired by the suffragette slogans, this tongue-in-cheek production takes audiences on a whirlwind tour of the inspiring activist’s mission.

Lady Rhondda, as she was known, was a suffragette who ran the Newport branch of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) – the militant organisation campaigning for women’s suffrage in the UK founded and run by Emmeline Pankhurst.

She was a pioneering business woman and sat on the boards of several international companies in the 1920s. The founder and editor of the influential feminist magazine Time and Tide, she campaigned tirelessly for equal rights for women. She was the first female Honorary President of The Institute of Directors and was posthumously responsible for the admission of women to the House of Lords.

With 2018 the 100th anniversary of the first wave of women being legally allowed to vote, WNO’s fascinating depiction of Lady Rhondda’s life has been created by an all-female team with original score composed by Elena Langer, who worked on WNO’s premiere of Figaro Gets A Divorce and libretto by Emma Jenkins who co-wrote the libretto for WNO’s 2016 world premiere In Parenthesis and it will be performed entirely by women.

Leading the creative team are director Caroline Clegg, who has previously worked with WNO on Janáček’s From The House of the Dead; musical director Nicola Rose (who has worked with WNO as a pianist for many years) and designer Lara Booth.

Madeleine Shaw plays Lady Rhondda, and soprano Lesley Garrett will guide the audience through the story as Master of Ceremonies in a character based on real-life pioneering music hall entertainer Vesta Tilley, a female compere impersonating a male. Lesley returns to WNO after delighting audiences in The Merry Widow and in 2015’s spectacular Chorus!.

Lesley and the members of WNO’s Ladies Chorus will perform all the other roles – including male politicians Winston Churchill, Herbert Henry Asquith, and David Lloyd George as well as Margaret’s father David Alfred Thomas, first Viscount Rhondda, and her husband Sir Humphrey Mackworth (whom she divorced before entering a relationship with journalist Helen Archdale).

WNO’s Artistic Director David Pountney said: ‘We are proud to bring the life of one of Wales’s unsung heroines of the suffragette movement to the stage.”