Script by Mick Martin

Directed by Jude Wright

It’s the 1930’s and a young Joan Littlewood has walked out of RADA and stomped her way north, searching for the revolution. She reaches Manchester and finds kindred spirits – at Rusholme Rep!

There she embarks on a production – ‘Draw The Fires’ by Ernst Toller, the story of the Kiel Uprising in Germany, that brought the first world war to its knees. But Joan doesn’t like the play – where are the women she demands to know?! As Joan’s rows with Toller shake the building, so from the factories of northern England to the mills of northern Germany, the voices of the women rise up from the depths.

In this imagined piece, Bent Architect weave verbatim histories of the women of Kiel with the radical force of Littlewood, to hear those voices resound afresh. They offer a new and barely considered view of the 1914/ 18 war – that it came to an end when ordinary people chose peace instead of conflict.