1919: the birth of modernity - The Jewish Chronicle

A great deal of attention has been given over the past few years to the centenary of the First World War, etching afresh into the national consciousness the years 1914 to 1918. The presence of memorials listing the names of the dead, mostly young men, have long been landmarks. The swathe of poppies sprouting within the moat of the Tower of London in 2014 drew unprecedented crowds. The warning "Lest we forget" has been well-heeded.

Then what? Well, then came 1919. This time is hazy in the collective memory, hardly marked out in particular. And yet it has its own distinct relevance. Change was in the air. All the known boundaries and definitions of class, nationhood and gender roles that had been in place before the war and had been shifting throughout it, were continuing to be reshaped in essential ways for men as well as women.

There was no going back to the way things had been - de-mobbed servicemen, some spurred on by revolution in Russia, rioted when their jobs were no longer waiting for them because they'd been filled by immigrant workers. Some women (over 30s with property) had been given the vote.

Nancy Astor, the first female MP, took up her seat and women could now legally enter professions that had been barred to them, train to become vets, civil servants, lawyers. Marie Stopes's bestselling Married Love was opening eyes to intimate dialogue between the sexes and paving the way for readily available methods of contraception; 1919 was arguably when the modern world with its particular opportunities for more than just a few was stirring into shape.

Something else that was changing, always a reflection of the mores of a society and the roles people play within it, were clothes. Advertisements for corsets reveal a glimmer of what was to come, offering some relief for "healthy women" with boneless stays and shortening the length. Here began the relief from constriction that was to gather pace and lead to the abandoning in the 1920s of what had held in women for so long.

And then there is the matter of trousers. In Paris, Coco Chanel, who had famously pioneered the wearing of pants by donning sailor's loons to protect her modesty while bathing, was preparing to open the precursor to the modern boutique. As Oscar Wilde wrote, "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible…" And the mystery of the visible in 1919 forms the fabric of my new play, which has itself risen from the ashes of a previous life to find itself afresh.

Poppy + George first stirred into life when I was writer in residence at Theatre Centre, a young people's theatre company, in the early 1990s. As I researched into the lives, loves and misdeeds of women pirates of the 17th and 18th centuries, I stumbled upon various other intrepid women who lived outside the "feminine" remit. It was striking how much the outfits these women wore shaped their lives. Among other images from across the centuries, photographs from the early 20th century of women stepping into the jobs of the absent men in the trenches, and donning their outfits, caught my attention - in their overalls, dungarees and pants it looked like a quiet social revolution was occurring.

So what next, after the war was done and the men were returning? In my imagination, a tailor and dressmaker's workshop, tucked away down passages and alleyways, hidden from many, took shape in London's East End, where so many peoples, cultures, ways of living mingle and collide.

Here, with the world outside in flux, identities might be crafted by the cut of a jacket, the flare of a skirt or the line of a pair of trousers. Turncoat, as the play was then called, toured the country, offering audiences the opportunity to venture into the creative hub where whoever a person might want to be could be fashioned.

More than 20 years later, as we enter the second half of the second decade of the 21st century, nearly 100 years on from 1919, the play has emerged from the filing cabinet with a whoosh.

Watford's Palace Theatre is the perfect venue - a renovated music hall with a history that rings to the songs in the play. I was invited to rework it from beginning to end. And so they have come into their own far more fully than before - Smith, the Russian Jewish tailor with a Chinese past; George the chauffeur; Tommy Johns the music hall female-impersonator back from a tour of duty in the trenches; and a young woman from the north of England, inspired by her Suffragette teacher, whose name used to be Melody.

Names, like clothes, are important. The play had outgrown its old title somehow. What else to call it? Poppy + George popped into my mind without bidding. So the heroine had to change her name, too. Now she is Poppy.

I didn't quite know why at first, despite the obvious connections with the commemorative flower for those fallen in war (although this wasn't introduced as such until 1921). But, as I immersed myself in rewriting, Poppy began to grow into her name and the play into its new title in unexpected ways. That shifting energy of 1919, rather unnerving and unpredictable but also inventive, made itself felt.

The potent symbolism of this flower has now infused the work entirely - dreams, ending, resurrection - and the way the seeds sleep silently in the earth until it is disrupted (often by war as much as farming or trampling of boots or hooves), then burst into life and flower. Somehow this is a theme for now, too - a call to look again, to see how disruption and change, scary, shattering and unnerving though they may be, can enable hidden seeds of untapped flowering within each individual as well as the collective to stir into life and blossom at last.