This must be Shaw’s funniest work — a one-act play which smacks of Monty Python and Blackadder. But Shaw wrote this in 1908, setting the action on April Fools’ Day 1911, when he rightly predicted that the actions of the Suffragettes would escalate into violence and prove a real threat to the government.

Shaw was a strong supporter of “Votes for Women” and belonged to the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage. In Press Cuttings he chooses to ridicule the arguments of the anti-suffrage campaigners who expressed their views in the daily papers of the time, rather than bringing the suffragettes themselves on stage. The comedy lies in just how ridiculous these arguments were but also in the role reversals we see as the Prime Minister and the General show all the “womanly” qualities of timidity and indecision and the women show the “manly” qualities of arrogance, insolence and self-sufficiency. Great fun! It’s a bit of a challenge to READ what is mainly a slapstick farce but we will do our best!

With Graham Bushnell as General Mitchener, Dave McEvoy as the disorderly orderly, Roger Surridge as Prime Minister Balsquith, Lynda Todd as the Irish Mrs Farrell, Jenny Bennitt as the well-named Mrs Banger, Sue Laplane as the flirty Lady Corinthia and Fiona Morel as narrator.