BARBARA Marten joins the rehearsals from Monday as the one professional actor in the 150-strong company for York Theatre Royal and Pilot Theatre's latest large-scale community production this summer.

Performing in the premiere of Bridget Foreman's Everything Is Possible: The York Suffragettes is the culmination of Barbara's involvement both in proposing the subject matter for a play and in the all-women committee set up at the Theatre Royal to oversee the 2017 season of women's work under the title Of Woman Born.

Running from June 20 to July 1, Foreman's play is being co-directed by Theatre Royal associate director Juliet Forster and Pilot associate director Katie Posner and designed by Sara Perks, with a lighting design by Prema Mehta.

A cast of around 100 women and 50 men, including a choir, is in place for Foreman's story of an ordinary Heworth Green housewife risking her life and her family to join the Suffragette movement in 1913 as women across the country, outraged by inequality and prejudice, begin to rise up and demand change.

The play recalls how, here in York, women ran safe houses, organised meetings, smashed windows and fire-bombed pillar boxes as the story of their dangerous, exhilarating and ground-breaking actions is told for the first time.

"I play the lead character, Annie Seymour Pearson, who starts by addressing the audience, where she talks about how she began her involvement in the Suffragette movement as an ordinary, middle-class housewife in a church-going family with a middle-management husband and three children," says Barbara, whose most recent role was on the London stage as Mrs Birling in An Inspector Callas at the Playhouse Theatre.

"She is also part of the Primrose League who went out canvassing among women like themselves to influence them into getting their husbands to vote for certain candidates in elections."

Yet you would struggle to find outward acknowledgement in York of Annie Seymour Pearson's place in the city's social history. "The house in Heworth Green where she ran a safe house no longer stands and there's no blue plaque," says Barbara. "Even her obituary made no mention of her having been a Suffragette.

"It's interesting choosing Annie as a central character because she was such a genteel, respectable woman who didn't start out as militant, but various events propelled her forward."

Not least, Annie was arrested in January 1913 when a union deputation of York Suffragettes went down to London as thousands of women converged on the capital, with a lot of women being received by the Chancellor at Number 11, Downing Street, to talk about the poverty that many women were living through, but their actions made no difference to a bill that was going through Parliament," says Barbara.

"Annie was arrested for obstruction just for walking on the pavement, and the charge was obstruction simply because there were so many women there. She was charged 40 shillings for her offence or three weeks in prison and she wrote to her husband to say that she would not pay her fine but would serve her sentence and was prepared to be imprisoned again.

"She's there in prison for two days, when her husband comes down to London and pays the fine – and you can just imagine the scene when she got home."

The story of the Suffragettes of York may not be widely known, but thankfully Barbara found a wealth of archive information at the University of York's Borthwick Institute [of Historical Research]. "There's a huge stock of information and testimonies by Suffragette women that's been very useful, and there's also a slim volume by a Lincoln University professor, Krista Cowman, called The Militant Suffragette Movement In York," says Barbara.

"When I met her for the first time, Krista was emphatic that the Suffragette movement was not a London movement: it was made up of women from all over the country, like in Manchester and Leeds, where lots of women worked in factories, and in York as well. Scarborough was very militant too."

York Theatre Royal and Pilot Theatre present Everything Is Possible, The York Suffragettes, outdoors and at York Theatre Royal, June 20 to July 1. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk