Historian & bestselling author Kate Mosse is heading out on tour with a brand-new show that celebrates the lives of some of history's 'trail-blazing and heroic women'. The tour follows on from Kate's recent and highly acclaimed book, Warrior Queens And Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built The World. What's On recently caught up with her to find out more...

What inspired you to turn your bestselling book, Warrior Queens And Quiet
Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built The World, into your first-ever live show, Kate?
I’m in my 60s now, and I like to have new challenges. You’ve got to be brave, haven’t you? I love being a writer, but you can’t just think, I’ll keep doing the thing that I’ve always done. You’ve got to push yourself and keep trying.

Are you looking forward to performing the show ‘live on stage’?
Yes! I’ve really enjoyed book events in the past. I’d been really disappointed during
lockdown not to be out and about meeting readers. Warrior Queens And Quiet Revolutionaries, the book, is a celebration of nearly 1,000 incredible women from all periods of history and all corners of the globe. The tour will be the same. It was my lockdown project, researching all these amazing women and turning detective for my own family history, too - and I wouldn’t have had time to do it otherwise. And then I thought, “I would just really enjoy sharing these stories with bigger audiences.” 

What are you hoping to achieve with the show?
A really great night out at the theatre. It’s for everybody. It’s for girls and boys, men and women, dads and their daughters, mums and their sons, friends and neighbours. There will be music, props, a proper set, pictures, and me! I’ve never done anything like this before, so of course I’m a little daunted. But I’m going to give it my best shot. During the course of the show, as well as plenty of fun facts and did-you-knows, I’ll tell the life stories of some of the most interesting, most inspiring, most astonishing women from the book. Some of the stories are tragic, some are hilarious, and some make you gasp out loud because you can’t quite believe them.

Have you had experience of live performance before?
Yes. Although this is the first time I’ve done a one-woman show as a performer, I often compere or host big events at theatres and literary events, and I enjoy interviewing writers, actors, directors and performers. I wrote my first full-length play last year, an adaptation of one of my own novels called The Taxidermist’s Daughter. It was an honour that it opened the 60th anniversary season at Chichester Festival Theatre. 

Do you feel an affinity with the theatre?
Definitely. I was taken to the theatre by my parents from a very young age. One time in particular, when I was six, I remember walking up into the auditorium of Chichester Festival Theatre, holding their hands and in my best party dress. Sitting in the auditorium that first time, as the lights went down, I remember thinking: “Oh, now I understand. This is where magic happens!” And I’ve never lost that feeling - whether I’m backstage and about to go on to interview somebody, or, when it was my own play, sitting in the audience as the lights went down. I still feel that flutter of expectation that anything could happen. 

What are you looking forward to about the tour?
I can’t wait to see the faces of the audience. When I write a book, I put it out there and the reader takes it from my hands, and then the book’s completed. It’s the same with the theatre tour. The show only exists when the audience is in the auditorium. Otherwise it’s just me and the wonderful stage manager and the sound & lighting guys, talking into silence. I love the idea that a theatre show will be different every night, because the people who are there are different every night. 

What else?
I really love the UK. That sounds really old-fashioned, and I don’t mean it in a creepy, weird, flag-waving kind of way, but rather that we have a wonderful country. I’m hugely looking forward to travelling around Britain, going to places I don’t know and seeing cities and towns that I might have heard of but never visited. 

What will be the main themes of the show?
It’s a love letter to history - it’s why this is a show for anybody who loves history or is interested in family history. But it also asks the questions: What is history? Who makes it? Who gets to decide what matters? Why do some people end up in the history books and others don’t? 
I want to unravel the way that history gets written. Another theme is asking what, if anything, links all of these women? Are there special characteristics that come up time and again, regardless of place or time or the work a woman is doing? And I want the audience to feel that they are part of that conversation with me. Finally, it’s a celebration. I want people to feel inspired, empowered and delighted to have spent the evening in the company of so many trailblazers from the past.

Can you tell us about one of the various women you’ll be featuring in the show?
One of the women is the great British footballer - Preston’s finest - Lily Parr. She’s a legend, who scored more than 1,000 goals in her time. Her story is really illustrative of how once-famous women are deliberately left out of history. When people say fans don’t want to watch women playing football, that’s just not true. Women’s football was the biggest sport in the early 20th century, particularly when most men were away in the trenches during the First World War. At that time, there was a famous Boxing Day match between the leading women’s teams. Lily Parr played for Dick Kerr’s Ladies team, and they played in the Boxing Day match in 1920 that was watched by 48,000 people. It was the biggest-ever crowd for a women’s match... until the Lionesses won the Euros Final in 2022, of course! 

What else will feature in the show?
I will be asking the audience as they leave to nominate the one woman from history they would have put in my book. That way, together, the audience and I will be building a massive library of women - many more even than the thousand I mention in my book. I’m hoping many of these will be important women locally who I won’t have heard of before. Putting women back into history, getting women’s names better known, is about repetition; saying their names over and over again. After all, we know that women and men built the world together. This is not about ignoring all the wonderful men who’ve done incredible things - and some of the monsters! - but rather putting the women back in. The more I go around the country, the more varied and regional the nominations will be. 

Will the nominated women have to be famous?
Not at all. People can nominate anybody they want. Some might be in the book, but many others will be less known outside their local community. Some will nominate people like ‘my mum’, which will be wonderful because at the heart of my book is my own family story. I’m using my great grandmother’s life as an example of how women do disappear from history. It’s why the title is Warrior Queens And Quiet Revolutionaries. It’s often the women nobody knows who most changed the world for the people around them. Family history is important, we know that it’s just given less attention. We know about queens and the pirate commanders, but we don’t know about all those quiet, gentle, campaigning women who also made the world a better place.