The Vegan Tigress

“An important and wonderfully enjoyable play - sharp, funny, and fast-paced” ★★★★ everything theatre

“Original, funny and touching” ★★★★ London Pub Theatres

"Parker & Campbell keep an audience electrically aware at every stage of their shifting emotions, Parker with understated, but pointed, sensible exasperation, Campbell with volcanic elocutionary relish.” ★★★★ Lost in Theatreland

“A highly entertaining two-hander with compelling performances...Campbell is hilarious as the ascerbic aristocrat, Lady Tuttle, matched by Parker as the frugal but feisty de Morgan.” The Family Stage

“Parker and Campbell are hypnotic in their imaginative retellings and performances of De Morgan’s stories.” The Conversation

Full Reviews

★★★★ An important and wonderfully enjoyable play, bringing the story of Mary De Morgan to light. Lily Middleton. everything theatre

One of the greatest joys of theatre is what it can teach you about the world, whether it be different cultures and viewpoints or, in this case, forgotten historical figures. The Vegan Tigress brings Mary De Morgan to light, a writer who was friends with William Morris, Burne-Jones and Rudyard Kipling. But enough about the men, this play wants to shine a light on an incredible woman that we should all know about, and her remarkable, intriguing and fascinating stories.

Playwright Claire Parker, who also plays Mary de Morgan, sets her play just a couple of years before Mary’s death, when she’s living alone, writing fairytales and going to Suffragette meetings. We meet her in what appears to be quite an ordinary Edwardian life, were it not for her radical viewpoints. By refusing to marry and have children, and making a living from writing, she has been a disappointment to her would-be mother-in-law Lady Tuttle, who just happens to be dead and appearing as a ghost in Mary’s home.

The writing is sharp, funny, and fast-paced. What could be a long two hours on hard seats, in a stuffy small theatre, absolutely flies by. It’s clever and engaging, with the story passing with ease between Mary and Lady Tuttle’s Edwardian lives, and one of Mary’s fairy tales brought to life. It was with childlike wonder that I soaked up this story, completely enraptured by Claire Parker and Edie Campbell.

Parker’s writing and Campbell’s acting skills meet wonderfully in the character of Lady Tuttle. She is an Edwardian Margo Leadbetter, breaking the fourth wall to admonish us for our outfits, before turning her attention to Mary. She is such a formidable character and it’s a testament to the strength of the actor that, on seeing Campbell at the bar after the show, I failed to recognise her! In moments when Mary’s fairytale is brought to life, Campbell transforms into a bird, a tree and a tiger – she’s utterly mesmerising to watch.

Parker’s Mary De Morgan is charming, her passion for her lifestyle and choices infectious. It’s remarkable how much of it strikes a chord with the women of today, where the choice not to have children is still met with Edwardian values, or worse. The play makes you itch to find out more about this remarkable woman. And when she’s not bringing Mary to life, Parker’s transformation into a talking turtle during the fairytale sequences is honestly one of the funniest character transformations you will ever witness on stage.

The biggest joy in watching Parker and Campbell on stage is the amount of fun they are obviously having, it’s the main reason the show is so easy and compelling to watch.

Sound effects are used throughout the show, and sometimes in a small space these can feel a bit clunky, but not in The Vegan Tigress. The cast don’t miss a single beat, there’s not a tiger roar that isn’t matched by Campbell’s gaping jaw. And the sock puppet bird is remarkably believable. Direction by Tracy Collier, stage management by Elisabeth Tooms and Miles Jones, and the marvellous cast all combine to bring this unusual play to life.

A play that flits between Edwardian England and the bizarre fantastical world of Mary De Morgan’s imagination could easily have been confusing or dry, but Parker’s writing, the dynamism of the direction, and the acting skills ensure that this play is a success. It’s not often that a play completely removes you from a sense of time and the worries of the world waiting for you outside, but The Vegan Tigress does just that.

★★★★ original, funny and touching David Weir, February 22, 2025 London Pub Theatres

Writers write for many reasons – some to say what must be said, some to scrape a living, some in pursuit of fortune and fame. All, though, at some point hope that the fact of their published or performed work is a scratch on the surface of time, a small glimmer of immortality. Mary de Morgan, obscure to us now, a minor literary figure even in her own mid-to-late 19th century, is restored to life at Clapham in Claire Parker’s The Vegan Tigress.

She’s a Mary quite contrary who has managed, by outspoken opinion and absence of tact, to alienate her circle (much of the pre-Raphaelite movement and George Bernard Shaw among them) and lose her fiance. Surrounded only by piles of books, she toils alone in her tiny garret to write the fairy stories that remain her near-forgotten legacy to the world.

But her loneliness will be disturbed. She’s also interested in the spiritual world and manages to conjure from the vasty deep, perhaps the last companion she’d have wanted in the shape of Lady Tuttle (Edie Campbell), the corseted, conventional and recently deceased Victorian matriarch who’d have been her mother-in-law if life had taken a different turn.

Lady Tuttle’s spirit is not blithe: haughty, self-satisfied and with that peculiarly English capacity to wield politness as a deadly weapon, she berates Mary’s poverty, dowdiness and literary pretensions as the pair settle to an eternity of sparring until they come to appreciate in their loneliness that more unites than differentiates them as women in a thoroughly masculine society.

Parker (who also plays Mary) has written an original, funny and touching work which weaves one of Mary’s fairy stories into the sniping between the fading literary figure and the ghost.

If de Morgan herself wrote unconventional fairy stories (happy endings optional, honest poverty more to be prized than pots of gold), Parker follows suit in introducing not only a ghost but transitioning smoothly into dramatising the Vegan Tigress, an almost psychedelic tale about a queen whose lost hair is recovered with the help of a Tiger who can’t eat flesh. Care has also been taken with costume, set design, lighting and sound in creating Mary’s shrunken physical world and limitless imaginary one.

February 24, 2025, The Family Stage

Having set the bar very high with their previous production, Apples in Winter, LynchPin Productions return with a new play penned by Claire Parker. In The Vegan Tigress, Parker steps onto the stage alongside Edie Campbell for a darkly witty re-imagining of the later years of real-life Victorian writer and suffragist, Mary de Morgan. You may well not have heard of de Morgan, who has been rather lost in history in comparison with male contemporaries such as George Bernard Shaw and Rudyard Kipling. Parker’s play seeks to change all that, giving us a glimpse into this fascinating fairytale writer who becomes the star of a brand new story.

In that story, de Morgan (Claire Parker) inadvertently summons the ghost of her spurned lover’s mother, Lady Tuttle (Edie Campbell), much to their mutual displeasure. Each stuck in a limbo of their own, the polar opposite pair become reluctant roommates in de Morgan’s humble residence as the writer finds herself on the cusp of a life-changing adventure.

It’s a highly entertaining two-hander with compelling performances from the two versatile actors who keep the audience engaged throughout the well-paced play. Campbell is hilarious as the ascerbic aristocrat, Lady Tuttle, matched by Parker as the frugal but feisty de Morgan.

Although primarily a comedy, there is real depth to the story which interweaves one of de Morgan’s own fairytales to create a layered narrative that explores morality, mortality and personal legacy. Laced with social commentary on class, capitalism and feminism, it’s a clever piece of writing that gives the audience a real sense of the woman behind the words, honouring de Morgan’s writing in a fresh format.

It’s a fitting tribute to an almost-forgotten writer, highlighting the enduring power of storytelling to not just keep memories alive but even revive them. Another success from the small but mighty LynchPin Productions who are steadily carving out their own legacy.

★★★★ Tom Carrao, 27th February 2025, Lost in Theatreland
One of the greatest achievements (in a production flush with them) of this new work by Claire Parker, who also stars, is in clutching an extraordinary female figure from the obscurities of history and indentured attitude, enacting a swift, sleek rescue from the monopolising patriarchal sovereignty. Born into a non-conformist and free-thinking family, Mary De Morgan prized an intellectual and questing mind above all, unafraid to vocalise opinion or exhibit will, which of course caused friction in a social environment & time in which such behaviour from a young girl was thought quite unfavourable. The heroines of her eventual fairy tales (the works for which she is generally known) share in this self-possession: wilful, active agents in their own stories, not the demure or passive ingenues waiting for the fair prince to sweep in and save them from danger and ruin. Classical in structure, but subversive in intent, the majority resist facile happy endings and celebrate the more humble qualities of altruism and benevolence over material gain and overweening ambition, to some traditionalist’s considerable consternation. She moved in influential artistic, cultural & political circles of her day, but often found her contributions dismissed or devalued. She involved herself in major progressive social movements such as the Suffragettes. Despite not being able to make a living income solely with her writing, she nevertheless remained a woman of independent means (working as a typist).

With Edie Campbell a ferociously entertaining force as sparring partner Lady Tuttle (the embodiment of the haughty, imperious and caustically critical Victorian matriarch), Parker sets up a conversation between two diametrically opposed perspectives on feminine comportment and what constitutes success for a woman in a narrowly-defined society, the message & approach of which never subsumes the two human characters on stage, allowing quirks, imperfections & compassions to display. In less sure hands, the characters could have easily become cold mouthpieces for rival philosophies, but Parker crucially provides a warm and beating heart to each woman. The audience understands clearly the ways in which the two combatants are listening to each other through their fights, considering words and thoughts stated. In moments of repose, vulnerabilities surface from beneath headstrong facades.

Perhaps in reference to the spiritualist trend of the times, Lady Tuttle appears as a ghost to Mary following her death on the earthly plane. This is considered the worst possible trap for both women, an entanglement of two monumentally incompatible souls. Yet perhaps the universe has useful plans. Lady Tuttle disparages of Mary’s meagre living conditions, a cramped hovel of a flat full of piles of disordered books and dusty, tired furnishings. She condemns her appearance, frumpy and unadorned. Worst yet, Mary has thwarted her son’s intentions to marry her, an offence unforgivable and untenable, the humiliation of a male by an impolite woman, a transgression of principle. She is the mother-in-law who could-have-been. Unable to leave this limbo, the women are forced to withstand each other’s temperaments and perhaps come to realise a mutual sacrifice and compromise, acknowledge a shared gender loneliness. Campbell is granted a few amusing fourth-wall penetrations, given her in-between circumstances (admonishing the vulgarity of the audience’s attire, even encouraging us to indicate to a despondent Mary that we are aware of her efforts, that we have found a crumbly edition of her stories in a second-hand bookshop or indeed, in a meta moment, have seen a modest production of her life in a fringe theatre!)

Within this restricted, confined space, it is the particular power of imagination to provide the characters the largesse to expand outside the scant surroundings. Parker & Campbell throw themselves, with great playful alacrity, into several of the fairy tale scenarios of De Morgan’s works, acting out the unspooling narratives in a pure, fantastically childish gambol, unrestrained and unselfconscious, a return to instinctive pleasure. There is a liberation in this relaxation of control, freely absent of the authoritarian gaze (Campbell especially communicates the joy of the loosening corset that has been binding her throughout). The tales are full of derring-do and risk, but also morally troublesome choices and dubious behaviour (as in the central tale of the tigress). The performers bring to excitable life a devious bird and a resentful & hostile tribe of tortoises. One need not look far for associations to women suffering the machinations of unscrupulous, petulant men for perceived slights. Elizabeth Tooms’s lighting smoothly moves the audience between the natural and chimerical worlds (ditto Tracy Collier’s sound design-and her fleet direction keeps a tight space animated and performances perfectly pitched between the two worlds, not to mention an expert use of a standing screen as a transitional arena).

Consumptive, facing mortality (perhaps the reason for being so aligned with Lady Tuttle’s frequency), a sudden opportunity to move to Cairo to tutor at a girls’ reformatory school presents itself to Mary and she agrees to take it, inviting Lady Tuttle’s spirit to accompany her. True to fact, this is where De Morgan spent her last years. By now bound in covenant, united in a melancholic but matter-of-fact acceptance of their overall limited situations, the women embrace the great unknown, an adventure chosen, not by others, but wholly by themselves. Parker & Campbell keep an audience electrically aware at every stage of their shifting emotions, Parker with understated, but pointed, sensible exasperation, Campbell with volcanic elocutionary relish. Between them exists a tremendous push & pull, an antic support, bringing a final breakthrough. 

If the objective is to leave and be so stimulated as to want to seek out some of De Morgan’s work, Parker has more than succeeded in this goal.

The Vegan Tigress: intimate play resurrects fierce forgotten Victorian writer. Lucy Ella Rose, February 28, 2025, The Conversation 

The Vegan Tigress, a new play by Claire Parker, shines a spotlight on the largely-forgotten feminist fairytale writer Mary De Morgan (1850-1907). And the timing is particularly apt. The show opened, at London’s Bread & Roses Theatre, in the lead up to International Women’s Day and during the year of the 175th anniversary of De Morgan’s birth.

The production, by LynchPin Theatre Company, is part of a wider cultural project to celebrate underappreciated Victorian women writers, actors and activists. Parker has also written plays on feminist actor Ellen Terry and her daughter Edie Craig.

It also speaks to a general resurgence of interest in the creative De Morgan family. Mary’s father was Augustus De Morgan, the mathematician and logician and her brother was the potter, tile designer and novelist William De Morgan.

The Bread and Roses Theatre – an intimate space above a lively Clapham pub – creates an immersive experience. The audience shares De Morgan’s modest London quarters along with the accidentally summoned ghost of her ex-lover’s formidable mother: Lady Tuttle (played by Edie Campbell).

Providing comedic value, Tuttle deploys her spectral status to prank De Morgan (played by Parker), but her presence also highlights the stark differences between them, staging a debate between feminist and patriarchal versions of Victorian-Edwardian womanhood.

Shrill-voiced, upper-class and tightly corseted, Tuttle opposes women’s education and refers to suffragettes as “hyenas in petticoats and bitter spinsters”.

Striding across the stage swathed in silk skirts and a velvet, lace-trimmed bodice, she is both a mesmerising and somewhat villainous matriarch. By contrast, De Morgan is an irreverent free spirit who wears bohemian clothing, admires revolutionaries and has been a suffragist since she was 16.

The show portrays De Morgan as a pioneering professional woman, writing feverishly at a desk flanked by piles of beautiful antiquarian books. Parker and Campbell are hypnotic in their imaginative retellings and performances of De Morgan’s stories such as the The Hair Tree (1877), which are woven into the play.

The Vegan Tigress transports the audience into fantastical realms, fusing eerie lighting with dazzling props and sound effects – thunder, birdsong, clamouring voices.

With impressive ease, the actors shape-shift into bizarre animal forms – a puppet parrot, a tortured tiger and a grotesque tortoise. Together they illuminate the sociopolitical subtexts of De Morgan’s stories.

Her subversive tale from 1877, A Toy Princess (which Parker describes in the play), critiques doll-like ideals of femininity, prefigures the feminist fairy tales of Angela Carter and resonates with the Barbiemania that surrounded the release of the Barbie film in 2023.

In literature and in life, De Morgan resists conventional narratives of marriage and motherhood, enacting alternative destinies for women.

Especially successful as a visual manifestation of the stories’ transformative power is the simultaneously symbolic and literal change we witness in Lady Tuttle.

The more she reads The Windfairies (1900, one of three fairy tale collections by De Morgan) and political publications (Votes for Women), the less straitlaced she becomes – literally. Her corset unbuttons and her tied hair loosens. Despite being a ghost, Lady Tuttle comes alive as her mind expands, testifying to the powerful potential of reading and writing.

In joyful and poignant moments of female bonding in the second half of the play, Tuttle and De Morgan dance the tango, and embark arm-in-arm on the trip of a lifetime to Egypt, where De Morgan worked in real life in a girls’ reformatory. The show becomes a celebration of female creativity, companionship and community.

At the play’s close, the fourth wall is broken and the audience is addressed by De Morgan as “people from the future”. It prompts a reflection on how far we have come since first-wave feminism, but also how far we still have to go (given #MeToo and the reversal of Roe v Wade, the US Supreme Court ruling that legalised abortion across the States in 1973), making Parker’s revival of De Morgan timely and important.

If De Morgan’s legacy is, as she soliloquises, “arming lost, disenfranchised girls and women with the tools to stand their ground”, what will ours be?