'Own your power': Beverley Knight on the message in hip-hop musical Sylvia

The story of the suffragettes is a "metaphor for so many things going on right now" including gender inequality and the disenfranchisement of the poor, the singer Beverley Knight has said.

- Nadia Khomami

Knight is playing Emmeline Pankhurst in a new production at the Old Vic that celebrates Pankhurst's daughter Sylvia.

Sylvia, which premieres at the London theatre in January, is a hip-hop musical about the life of a "feminist, activist, pacifist, socialist and rebel" who changed the lives of working women and men across the world.

"It's a metaphor for so many things that are going on right now," said Knight, who is widely regarded as one of Britain's greatest soul singers. "The way that the poorer sections of society are disenfranchised and removed from what goes on in the social and political circles, how they're easily passed over and disregarded, Kwasi Kwarteng and Liz Truss, I'm looking at you."

Although the musical is set in a time when women's voices were not only ignored but actively and in many cases violently crushed, "in a lot of ways we still haven't moved on", Knight added. "Women are still held in subjugation. We still have mansplaining, we still have gender violence. Look at the Sarah Everard case, all the conversations that were a ripple effect from that.