And, it would seem, East End women even more so. Teenage girls and women employed at the Bryant & May match factory in Bow, East London, famously went on strike in July 1888 to protest at low wages and lethal working conditions. Eighty years later, female sewing machinists at the Ford plant in Dagenham were refused equal gender pay after their work was regraded as “unskilled labour”. Their subsequent industrial action was largely responsible for the introduction of the Equal Pay Act in 1970. Key turning points in social history which have been immortalised on stage and on both small and silver screens, including a recent hit series on Netflix. Yet very little is known of Sara Wesker, another East End heroine who was a pioneer of women’s rights and the trades union movement in the inter-war period whom history seems largely to have forgotten. Until now.

Blue Fire Theatre Company specialises in “the untold stories of forgotten people”. Chopped Liver and Unions takes Wesker’s story and thrusts it into a well-deserved light with a charming yet powerful two-hander, set to popular music of the time. An active trades unionist in the East End garment industry and Communist Party member, Wesker, a refugee from Ukraine at the age of five, grew up in the Rothschild Buildings in Spitalfields, a tenement for working class Jewish families. She famously instigated and led a number of successful protests against unfair pay and working conditions for women, galvanising the female workforce through the singing of protest songs on the picket lines of Hackney and Shoreditch, many of which were traditional hymns and tunes set to new, more politically pointed lyrics. They came to be known as “The Singing Strikers”, yet history seems largely to have forgotten their vital role in the trades union movement and the fight for equal rights, a struggle where ”…the biggest machine can be brought to a stop by the removal of the smallest cog.”

The impressive, versatile Lottie Walker invokes her own East End roots to deliver a captivating, poignant and, at times, humorous monologue, penned by JJ Leppink, yet while this is a powerful, personal one-woman, one-act show, James Hall is equally impressive on the piano alongside her, accompanying Walker’s familiar songs whilst underscoring other key moments in Wesker’s tale. Narrative and music are stitched seamlessly together, yet this production lacks both the feel and tighter set-piece structure of a musical. Movingly, the performance is punctuated by projections of powerful and poignant photos from the time, their subjects frozen in history, from Pearly Kings and Queens to teenage Matchstick Girls already suffering from the symptoms of “phossy jaw”. Protest banners from the strikes adorn, starkly, the simple black walls.

The Irving Studio Theatre specialises in these intimate and understated black box productions where audiences feel very much a part of the action, rather than spectators of it. Blue Fire “champions the underdog”: Chopped Liver and Unions – a clever culinary play on words featuring a traditional Jewish staple – explores social themes which feel more, rather than less, prescient in today’s divided world, still riven by many of those same attitudes, prejudices and disparities which Wesker fought so hard to challenge.

I’m ashamed to say I’d not even heard of Sara Wesker until undertaking some research for this evening’s show. I’ll certainly not forget her now.