One hundred years to the day after Suffragist campaigners marching from Land’s End to London were met by an angry mob in Chippenham, their peaceful plea for votes was recreated in the same spot near the Bear Hotel by a theatre company this week.

The Dreadnought South West Associates are taking their play Oxygen, marking the centenary of the Great Suffrage Pilgrimage, to 26 venues along the original route, including the Yelde Hall which had a full house on both Monday and Tuesday.

In an extract in Market Place on Tuesday afternoon, the women made an impassioned and inspirational plea to women to throw off their corsets to make more room for air in their lungs and rise up against a mad situation in which “attention to women suffrage remains so feeble that street lamps demand more respect in Parliament”.

This time, unlike a century ago, they were not booed and spat at.

One woman in the audience, Elaine Brown, who lives near John Coles Park, said: “As I watched them I wondered if in their position I would have done the same. It’s important to remember what those women went through; it was quite scary, would I have put myself through it?

“I wanted to bring along my boys, who are 9 and 13, to show them that things haven’t always been easy for women.”

Director Josie Sutcliffe said the play had been inspired by the modern day women of the Arab Spring.

“We saw those women in Egypt and Syria peacefully protesting and standing their ground as firearms were pointed at their faces,” she said.

She warned recent changes were still putting women closer to home in danger, with the austerity cuts hitting them particularly hard and the department for equality budget slashed.

Actress Rachel Rose Reid, of London, agreed the play remained relevant today. She said the mob mentality encountered by the suffragists in Chippenham could still be seen in, for example, the English Defence League.