Start of main content

An interview with Helen Arney

Helen Arney is one of the writers and performers behind The Cambridge First All-Ladies Fire Brigade, about the University life of pioneering engineer, Hertha Ayrton. We caught up with her ahead of her performance at the 2026 WISE Awards to find out more.

Helen Arney

Helen is a songwriter, science presenter and recovering stand-up comedian. She’s been known to explain physics while riding a rollercoaster on BBC2, and tour the UK with science comedy phenomenon “Festival of the Spoken Nerd”. An alumni of Book, Music & Lyrics, Overture and Birmingham Hippodrome New Musical Theatre Writers Group, she now writes musicals in several collaborations. Alongside The Cambridge First All-Ladies Fire Brigade, she is writing a show about Teenage Jiu Jitsu Suffragettes, currently in development with National Youth Music Theatre, and a cabaret concept musical about everything Charles Darwin got wrong about the female of the species. Helen was lucky enough to join a WISE course as a teenager. It was a turning point that helped her make the decision to study Physics at university, and the place she first met the person who would be her lab partner when they both began studying at Imperial College London together.

What does performing at the IET for the WISE Awards mean for you personally?

Performing the show at the WISE Awards at the IET means a lot to me personally, because it's my way of celebrating the organisation and also saying thank you to them for being there at really important turning point in my life. Because when I was a teenager I went on a WISE course when I was thinking about studying science at university, and it was huge for me.

I spent a whole week in Manchester with loads of other young women who were also thinking about studying physics or STEM subjects at university, and I went from feeling really alone and really unsure to realising that this was a possibility for me. I could study physics in university, and I would find my people, and I would find the other people who loved what I loved and enjoyed the same things that I did. And it really changed my decision about what I was going to study at university. And weirdly, I met my lab partner there. 

So when I went on to study physics at Imperial College, someone else I met on the WISE course made the same decision. We luckily both got in and we became lab partners in the first year. We're still friends now.

So I have WISE to thank for that friendship, and for helping me make a decision that changed my life, and for helping me find my people. And today I think WISE is the organisation where women in STEM can still find their people.

Musicals about engineers and scientists can seem quite niche to the wider world? What was it that drew you towards creating STEM musicals? And why was Hertha Ayrton a good subject?

Musicals about scientists and engineers might feel a bit niche to the wider world, but I genuinely think that if the story is worth telling, you should tell it in any format. And I think the stories of science and engineering and the people who do those things are as big and as bold and as worth telling as any story about a ghost in an opera house, or French revolutionaries, or the six wives of Henry VIII. They're all great musicals and these stories deserve to be told.

Hertha Ayrton is the most incredible starting point for a musical, because her life is full of these incredibly dramatic moments that are so easy to get on board with, and everyone wants to know more about them and how she got there. Moments like she was Marie Curie's pen pal, she laundered money for the suffragettes, she was the first woman to present her own science in person to the Royal Society, and the first person who failed to be elected as a fellow because she was a married woman.

She was the first woman elected to the Institution of Electrical Engineers. She marched on Parliament demanding to meet the Prime Minister on Black Friday. And she did all of these things, not because she was born into a privileged life, as she was the daughter of a single mother with six or seven other siblings, but these things all happened because she made them happen.

Do people change their perceptions of the role of women in STEM after watching your performances?


I do think this show can change perceptions of women in STEM in two different ways. I think the first one is that it proves that women in science have been hiding in plain sight this whole time. So it was 150 years ago that Hertha and her friends were studying maths and science at Cambridge, and there have been women doing science for many years before then as well. And whether their achievements have been recorded in history, those achievements happened and they have been built on since. The science that we do now is based on the work of men and women from history, whether it's credited or not.

The other thing I think it shows is that these women that we have, based on the five main characters [in the show] are when you read their biographies, they seem very serious, quite unassailable, like goddesses of science and legend. But when you find out about how they were at university, you discover that they were just so much fun.

And there's much more in common with anyone who's at university studying science now than you would expect. They loved science and maths, obviously, but they also loved theatre and performing in choirs and dressing up and overindulging in chocolate, and lemon squash parties. And they hated early mornings. And when you read about them and you discover who they really were when they were young and learning about life and learning their place in the world, they were just so much fun.

Who or what in today’s world of engineering do you think would make a good subject for a musical?

I think there are quite a few different stories from today's science and engineering that would make incredible subjects for musical. As an ex physicist, I would say that particle physics, the search for fundamental forces for the mysteries of our universe, they are an incredible subject for a musical. Unfortunately someone has already started writing one of those over in America, so I'll tick that one off.

Also ingenuity, creating engineering discoveries in unexpected places. That's a fantastic idea for a musical that's been done as well. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind about William Kamkwamba and his wind turbines he created from scrap in a village in Malawi, in order to power his family's house. That is a stunning musical that's just finished its run in the West End of London. 

But really what's in common with those stories and the stories that I like to write are they are really human stories. They've got a human story at the very centre, and it's about imagination, and it's about creativity, and it's about overcoming challenges.

And it's about working together with other people to achieve something bigger than you can do on your own. And that's what musicals are as well. You can't do a musical on your own. You have to work with other people to create something that is much, much bigger than you. And I feel like that's what engineering and science has in common with musicals and with all of these brilliant stories. So if you've got any ideas, hit me up! I'm open for my next project.

Why is it important to celebrate women in STEM through performances such as yours and the WISE Awards?

I do think it's really important to celebrate women in STEM in as many ways as possible, including performances like ours, because there's no one typical woman in STEM and there's no one particular way to celebrate them. Performances like this are something that brings people together. You have a shared experience, and at the end of it, you know that you are not alone.

And for me, that is what joining a WISE course when I was a teenager did for me. It made me convinced that my people were out there, and that I would not be alone as a woman in STEM, and I feel like that is something I want our performance to do for the audience that are there.