The Ballad of Maria Marten
The Everyman Theatre
Cheltenham

WHILE even theatrical farce can lend itself to reflecting the surrealist element in human behaviour, melodrama, with its nods towards music hall and pantomime, must be the most difficult dramatic form to treat seriously.
 
Back on the road after the Covid break, Eastern Angles Theatre Company’s touring production has taken this old folk tale treatment of the 1827 murder of a village girl in a journalistically sensational red barn, and invested both characters and situation with a human and historical context.

An all-female, six-member cast add a feminist dimension with obvious but not overworked reference to our contemporary Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa murders.

The original particularly horrific killing by a local man, anxious to avoid marriage to a girl he has seduced and whose baby he has possibly killed, was notable for the gothic element of the buried body being discovered after Mary’s stepmother had dreamed of its whereabouts, leading to the murderer being tracked down, tried, convicted and hanged before a huge “appreciative” crowd.

From broadside media, book and stage performance, the story became a veritable cause célèbre, with trophy hunters looting bits of the Suffolk barn and even going as far as having the executed man’s skin used as the binding of a special publication of the tale.

Here, the villain, William Corder, never appears on stage. Elizabeth Crarer’s Mary, returned from the dead to tell us her story, explains that, although she knows the audience are waiting to see the horrific event enacted, she will not indulge us.

She has told us what happened but she is determined that we should understand the realities of the class ridden, poverty-suffering society that shaped her story. After all, “she had a life and should have lived it.”

A splendidly talented and energetic cast handle multiple role-changes with fluent assurance. Their choral singing is a special delight.

Throughout the first half, largely setting the scene, director Hal Chambers, with the support of Luke Potter’s music and Rebecca Randall’s dance routines, retains the pure entertainment aspect of the melodrama genre while writer, Beth Flintoff’s message, designed to give a voice to Mary then, and all those women suffering domestic violence now, leads to a fitting symbolic climax when the village women burn down the red barn.

(Touring  Autumn 2021 - Spring 2022 : for information contact mariamarten.com)