We know Maria is dead from the beginning. She tells us. We’re going to be shown how it happened. It’s an interesting creative choice, especially considering that the dead Maria accuses us of coming along just to see her murder (a crime I was previously unaware of, and a crime that it wasn’t me who chose to write a play about.)
But, apparently, Maria’s terrible fate is well-known, and has been the subject of ballad and theatrical treatment many times before.
The poor woman was murdered by her male lover in Suffolk in 1827.
Here playwright Beth Flintoff presents it as the story of a woman who suffers from gaslighting and coercive control.
There are other intriguing decisions being made: the key one being that men are substantially written out of the tale. In the first act, the only two male characters who appear are played by women. Rhiannon Jean and Olivia Bartha create these two wonderfully: Jean’s Thomas encapsulates small obtuse selfishness, and Bartha’s Peter is a terrific portrait of genuine personal affection battling social expectation.
In the second act, no male character appears on stage at all. It’s a brave decision. By privileging the female experience, the risk is run of making it less comprehensible – considering the topic is the relation between the sexes. Maria drives the play, and Naomi Belet’s performance is eminently watchable, a pathos inducing mixture of glorious exuberance and traumatised doubt. The script’s decision to exclude the culpable male character effectively centres the victim’s torment, but does so at the cost of making it less certain. The gaslighting and coercion are not shown, and so perhaps Maria really is a fool or mad – though I’m pretty sure that’s not the tale’s conscious purpose. In addition, choosing not to show men behaving badly can have the unintended consequence of imply their agency is irrelevant, and that the problem of violence against women is solely, and unfairly, up to women to solve.
Such a tale as this is indicative of the ambiguity in our current use of the word “story”. We constantly say things like “our stories should be told”, meaning our lived experience should be acknowledged or seen. But that isn’t the only meaning of the word “story”. A good story is not simply a true one. The feminist assertion that most stories have expressed male lived experience is entirely valid, but in the pain of exclusion, to conclude that is all stories do is to miss their potential. Stories are not merely records of experience; they are invitations to judgement. Representation is not approval or assent; audiences can, and do, judge the actions of characters. Human beings delight in discernment; it’s the basis of our agency in the moral universe. In its invitation to judge, theatre is a type of enjoyable work out, a necessary training for the real thing.
Director Louise Fischer’s female ensemble do some great work, but the conclusion of the piece also prodded me into thought. I’ll be wary of spoilers, but the play’s presentation of female solidarity is fascinatingly indicative of the current zeitgeist. Is the freedom of throwing off the dominance of one group only to be found by being subsumed into another? And is political action always to be symbolic?
My vagueness is no doubt frustrating, but see this work – and then read about the historical events on which its based – and you’ll see that it is burningly relevant, both in its powerful indictment of misogyny, and in its thought-teasing presentation of contemporary political assumptions.
Paul Gilchrist
The Ballad of Maria Marten by Beth Flintoff
at New Theatre until 16 December
Image by Bob Seary
Theatre Red 