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Event Calendar
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
The School for Scandal
Back to Black (15)
The Shamrock Spitfire (12A) + The Elvermen
MET: La Rondine
Wild Water (PG)
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The Ballad of Maria Marten
22nd February 2022 - 23rd February 2022
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Summer, 1827. In a red barn Maria Marten awaits her lover. A year later her body is found.
It was an event that had all the hallmarks of a classic crime drama – a missing body, a country location, a disreputable squire and a village stuck in its age-old traditions. But in all this hysteria Maria’s own story gets lost.
Until now.
Eastern Angles spine-tingling retelling rediscovers her story, bringing it back to vivid, urgent life.
Told through the eyes of Maria and the women who loved her this beautifully staged production brings the power of movement, music and storytelling together for a heart stopping evening of theatrical magic.
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Event Reviews
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The View From the Stalls
Maria Marten is dead. She died after a brutal attack - strangled, shot with a pistol and with a spade embedded in her head. And yet here she is, standing in front of us in all her deathly glory, to recount the tale of how, in 1820's Eastern England, this most callous and hidden murders came about, a true story which has been retold since many times as "popular entertainment" in film, poetry and song but which here, in a version written by Beth Flintoff for Eastern Angles Theatre Company, focusses on the woman herself rather her killer.
With the help of her friends, all traces of her scars and wounds are removed and she returns to her childhood self, playing innocently with other kids who have formed their own secret gang. Growing up, however, things get more difficult with the position of women in the society of the time defined totally by their social class with relationships across the social divide definitely frowned upon and in the case of Maria, with deadly consequences. She is at the very bottom of the social scale, poor, used and abused by menfolk and, as with her friends, becoming pregnant and suffering from all that it entailed. Her death, following her disappearance, sadly becomes almost an inevitability.
The story is told through a variety of means with Maria (Elizabeth Crarer) alternating between narrating directly to the audience and seamlessly returning to the scene being depicted. There is dancing and singing, much of it A capella, humour (is there really somewhere called the "Isle of Wight" one of the girls asks?) and some atmospheric music with the cast, all female, taking on a variety of roles (including convincingly a couple of menfolk). The scenes are very cleverly thought out and acted out, such as when one of those men dies by being drowned in a frozen pond. The set itself, basically a wooden structure representing the fateful barn, is transformed into other locations with some nifty choreographed scenery changes which you barely notice happening. And in the end, the barn becomes the "red barn" as fire engulfs it.
Whilst some of the "higher class" women did show some concern for the lower-class counterparts at all for the lower-class (delivering food and baby necessities, for example), the production concentrates rightly on the fate of the womenfolk like Maria who could do little to improve themselves and whose future, particularly after a relationship with men not at their social level, effectively seals their fate.
