Mary And The Hyenas: Hull Truck – Theatre Review

Mary and The Hyenas
Hull Truck Theatre
7^th February 2025

With perfect timing, in a particularly dismal few weeks for humanity, a musical about proto feminist and a somewhat unsung Mary Wollstonecraft, has its opening night in Hull.

Written by Maureen Lennon and directed by Esther Richardson, Lennon welcomes a different perspective, and obviously likes working collaboratively, combining also with Billy Nomates to produce the music – someone not unfamiliar with rock boy bores and trad dad keyboard warriors who gave her such a hard time for not playing with an orthodox set up at Glastonbury.

Despite being taken back to the 1790s, this is no Peaky Blinders backing track to a historical drama, but fully formed songs and plot devices. Opening with a bawdy scene on a well-used bed, which sees Wollstonecraft giving birth to her daughter just ten days before her death from an infection, a display on the otherwise austere stage counts down the time ominously; the daughter being Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, for once, not centre stage. Wollstonecraft’s musings on child rearing as articulated by Billy Nomates rich voice on How’d You Grow A Girl is made even more plaintive by the contemporary resonances which appear throughout the play, but don’t feel heavy handed.

That Wollstonecraft spent her childhood in the town of Beverley just outside Hull, seems to add a relatability and pride, without the parochialism that blights some theatre output. Calling her drunken and abusive father a ‘patriarch prick’ is a jolt into the present which is repeated to good effect with the use of more modern language. Delivered with gusto by a cast of six actors called on to represent a number of people, they nail dance routines at the drop of a bonnet.

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Something which is exemplified by the charisma of one who stayed in character throughout is Laura Elsworthy as Mary, a constant presence, delivering a dynamism that captures the defiance that propels the production. Her partnership with the almost too good to be true Fanny Blood, on a school for girls and a call to ‘be wild’ while slinging a wedding veil around, is a real treat. Her affinity with an early contender for the best punk rock name ever, in Fanny Blood, provides poignancy and depth.

After the interval, the set-up of Independent Men, with the pomposity of its ‘We are the men, most important men’ refrain playing out to a collection of  intellectuals like Thomas Paine, offers up the timeless thrill of iconoclasm. Wollstonecraft’s response to Conservative pin up Edmund Burke’s veneration of the established order beats Paine’s more well known Rights of Man to the punch. That her eventual disillusionment with the French Revolution isillustrated by the demise of an extremely messy melon, rather than the traditional guillotine set up, is something the audience seem to enjoy enormously. The only actual men in sight all night – stage hands called on to mop up the mess – feeling ideal.

Thankfully the script is a well-rounded portrayal that, despite her doomed relationship to Gilbert Imlay and jump into the Thames from Putney Bridge, acknowledges Wollstonecraft’s need for some sort of partnership. Billy Nomates’ Fuckboy captures the dilemma in another pleasingly deviant musical theatre moment, and Mary finds contentment of sort in an equally unconventional connection with original anarchist William Godwin, a pleasing denouement before the clock finally runs down.

It cracks on at a pace which might prove a little disconcerting for some, but should suit today’s teenage scrollers. The music, the matinee performances and the artwork, that ties in with the production around the theatre, suggests as much. Inspiring pictures that were not just ‘good for kids’ but ranged from collages that wouldn’t have looked out of place at the Cabaret Voltaire, to slogans in crayon saying ‘I don’t like pink’ which somehow read as a statement of intent. Let’s hope so, as with a sex offender in the White House and celebrity rapist in Romania, anything that thought provoking, accessible and above all entertaining agit prop can do to push back, is to be quite literally applauded.

Hull Truck Theatre until 1 March 2025

Wilton’s Music Hall, London 18 – 29 March 2025

Find Billy Nomates here

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All words by Steve John – Author profile here. You can also find Steve online at his website & Facebook

• Source: NEWHD MEDIA