Mary and the Hyenas review – patchy ode to Wollstonecraft and women ‘howling at the world'
It was quite a life. Having escaped a violent and heavy-drinking father, Mary Wollstonecraft ploughed a singular path. Avowedly independent and radical in thought, she dazzled and discombobulated a crusty male establishment with her intellect. She turned from governess to author and landed a reporting job in revolutionary France. Among her works, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a foundational feminist text. After that, giving birth to Mary Shelley seems like a postscript.
Maureen Lennon's patchwork tribute for Hull Truck and Pilot theatre is a musical collage of fast-paced scenes designed to memorialise a pioneer of sexual equality. As Lennon has it, this is a woman who demands parity with men, radicalises children and refuses to be shouted down. The play is 'told for all women who find themselves howling at the world'.
So far, so uncontentious. Where the production falters is in a mismatch of form and content. Directed by Esther Richardson, it follows mid 20th-century practitioners such as Bertolt Brecht, Joan Littlewood and John McGrath in its combination of snappy demonstrative scenes and illustrative songs. Designer Sara Perks puts the six actors in boots, bodices and flouncy skirts to create a new-romantic look that is reflected in Ayesha Fazal's pop-video choreography and the synth-heavy score by Billy Nomates. In the lead role, Laura Elsworthy has a mop of blood-orange hair that shrieks rebelliousness.
All this resists the pull towards romanticised period drama in favour of a cartoon-like immediacy. But it is a jokey format without jokey content. In the first half we get one overwrought scene after another, too short for us to identify with the characters, too angsty to show Wollstonecraft as a rounded human being. There is much shouting and no emotional range.
Similarly humourless are the songs, all strident calls-to-arms performed with much earnestness – arms aloft, clenched fists and punches in the air – but with as little joy as there is tonal variety. They feel shoehorned in.
Things perk up with the chewier scenes of the second half, when Wollstonecraft wrestles with putting theory into practice and the dramatic momentum builds. But for all the ensemble's commitment, Mary and the Hyenas strains too hard to make its revolutionary point.
At Hull Truck theatre until 1 March, then at Wilton's Music Hall, London, 18-29 March
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The Guardian
11-04-2025
- The Guardian
Mike Bradwell obituary
Ebullient, pugnacious, larger than life. No single adjective is sufficient to describe the tumultuous, impossible talent of the director Mike Bradwell, who has died aged 76. The success of the Hull Truck Theatre company that he founded in 1971 led, eventually, to the great success of Hull's year as the European city of culture in 2017. His adopted home theatre in London was the Bush, a small room above a bustling Shepherd's Bush pub, where he continued an extraordinary powerhouse operation in British playwriting, succeeding Dominic Dromgoole as artistic director from 1996 to 2007. The playwright David Edgar averred that Bradwell was 'a giant of the alternative theatre some of us were privileged to grow up in'. While the film director Mike Leigh, with whom he trained on the director's course at the East 15 Acting School in Essex, said that 'his unique achievement in creating 'devised plays' was to integrate his own songs into the action in a delightfully idiosyncratic way'. As Bradwell explained in an article marking Hull Truck's 50th anniversary, in 2022, he moved to Hull in 1971 because it was the most unlikely place in the world to start an experimental theatre company – 'plus rents were cheap and social security were unlikely to find us any proper jobs. I was 23 and I believed that theatre could change the world. I still do. I wanted to make uncompromising, provocative, funny, tough, sexy plays about people you didn't see in plays, for people who didn't go to the theatre. I wanted Hull Truck to be a nuisance.' Combative confrontation – as I knew only too well as a critic and contemporary of his – was second nature to Bradwell. He set up shop in Hull in a cold, damp squat, 71 Coltman Street, where his improvisations on sex, drugs and rock'n'roll in a communal living and rehearsal place were celebrated in a 2017 play by Richard Bean. There is now a blue plaque on the house once occupied by feral cats and long-haired, semi-starving, sometimes stoned, always underpaid actors. Hull Truck was a lifestyle choice of community engagement. They toured their plays around the theatres and community centres of Manchester and Yorkshire, meeting no reaction to speak of until the Guardian critic Robin Thornber acclaimed their third production, The Knowledge, the day after it was pulled – on grounds of alleged obscenity – from the Wythenshawe Forum in Manchester in June 1974. One scene from the next show, Bridget's House, in 1976, caused a furore when a character played by Rachel Bell observed that most men wouldn't know what a clitoris was if it jumped up and bit them on the leg. By now they were on a roll. They played the Bush in London, and Kenneth Tynan, no less, enthused about both the play and Bell. 'The bargain of real, proper theatre,' said Bradwell, 'is when a group of human beings on stage get together with a group of human beings in the audience to fearlessly celebrate their human being-ness.' He liked to say he was born in a pigsty near Doncaster – on a pig farm owned by his father's family, though his father himself, Frederick Bradwell, was a potato and vegetable farmer in the village of Epworth, near Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire. His mother, Olive (nee Johnson), worked in the box office at the Darlington civic theatre. After an unhappy time as a boarder at Canford school in Dorset (whose alumni include the artist and film director Derek Jarman and the novelist Alan Hollinghurst), he joined the Scunthorpe Youth theatre in 1966 and took a holiday job – his first professional appointment – as a stagehand on a pantomime at the Theatre Royal, Lincoln. His younger sister, Christine, was also in the youth theatre; she went on to run the Anvil Arts centre in Basingstoke. Bradwell belongs to the tradition of rough-house contemporary theatre that stretches from the Elizabethans and Jacobeans through Joan Littlewood and Ken Campbell, bypassing the monolithic National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company. His friendship and association with Leigh led to him appearing as a risible, guitar-strumming hippie in Leigh's beautiful, melancholic stage play Bleak Moments (at the Open Space in Tottenham Court Road in 1970), then, a year later, in the film of the same name – Leigh's first, funded by his fellow Salfordian Albert Finney – which was hailed on both sides of the Atlantic as a masterpiece of quiet suburban anomie. His other adventures in showbusiness, as recounted in his glorious memoir The Reluctant Escapologist (2010), witnessed the onstage mass love-ins of the Living Theatre at the Roundhouse in the 1960s; teaching Bob Hoskins how to eat fire; becoming an escapologist (reluctantly) in the Ken Campbell Roadshow; and doing battle with health and safety inspectors in his 10 years running the Bush. Hull Truck relaxed its aggressive counterculture default setting – probably not a good thing – when they settled in 1983 in a delightful 150-seater converted church hall, the Spring Street theatre, under the artistic directorship of the playwright John Godber (who riled Bradwell, the bolshie beatnik, when, on the Terry Wogan TV show, he said he wanted to do theatre his mum and dad would like). The company became even more respectable when, in 2009, they moved into a £15m new home in Ferensway, Hull, funded by the Arts Council, Hull city council and the European regional development fund. The venue remains a thriving and going concern. Bradwell, meanwhile, ploughed his own furrow. When he left Hull Truck in 1981, Robert Cushman in the Observer saluted his 10 years there as 'the richest, sharpest and funniest work in the British theatre'. Bradwell became an associate director at the Royal Court (1984-86). At the Bush from 1996, he directed no less than 40 plays in 10 years, including work by Jack Thorne, David Eldridge, Georgia Fitch, Joe Penhall, Doug Lucie and Terry Johnson. Between 1991 and 2003, Bradwell directed three rollicking plays by the Mamma Mia! author Catherine Johnson, another of his proteges; Resident Alien, a wonderful Quentin Crisp monologue written by Tim Fountain and performed by Bette Bourne ('Life is a funny thing that happens to you on the way to the grave'); and a heartwarming musical play about a close-harmony singing group in a small mining village near Doncaster, The Glee Club, by another of his significant proteges, Richard Cameron. He first met his future life partner, the actor and playwright Helen Cooper, when working as dialogue coach on Campbell's sensational 24-hour epic, The Warp (1979), at the ICA in the Mall; she was dancing to Ravel's Bolero. They got together in 1983, and he directed two fascinating plays of hers about the forgotten wives of famous figures, real and literary: Mrs Gauguin (1984), at the Almeida in Islington, and Mrs Vershinin (1988), the unseen suicidal wife of the flirtatious battery commander in Chekhov's Three Sisters, at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. Helen survives him, as do their daughter, Flora, a grandson, Beau, and his sister, Christine. Michael John Bradwell, theatre director, born 14 June 1948; died 7 April 2025
BBC News
08-04-2025
- BBC News
Hull Truck Theatre founder Mike Bradwell dies at 77
Playwright John Godber has led tributes to "formidable force" Mike Bradwell, a theatre director and actor, who has died at the age of founded the Hull Truck Theatre company in a squat in Coltman Street in 1971. It went on to earn national death on Monday morning was confirmed by the who served as artistic director of Hull Truck from 1983 until 2010, described his predecessor as a "maverick and a disruptor" who would be "sorely missed". Godber said: "Mike was central to me coming to Hull and, in that sense, changed my life. He invited me to apply and run Truck after he left and that was a significant turning point. "He was a genuinely nice guy and very funny. One of the things that he said to me was make a nuisance of yourself, which I think is a great thing for theatre companies to pin their philosophy to."He'll be sadly missed." Bradwell was born in Scunthorpe in 1948 and trained as an actor at the East 15 Acting School in east 1971, Bradwell placed an advert in Time Out magazine which read, "Half-formed theatre company seeks other half" as he looked to link up with other aspiring result was Hull Truck Theatre and, over the following 11 years, Bradwell and the company toured the UK performing children's shows, plays and experimental a joint statement, Mark Babych and Janthi Mills-Ward, chief executives of Hull Truck Theatre, described Bradwell as "passionate, funny and brave" and said his "uncompromising artistry revolutionised British theatre by putting the stories and voices of real people centre stage".They added: "His legacy is felt across our industry and nowhere more so than here in Hull." Between 1996 and 2007, Bradwell served as the artistic director of the Bush Theatre in Shepherd's Bush, a statement, released on social media, the Bush Theatre said it was "deeply saddened" by Bradwell's passing and said he had left an "indelible mark" on the was also an award-winning writer. His book on alternative theatre, The Reluctant Escapologist, won the Society for Theatre Research's Theatre Book Prize in 2010. Listen to highlights from Hull and East Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, watch the latest episode of Look North or tell us about a story you think we should be covering here.
BBC News
08-03-2025
- BBC News
Feminist icon Mary Wollstonecraft still making waves 200 years on
The playwright behind a musical about Mary Wollstonecraft has said more people are taking inspiration from the feminist icon, two centuries after her Lennon wrote Mary and the Hyenas in tribute to the literary pioneer, who is known for her trailblazing work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in musical will be performed at Wilton's Music Hall in London from 18 March, after debuting at Hull Truck Lennon, from Hull, said: "It's not until around now that we're rediscovering and remembering what a huge legacy she has." She added: "Of course, in feminism people have always championed her and she's provided an inspiration to so many, but only in the last few years is she starting to be as widely known as we would expect."Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 and raised in the East Yorkshire town of Beverley. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman argued women were not naturally inferior to men, but only appeared to be because they did not have the same access to education. Wollstonecraft went on to spend time in Paris during the French Revolution. She died in 1797, aged 38, just days after the birth of her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who would go on to write Frankenstein. Ms Lennon said there were parallels between Wollstonecraft's time and the modern in her musical call out how women are treated in love and the pressure to be independent and about feminism in the modern day, Ms Lennon said there was still a notion of women "having to be polite and compliant" in society. "I think we can all identify with that feeling of being 'too much' for the world, particularly if you're a woman."Mary really paves the way there about not apologising for that and that's something that I've really tried to hold on to when you're searching for bravery," she Lennon also said she believed there was a "huge issue" within the playwrighting industry, with women "still not being given the same opportunities" as men. Listen to highlights from Hull and East Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, watch the latest episode of Look North or tell us about a story you think we should be covering here.
