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BBC News
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- 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.
The Guardian
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
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
