If I could give this show 10 stars, I would. It’s a one in a million. So rare is theatre this extraordinarily imaginative, masterfully crafted, exquisitely performed and poignantly relevant.
Beth Flintoff’s The Ballard of Maria Marten was first staged in 2018 and has since been in development with two further casts. We are privy to four years of maturation and it is as compelling and gripping as theatre can be. Every note perfectly pitched, each harmony as tuneful as a room full of angels, each movement elegant and eloquent, every inch of the stage fully inhabited and the character and the world of Maria Marten, fully realised.
There have been many reiterations of this story, of the brutal and gruesome murder of Maria Marten by her husband William Corder in 1827, the first only a year later when it appeared in a local tabloid, selling over a million copies. Since then, the story took on a life of its own and fact and fiction soon became a muddle of speculation. Most of the books, musicals, plays and films about Maria and her story, don’t focus on her. Instead, they focus on Corder, the murderer. Played by an all-female cast of six, Beth Flintoff’s version directed by Hal Chambers, focuses entirely on Maria’s story, with two of the male characters played by the women and the murderer himself, just a terrifying, shadowy force, wreaking havoc and destruction by his inescapable presence in Maria’s psyche.
