The Ballad of Maria Marten
The Everyman Theatre
Cheltenham

WHILE even theatrical farce can lend itself to reflecting the surrealist element in human behaviour, melodrama, with its nods towards music hall and pantomime, must be the most difficult dramatic form to treat seriously.
 
Back on the road after the Covid break, Eastern Angles Theatre Company’s touring production has taken this old folk tale treatment of the 1827 murder of a village girl in a journalistically sensational red barn, and invested both characters and situation with a human and historical context.

An all-female, six-member cast add a feminist dimension with obvious but not overworked reference to our contemporary Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa murders.

The original particularly horrific killing by a local man, anxious to avoid marriage to a girl he has seduced and whose baby he has possibly killed, was notable for the gothic element of the buried body being discovered after Mary’s stepmother had dreamed of its whereabouts, leading to the murderer being tracked down, tried, convicted and hanged before a huge “appreciative” crowd.