Writer Claire Novello explores the extraordinary lives of overlooked women.
Her new musical about the pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read is at Brighton Fringe in May.
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In October 1720, the English privateer Jonathan Barnet attacked and overcame the ship of notorious pirate John “Calico Jack” Rackham off the west coast of Jamaica. Among the captured crew were two women.
Mary Read was born in 1685, and grew up in poverty in England, the illegitimate child of a widow. Anne Bonny, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Irish lawyer, was born around fifteen years later. How the two women ended up pillaging and plundering in the Caribbean together alongside one of history’s most famous buccaneers is an extraordinary story – and one about to be told on stage at Brighton Fringe in Claire Novello’s new musical Bonny and Read.
“I teach film studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and one of my students wrote a fascinating dissertation about cross-dressing in film,” Novello explains, when asked about the musical’s origins. “The conclusion she came to was that when men dress up as women in film, it is invariably comic. When women dress up as men, though, it is generally tragic.”
“I wanted to tell a story that didn’t fit that pattern,” she continues. “I read a lot, and found a lot of historical examples of women dressing up as men to become soldiers or sailors, to escape poverty and to escape the restrictions of their gender. I found the story of Mary Read and Anne Bonny and I knew I just had to put it on stage somehow.”
Novello started writing Bonny and Read in 2019, staged a few workshops and rehearsed readings, then developed the script during two long years of Covid-19 lockdown. Along the way, it evolved from a play, into a verse-play, and finally into a fully-fledged, four-handed musical, with a book and lyrics by Novello, a score by composer Frederick Appleby, and direction from Kenneth Michaels.
“It is written in rhyme, which gives it an eighteenth-century flavour, but the language is deliberately modern at the same time, which hopefully emphasises the story’s contemporary resonances,” says Novello. “The music isn’t contemporary, though, and it isn’t traditional, eighteenth-century sea shanties, either. It is quite influenced by Kurt Weill and The Threepenny Opera, actually. We were very careful about avoiding cliché.”
“I’ve always been interested in obscure and overlooked historical female characters… we need to hear their stories…”
Novello grew up in London, studied German and French at the University of London’s Bedford College, and subsequently worked as a foreign language teacher, both in the UK and abroad. She always aspired to write drama for stage and screen, though, so returned to academia, completed an MA in at UCL, and spent twenty years as a lecturer at SOAS, writing short screenplays on the side.
In 2018, with the help of fellow members of long-running play-reading forum Actors and Writers London, Novello formed Novanda Productions, and staged her first play, The Dedication, at the Bread and Roses Theatre in Clapham. A three-act, seven-handed psychological drama set in Vienna in the early twentieth century, it focused on the remarkable life of Alma Mahler, wife of the Romantic composer Gustav Mahler.
“I’ve always been interested in obscure and overlooked historical female characters, and particularly characters that broke the norm and refused to conform to the limits society tried to put on them,” says Novello. “I’m interested in putting these characters into their social, political and historical context, so that contemporary audiences can empathise with them.”
“They are inspiring people, and we need to hear their stories,” continues Novello. “We need to see more of them on stage, because despite the fact that they might have lived hundreds of years ago, a lot of things haven’t really changed. We still live in a male-dominated society that puts a lot of limitations on the roles that women can play.”
It is easy to see why Novello was drawn to Mary Read and Anne Bonny, then. They were “extraordinary women who defied the conventions of their time,” she says. “They dared to lead the same lives and share the same status as men, and they actually became incredibly famous in the eighteenth century for doing so. In Jamaica today, most people still know their names.”
When Bonny and Read arrives at Brighton Open Air Theatre on May 11, it will be the show’s third outing, having previously run at Barnes’ OSO Arts Centre and at Lewisham’s Brockley Jack Theatre last November. Novello hopes that it will have a future life, too, and is planning to take it on a tour of coastal towns and villages, where its story can sing in the sea-salted air.
And what became of Read and Bonny, after they had been captured by Barnet back in 1720? They were taken to Kingston, Jamaica, tried alongside Rackham and his crew, and sentenced to death by hanging. Both “pleaded their bellies”, claiming they were pregnant to avoid execution. Read died of fever in prison the following year, but Bonny? Well, nobody knows.
What do you want to do?
I’d like to take Bonny and Read on tour. We have already got one venue in Portsmouth and one venue in Weston-super-Mare lined up for September, but there are plenty of other seaside towns and coastal cities where staging a story like this would be brilliant.
What support do you need to get there?
If producers and programmers and venue managers want to get in touch about staging the show somewhere else, or perhaps developing it further, that would be very welcome. And if people could spread the word about the performance in Brighton on May 11, that would be very helpful, too.
How can people find out more about you?
People can come and see the show, they can have a look at our website, and they can find us on Twitter.
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Fergus Morgan