The Ballad of Maria Marten, review: lovingly restoring dignity to a 19th-century murder victim

Up to 20,000 people apparently witnessed the execution of William Corder, convicted in 1828 of murdering his 25-year-old lover Maria Marten and burying her under a Suffolk barn where her body would lay undiscovered for over a year. The brutality of the crime, involving strangulation, battery and a pistol, sent a thrill through the country which poured over the details with the same tabloid prurience with which we obsess over stories of murdered women today. “You’re here to see my blood,” says Maria to the audience in this new retelling of the tale. “But I don’t need to show you that. You’ve already imagined it enough times yourselves.”

Beth Flintoff’s vigorous play, first seen in Ipswich 2018 and steadily gaining word-of-mouth acclaim since, joins a mini industry of murder ballads and books that have sensationalised the Marten case, but it also stands apart from many of those feverish accounts by speculating not on what might have happened to Maria at the gruesome moment of her death but on who she might have been in life, growing up in the dirt-poor farming village of Polstead.

It’s a straightforward piece of feminist revisionism, in other words, reclaiming the woman behind the headlines, but it’s also a glorious piece of folk theatre, full of music and dance and bubbling with a rich, loamy wit. And no, we don’t see Maria murdered – in fact, William doesn’t appear at all. Instead, Elizabeth Crarer’s sparky, defiant Maria frequently tartly reminds the audience of what will happen to her, but for most part gets on with the happy, hardscrabble business of living.

Hal Chambers’s muscular production for Eastern Angles theatre company has the melodious fluidity of a dance. A beautifully honed, all-female ensemble play various different characters so well you assume the cast is larger than it is. The sparse selection of props distil the reality of life for women in 19th-century rural England – buckets, bowls, sacks of grain – alongside a dreamier, rosier evocation of feminine solidarity and love. There is a gorgeous moment at the start when Maria appears bloodied and battered from beyond the grave, before her friends clean her up, tidy her hair and restore her to life.

There is laughter, song, but also a brutal coming-of-age experience of sex. These girls yearn for romance – within seconds of finding it (invariably during a few snatched minutes up against a wall), they are jumping up and down in the hope of avoiding becoming pregnant. Aside from friendship, everything is transactional. Maria, who is steely, sprightly, mischievous, goes with the son of a local farmer so that her dad, a mole catcher, might be briefly employed. “I know my price: three days’ work, a loaf of bread and some cheese.”

Like the West End hit Emilia, which reimagined the 16th-century woman assumed to be the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets as a raging feminist, The Ballad of Maria Marten grafts 21st-century sensibilities on to a woman about whom in truth we know little. Yet where the former felt like a glibly politicised appropriation of an unknown woman’s story, Flintoff’s play pulses with invigorating new life.

Maria had three illegitimate children and was damned by the press at the time as a result; Flintoff paints her as a sexually confident woman with few options who refused to feel shame. Gaslighting as a term didn’t exist in 19th-century rural England, but it’s not such a stretch to imagine something similar occurred to Maria as her by all accounts abusive relationship with William – a renowned liar and a thief – darkened. Chambers’s production, which effectively fuses modern and ancient folk music, accumulates in tension despite us knowing the outcome. In the end, it’s not just what happens to Maria that’s the pivotal point here, but what the play asks us to imagine.

At Wilton’s until February 19, then touring. Tickets: mariamarten.com