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
