Mary and the Hyenas review

Mary Wollstonecraft, trailblazing feminist icon, and Billy Nomates, creator of irresistible electro pop. It ought to be a combustible combo – so why does this new piece of music-theatre from Hull Truck and Pilot Theatre turn out to be such a hectoring muddle?

It’s not the fault of the energetic cast, who, under slightly rackety direction from Esther Richardson, strain every sinew to galvanise a cavalcade of cartoonish figures. But for all their efforts, Maureen Lennon’s writing – a breathless, whistle-stop tour of Wollstonecraft’s life – lacks drama, texture, detail and urgency. The songs by Tor Maries, aka Billy Nomates, impede rather than enhance the narrative: strident, synth-led exhortations to female emancipation couched in lyrics co-written by Lennon that are excruciatingly on-the-nose. The cast sings them with vigour but with a reckless, search-and-destroy approach to melody and pitch – feminism-lite, meted out with the heaviest of hands.

“Hyena in petticoats” was the slur flung by Horace Walpole at Wollstonecraft, author of the seminal work A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and mother of Frankenstein creator Mary Shelley. In punk, provocative style, Lennon’s play begins with the latter’s birth, accompanied by a protracted, labour-pains yell of “fuuuuuuuuuuck”, swiftly followed by a cacophony of rebellious hyena-howling from its all-woman company. But Wollstonecraft died just 10 days later – so the piece then proceeds to dissolve into a mess of flashback that manages to feel totally inconsequential, even when she pitches up in Paris at the height of the Revolutionary Terror.

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