'Ballad Lines' review — this powerful folk musical is suffused with passion and heart

Read our review of Ballad Lines, written by Finn Anderson and Tanya Azevedo, now in performances at Southwark Playhouse to 21 March.

Summary

• New musical Ballad Lines comes to Southwark Playhouse
• The show is written by Finn Anderson and Tanya Azevedo
• The musical explores fertility and family
• The excellent cast includes Frances McNamee and Kirsty Findlay

If good intentions were all, Ballad Lines would be taking pride of place in a world (musical theatre) forever on the lookout for the new. Here is a show suffused with passion and heart that comes tethered to a surging score from the fast-rising Scottish singer-songwriter Finn Anderson (Islander), who shares co-creator credit with the musical’s director, Tanya Azevedo.

It’s heartening, too, to find a folk musical that folds seven actresses (and one actor) within its capacious embrace. Spanning centuries and continents, this ambitiously conceived piece uses the power of storytelling to conjoin tales of fertility and family, bloodlines and bigotry.

Along the way, we dip in and out of Appalachia, New York, Ulster and Scotland as the musical ricochets this way and that in a narrative cat’s cradle: that very patterning of fabric is at one point created in front of our eyes by the collectively impassioned cast.

So it’s rather a shame to have to report that the journeys on view need further consideration still if the show, originally called A Mother’s Story, is to move audiences in the way presumably intended. In desperate need of trimming and shaping, the piece as it exists now often fights its own best instincts.

You’re compelled by the apparent range and ease of a yearning score that dips in and out of the musical canon (rending use is made of the Scottish ballad “The Four Marys”, by way of example) only to be brought up short by the bald-faced pronouncements of the book. Too often, the writing lapses into clunky portentousness – “time started closing in, as it always does” – when we’d rather probe the Celtic reaches of Anderson’s music: all credit on that front to musical director Shonagh Murray, who is one of the four-person band.

Centre stage is more often than not taken by the troubled Sarah (Frances McNamee), who is forging a life for herself in contemporary New York with her girlfriend Alix (Sydney Sainté). Caught up in contentious issues of childbearing in the here and now, Sarah is pulled toward the past by her often-prickly Aunt Betty (Rebecca Trehearn) and her bequest of a box of cassettes that connects the present day to an array of pioneering women who came before.

Those include a woebegone pastor’s wife, Cait (the gossamer-voiced Kirsty Findlay), in 17th-century Scotland and an Ulster adolescent, Jean (Yna Tresvalles), encountered 100 years on, the two women fighting to achieve a freedom not readily allowed by circumstance. One wants a child and the other doesn't, a dilemma that Sarah is facing in a relationship that risks fragmenting in front of our eyes.

Sarah and Alix inhabit more enlightened times, or so you might think were prejudice of varying kinds not brought to bear on women who wonder aloud at the wisdom of becoming a parent amid the gathering cruelty taking over the world just now.

There’s no faulting an eight-person cast who on opening night at least looked visibly overcome by the import of the material to hand, and McNamee should go far with her stirring occupancy of the show’s star part. A shoutout, too, to Ally Kennard as the lone male actor, here asked to juggle three roles that place notions of patriarchy in bold relief.

Anderson and Azevedo share credit for a book that makes no shortage of points about the strictures placed on women in whatever society that may find themselves across the years. But there’s more innate eloquence in the ravishing sweep of Tinovimbinashe Simanda’s choreography than in the pro forma assertions. You warm to the impetus behind a musical about the prevalence of ballads over time as a communal lifeline while at the same time hoping for further rewrites that would let a sometimes clotted evening flow as freely as its adventuresome score.

Ballad Lines is at Southwark Playhouse to 21 March. Book Ballad Lines tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Ballad Lines (Photos by Pamela Raith Photography)