Long Joan Silver – Hope Street Theatre, Liverpool

Picture: John K Roberts

Long Joan Silver played at Hope Street Theatre, Liverpool.

Billed as the first musical to take place at the Hope Street Theatre, Long Joan Silver could probably be better described as a comedy with songs, but that may be stretching a point.

The show, written by Adam Ward, tells the tale of Joan, the daughter of Captain O’Malley. O’Malley has longed for a child to take on his piratical trade, but when presented with a daughter his dreams implode because, of course, girls can’t be pirates. As the story unfolds, we meet an entirely female pirate crew, led by Captain Mary Read, and the male pirates are roundly taught a lesson.

Along the way, Joan meets a man who has been turned into a monkey and she sets about helping him reach a remote island where he can find the means to transform him back.

The pirate captain’s misogynist notion leads to an early musical interlude that sets the tone for the whole show, but repeating the line ‘Girls can’t be pirates’ over and over to the accompaniment of two strumming guitars does not make a song. Sadly, a string of increasingly forgettable numbers doesn’t make a musical either.

There are some big performances in the show, led by Kimberley Athawes as Joan. She gives her character a great blend of guts and gentleness, and she has a great voice. Her scenes with Ryan K Byrne’s splendidly characterful Monkey give the piece its heart, and his almost Caliban-like search for humanity is a theme that could be almost a play in itself. Josephine Sherlock and Mollie Cranmer put in solid performances too, as Captain Mary Read and Four Finger Suzie.

The best comic turn in the piece is Big Sal, played by the imposing form of Joseph Ball. His dry, stony-faced delivery is impossible to describe as resembling anything other than Tommy Cooper in a frock, and he is genuinely funny.

Less explicable is the other cross-gender role of Kendro, a lecherous womaniser played by Emily McGlynn, whose beard gives the appearance of having been applied with a marker pen by her shipmates while she was drunk.

Possibly the show’s biggest difficulty is its own identity crisis. Contained within are the makings of a rollicking comedy, a morality tale with interwoven themes and, possibly, even a musical but it spends so much time at sea between these possibilities that it never really finds a harbour in any of them. It’s an entertaining evening, but to make it into a musical requires a re-write in both form and content.

Nigel Smith