Picture: Pamela Raith
Ballad Lines continues at Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London until 21 March 2026.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Tania Azevedo and Finn Anderson’s Ballad Lines is a truly joyous experience with a compelling and resonating storyline and gloriously rich music and lyrics by Scottish composer Anderson (a former winner of Musical Theatre Review’s Edinburgh Fringe Best Musical Award for his show Islander).
The show’s simultaneously historical and contemporary theme brings to the stage a different sound world from your average musical. This unique folk theatre appears completely natural on stage although costumed and grounded five generations ago. Its playful non-linearity and coincidence of past and present interactions, as its plotlines shift cleverly and seamlessly in time, are suggestive of popular shows including the highly-successful musical Six and the hit TV show Ghosts.
Directed by Azevedo, the co-writer of this imaginative text, the newly revised show based on the earlier iteration A Mother’s Song is now slickly presented for its London premiere.
The focus of Ballad Lines’ emotional journey is female independence centred on the present-day experience of nervy Sarah (Frances McNamee), whose home decor even carries an illuminated pink ‘good vibes’ sign. Living in a lesbian partnership in New York with confident Alix (Sydney Sainté), her story is guided for us by homely Aunt Betty, commandingly played by Rebecca Trehearn, who had inducted her into their family line of female ballad singers as her substitute mother.
A classic theatrical device of an inherited Pandora’s Box – her “portal to another time” – is the means by which we access Sarah’s experience. What follows is an emotional coming-to-terms with her inheritance, a song tradition which is the heart of the show, and what it means to her in this very different world.
A matrilinear thread, symbolised slightly clumsily by unravelled cassette tape, links various women across time and a leather prayer journal from 17th century Scotland is passed on as the only physical artefact to survive the passage. The resulting connections queer the plot through a range of different bonds beyond the classic mother-daughter relationship which reference the modern feminist notion of family of choice.
Sarah’s role is central but in Act I seems overshadowed by the huge stage presence and stupendous sound produced by Cait (Kirsty Findlay) and the attractive optimism convincingly characterised by Yna Tresvalles as Jean. By the middle of Act II we feel Sarah’s strength and the power of her performance grows in response to the awakening of trauma and its consequences.
The armchair which has centred our attention on earlier key moments of female domesticity, including female orgasm and childbirth pangs, becomes a therapy chair in which Sarah literally crumbles emotionally, and then rises from to reach new heights as a professional singer. McNamee literally pulls all she has out of the bag in the final numbers. In a neat twist we hear a child calling to their mother from the wings, echoing young Sarah on the cassette tapes recorded by Aunt Betty.
Shonagh Murray is a strong MD with a committed band backed up by faultless sound production (designed by Andy Johnson). There is striking musicality too in the energetic ensemble choreography of the opening which Tinovimbanashe Sibanda constructs as a choric orchestra with the six performers using their bodies as instruments, successfully navigating quite a confined space through emphasis on the vertical.
Effective lighting (designed by Simon Wilkinson) and a curious macrame backdrop representing rocks, sails and clouds (TK Hay) as well as the recurring metaphor of the river of time, add to the kinaesthetic pleasure as the soaring and sonorous folk vocals of these performers with “stories and songs in their eyes” raise the roof.
This is modern folk which fuses original songs with inherited tunes reimagining ballads in Anderson’s unique contemporary voice, placing them within the lives of fictional characters connected to the tales within the songs. It’s overtly a queer feminist show foregrounding choice and resistance to control, and challenging stereotypes.
A key pivot is within a powerful party dance uniting the women across time on the stage when brilliant fiddler, Sally Simpson, rises to dominate the scene with outpouring of sound, symbolising the key final message of Sarah’s journey – “only one voice can set me free and it is my own”.
A token male performer is used effectively to underline the constraints of social structures and to highlight changing articulation of identities. The male roles work well at supporting these changes as well, since Ally Kennard as Scottish Presbyterian Minister had provided the prayer journal for his wife, as Ulster Doctor had supported Jean’s application to emigrate, and as Sarah’s brother had sought to dissipate generational conflict between Betty and Sarah, all of which contributes to this show’s open-hearted humanity.
An album has been released alongside the new production, but this show is more than a compilation of tracks of accompanying songs. The majority of the production is through-composed musical theatre, with breaks for unaccompanied acting carefully interjected at dramatic plot pivots. With the musical score and the soundworld absolutely at the heart of it all, a collective experience of folksong is underscored – questioning, but also knowingly articulating, what it feels like to receive music and stories passed on.
Charlotte Purkis
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