The Ballad of Anne and Mary – Long Cat Media

The Ballad of Anne and Mary is available on all podcast players and via www.longcatmedia.com.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

History isn’t always written by the victors. Sometimes it’s just written by those in power, and anybody who threatens that power can often find their story disappears from the written record.

That is why so many historical figures who do not fit into the mould of straight, white and male see their stories downplayed or ignored. Two such women are Anne Bonny and Mary Read, two 18th century pirates who thrived in an otherwise male-dominated environment.

Much of the knowledge around these two characters already blurs the line between fact and fiction – a contemporary work about piracy, A General History of the Pyrates which introduce the notions of the skull-and-crossbones flag as well as mythologising the likes of Blackbeard, has been speculated to have been the work of Daniel Defoe.

But in Long Cat Media’s new multi-part musical podcast The Ballad of Anne and Mary, that book forms a crucial framing device to tell the stories of these seafaring women.

Starting at the end of their lives, with Anne and Mary both in prison but separated, journalist Nathaniel Mist (played by Hamilton’s Karl Queensborough) interrogates them about their lives – ostensibly to flesh out his book and provide some colour about their male contemporaries, but also with an eye on discovering if the treasures they’ve plundered have been buried and might be recoverable.

In the meantime, he is treated to a chronicle of the two women’s lives, largely narrated to him by Christina Bianco’s Anne. The real Bonny was born in Cork but as a young girl her family moved to North Carolina, and Bianco gives a believable Irish-American twang to her accent that may ebb and flow, but does so in a manner befitting of a woman who would have grown up in America with Irish parents.

Sooz Kempner’s Mary Read has a slightly different challenge to portray: for most of her early story, she is dressed as a man and presenting as male, “Mark” Read joining the crew of Calico Jack’s ship – upon which Anne is also serving – when her own is captured.

Laurence Owen’s songs pepper the episodes with arrangements that evoke the folk tradition – heaving on pipes, fiddle and guitar – while also introducing, on occasion, a contemporary rock sound. The arrangements suit both Bianco and Kempner’s voices. With Bianco, who has become known for her hilarious and accurate vocal impersonations, Anne always seems just one vocal trill away from going the full Celine Dion, but that’s no bad thing at all. Both leads are ably backed up by drag legend Le Gateau Chocolat as Calico Jack Rackham, and the trio lend buckets of charisma both in their songs and their book scenes.

But oh my goodness, there is a lot of book to get through. With each episode lasting over half an hour, by the end of episode three the podcast has been going for as long as a full two-act musical, and yet Anne and Mary’s story still only feels like it’s just getting going. Many meanderings away from their story may help a little in the world-building, but it feels as if book writer/director Lindsay Sharman could have trimmed a good ten minutes off each episode and ended up with a tauter, more enjoyable piece that got to the heart of these women’s tale more directly.

Still, all the dialogue is presented with some impressive sound design by Owen. There is a strong, believable sense of place in each scene, thanks to the multi-layered audio.

With two episodes left to go, it feels as if an exploration of Read and Bonny’s adventures has a lot more yet to give. But on the strength of the musical numbers – including a wondrously rustic new sea shanty which, after a snippet is performed during the drama, is presented in full at the end of episode 3 – there is still much left to enjoy.

Scott Matthewman