Where do you start when you are asked to write a piece on a show that combines a love of real-murder podcasts, Greek mythology, punk, and the “tyrannical history of male power?” The only sensible answer can be, with the writer! So I found myself in conversation with Hull’s Maureen Lennon, writer of Dead Girls Rising, a brand new play for the Red Ladder Local circuit this month.

Six years in the making, Dead Girls Rising began when Maureen undertook a residency at Leeds Library and was surprised by some customers’ choice of reading:

Actually, we just spent a month kind of hanging around the library and getting inspiration and ideas, engaging with their spaces and what they did. The fact that there were all these older ladies coming in and taking out really gory books about both fictional and true crime really interested me. I had a kind of conflicted relationship with true crime.What was the attraction? So, I started to research it. How is it related to our lives and how was it speaking to us? Why does it especially appeal to women?

Maureen then wrote a short treatment for the potential show and, along with Alex Mitchell the Artistic Director of Silent Uproar and the co-director of the show Ruby Clarke, “Knocked it around for a while.”

Out of these conversations came the idea of two contemporary young women accidentally summoning Greek deities, the Furies, whilst asking questions such as what would they be like?

How could we represent the kind of power given that they were operating outside of the rules. It had always had songs but punk felt like a really great way to do that. And so we brought in Anya Pearson, the acclaimed punk musician to help and who has now been on board for over a year and a half.

Maureen explained that Dead Girls Rising straddles two worlds with its Greek mythical element but at its heart it is the story of two young women, Katie and Hannah, growing up.

It is looking at how the coming-of-age experience for girls and women so often involves learning to operate in a world of fear and a world which, whether something has happened to you or not, like the possibility of violence, often feels quite alive and the stories of that violence are everywhere. So, you are imbibing them all the time. What that does that do to us as human beings?

Dead Girls Rising Rehearsal (c) Silent Uproar

Maureen continued:

As a society we kind of fetishise and are obsessed with the stories of dead girls. and I kind of wanted to explore why that was, but also what that does to us if it feels like. That story becomes so pervasive in our culture that the myth of the dead girl feels like one of our founding stories as a society and like something we need to investigate.

Maureen thought that this came from TV, literature and film but she returned to the classics stating that partly the play is inspired by Greek trilogy the Oresteia, which the Furies are part of. They are in the third play of the trilogy, The Eumenides, and that is often talked about in academic circles as being one of the founding examples of justice and a justice system. The judgement is based on the idea that women are not as important as men with the strong and disturbing misogyny of Apollo arguing that fathers have a greater claim over their children than mothers do.

I got really interested in that and I thought, wow, what a family to belong to!

Maureen doesn’t aim to lecture her audience but to hold a conversation and this piece does that on so many levels that should attract an audience of all ages and backgrounds. She is particularly keen to attract younger audiences to her work.

Aiming at a younger 16+ crowd doesn’t mean other people cannot or won’t come, but it just means it is about how do we make sure that a new generation also thinks the theatre is for them and is an exciting place. How do we kind of speak that language in a way that means stories we are telling are alive, vibrant, and exciting? It is also like the gig element; the venues that we are going to were carefully selected. We are trying to open out who will feel comfortable in the space.

Many of the performances on the tour are in non-traditional theatre spaces including two performances for Red Ladder Local at Marsden Mechanics on Saturday 25^th May and The Cluntergate Centre Horbury on Sunday 26^th May, both at 7:30pm.

Join Katie and Hannah and the Furies this month. You won’t be disappointed!

By John Heywood

Additional dates can be found at https://www.silentuproarproductions.co.uk/coming-soon