The Unravelling Fantasia of Miss H
As we approach International Women’s Day I recall this phrase “Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart!” (Writer Elizabeth Gill). After witnessing an exhibit which did just that, I felt compelled as an artist to explore further.
The subject was Mary Frances Heaton committed, after demanding payment owed her by the vicar, to 41 years in Wakefield Pauper Lunatic Asylum. Her story is known to us because she embroidered it onto almost a dozen samplers which survived and were later found in the Asylum.
As a musician and actor I was immediately struck by the rich metaphorical potential for a piece of performance with its complex tapestry and emotional unravelling – I imagined a vocally haunting and evocative piece, distortion and anarchy as Mary Frances Heaton’s inner world erupted into chaos and despair.
The libretto was sourced largely from Mary’s own embroidered words and from her surviving medical records which included anecdotes and descriptions – a story that you couldn’t ‘make up!’ I surrounded myself with a brilliant creative team of women (one who came equipped with a subversive, deconstructed inside out piano) to figure out how best to tell it. Offstage Yorkshire women who lived in the communities where Mary came from would express their responses through Radical stitching workshops and Empowering singing workshops.
We are half-way through our Yorkshire tour and so far the response has been overwhelming: women opening up after the performance about their own lives, their mental health, their sense of disempowerment in the system as women, as birth-givers, as mothers and carers, to recall just a few conversations I had post show. One woman told me how a cherished member of her family had been thrown into a psychiatric unit by her husband who was having an affair – this experience led her to take her own life. Another woman with experience in institutions basically said “Nothing has changed”, another was fleeing for her life from and a husband who wanted to commit her and her eldest daughter and a country which offered them no sanctuary.
These women tell me that the story we are telling on stage is resonant, accurate, empowering, enabling them to tell me their own stories shortly after my coming offstage. Women know it is time to stay silent no longer to refuse to tolerate the injustices which keep us down. Mary’s samplers hang in Wakefield Mental Health Museum, her enduring words and images to be seen by generations to come. I had no idea this story would stir such emotions and start so many much needed conversations. Where to take them now is the next part of this journey.
The Unravelling Fantasia of Miss H Stitched-up Theatre’s contemporary music theatre piece is a new composition by soprano Red Gray and Sarah Nicolls with her inside-out piano, touring Yorkshire following a successful run at the Arcola Theatre and Tete a Tete Festival in London. Find out more about the performance on 9th March at Left Bank here.