Anna – Emul8 Theatre Co., Rialto Theatre, 20th May
Having worked in the Hastings area some time back, I’d heard often of the inspiring protagonist of this show, Annie (Baroness) Brassey, a titled lady adventurer oft found in vast undiscovered areas in foreign lands in her prime, the key Victorian years of the 1870s.
This intrepid lady and her multitudinous children and husband, a Member of Parliament, sailed their steam ship the ‘Sunbeam’, called after the nickname for their young daughter who died of scarlet fever age four. This lost child is characterised in the play at the Rialto by a large puppet that looms large in the proceedings, having left the family bereft with her passing.
Annie Brassie comes across in this play as a larger than life individual who, though from privilege, was enamoured with the wider world and all the varied inhabitants in it. Her journal, ‘A Voyage in the Sunbeam’, once published, brought her fame as a popular writer of the period. This play sought to uncover the woman behind these tales.
I was excited to see the show as it promised an unusual re-telling of this great life through a combination of puppetry, song, and acting. I can see that a lot of thought and preparation had gone into its production. The show starts with the protagonist being mocked unkindly by certain parochial establishment figures in the local area for her pretensions. This first section takes place during a period of mourning for her daughter Constance and at this juncture Baroness Brassey seems lost and isn’t eating. As a result, her tale is told by the servants of the house to provide context.
This was my main issue with this piece – by giving so much of this portion to the servants, it started to feel like their story rather than the key player’s. The elements together didn’t amount to the sum of the parts, and the constant repetition of the same lines by the Anna’s maid Bessie made for somewhat tedious viewing. It felt that these characters were getting in the way of the tale, rather than adding to it. This changed over the course of the play but by then my attention was wandering and I felt a certain frustration that it didn’t live up to its promise. It was good effort but could have benefited from cutting their lines back to move the story forward.
Much of Anna’s collection of ethnographic material are now housed at Hastings Museum and Hasting Library and I recommend viewing these there to get a true picture of this great life. Brassey’s last voyage on the Sunbeam to India was in 1886 but she died of malaria on 14 September en route in 1887, and was buried at sea.
