Compton Mackenzie‘s 1928 comic novel bursts onto the stage for the first time with a glorious score by Tony Award winner Sarah Travis (orchestrator Sweeney Todd – Broadway, upcoming Brigadoon – Regent’s Park Theatre) and lyrics by actor and bestselling author Richard Stirling (Cecil Beaton’s Diaries – Off Broadway, Julie Andrews: an intimate biography) by kind permission of the Society of Authors. We sat down with Richard to discuss their upcoming production.
This is the first time Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women has been adapted for the stage. What drew you to this particular novel, and how did you approach translating its comic spirit into a musical format?
The piece was originally commissioned in lockdown, by Stewart Nicholls, BA Musical Theatre Programme Leader and Associate Professor at Guildford School of Acting. I am unsure how he came across the book, but I know he was looking for a subject for a predominately female group of student Finalists. And when the piece was performed, albeit remotely, they were very fine indeed. I have to say, we owe everything to Stewart and his discovery. Sarah Travis and I wrote the basic piece
reasonably quickly: the characters, location, period and humour all lent themselves to musical treatment remarkably easily.
As both lyricist and book writer, how did you work with Sarah Travis to weave her music and your words into a unified theatrical language? Could you describe your collaborative process in shaping the tone and rhythm of the show? Were there particular moments where the music shaped the story, or vice versa?
As I say, Sarah and I wrote separately in lockdown isolation. We then had a couple of meetings in the period when we were allowed to mingle. I wrote the lyrics first for the majority of narrative and ‘point’ songs, but Sarah set the musical landscape early on, as well as landing some of the score’s catchiest earworms. Working with a Tony Award winner is a privilege, but Sarah and I had great satisfaction in pitching ideas, lyrical and musical, by Zoom. And although she is a phenomenal composer, her theatrical instinct is frighteningly acute.
The show celebrates a group of ‘extraordinary women’ in a post-WWI Mediterranean setting. How did you interpret or expand the gender politics and queer subtext of Mackenzie’s original work for a contemporary musical theatre audience?
The beauty of the book is as a comic novel. There is no didacticism, just a fullhearted depiction of women after the Great War making a brilliant and sometime reckless life for themselves – as one of them says, ‘contro il mondo’. But actually they are not against the world, but in pursuit of self-identification and agency. They are mostly monied. And lesbian. But more than anything they are women on their own terms, and dazzling with it. One of the delights for an audience today is to see how a male writer let these extraordinary women leap off the page a century ago.
The setting of the island of Sirene feels both idyllic and volatile, with themes of paradise, desire, and disruption. How did you and the creative team, including director Paul Foster and designer Alex Marker, envision the world of the island theatrically?
Sirene is paradise for these women. Paul Foster and Joanne Goodwin, director and choreographer, have done a truly stunning job of bringing the characters and their locale to life. Jermyn Street Theatre is a small space. But the world Paul and Joanna have created with this extraordinary group of West End performers is as persuasive as anything I have seen recently in London. The result is both specific and evocative.
You’ve previously worked on stage biographies and adaptations of historic figures. How does Extraordinary Women fit into your broader artistic interests in history, character, and reinvention—and what new ground does it allow you to explore as a writer?
I have always enjoyed writing female roles, and make it a badge of honour to have more women than men in a cast, if I can. The 1920s was an extraordinary time, in which everything changed for women, particularly if young. After centuries of covering their bodies and following in their male relatives’ shadows, suddenly they were encouraged to bare their legs, cut their hair, have a good time (even if they couldn’t afford it) and face the world with defiance. Of course, there was burn-out with the stock market crash of 1929. And of course women needed to have money to indulge these freedoms. But even for poorer women, there was a new wind in the air, and this must have been intoxicating. The women in this play are defiant about the world, to their last breath.
Extraordinary Women runs at Jermyn Street Theatre from 23 July to 10 August. For more information and to book click here https://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/show/extraordinary-women-a-new-musical-of-the-1920s/