Morveren: Matriarchy, Mermaids, Motherhood

About the Play

Morveren is a new intergenerational play by Kate Webster, which will be directed by Marvellous Machine Artistic Director Lou Corben, with original live music by Becki Jayne Reed. Drawing on British folklore and mermaid myths, Morveren is centered around a coastal community run entirely by women, and explores what it’s like to be dependent on the sea. Tides are the rhythm of this community’s life, including the annual ritual in which they honour the water and everything it gives them. The play explores a world where women make the decisions, using theatrical magic and live music to tell this unique story of a matriarch handing on her power that offers an alternative to dystopian futures. Morveren is about finding you were the answer all along and ends with an epic song and dance number celebrating community and harmony with nature.

Ambitious banker Keren takes mermaid-obsessed daughter Ellie back to her rural Cornish roots, only to discover the village is a hidden society run by women. Morwen, the grandmother who raised her, wants Keren to stay and take over as village matriarch. But Keren can’t imagine giving up the career she’s built. Through confronting the legacy of the lifeboat wreck that killed her parents and finding a way to protect the village from becoming a gentrified heritage attraction, Keren discovers she doesn’t have to choose between owning her roots and her ambition. She can be both.

We are working with female singers from Oxford Community Choir and London City Voices to create an original soundtrack of choral songs and folk music to accompany the play.

About the company

Marvellous Machine Theatre Company is a female-led theatre company that creates magical home-spun theatre with original live music, inspired by fairytales, feminism, the Gothic, traditional folk music and comedy. We’re a small company with limited resources, yet the stories we tell are one of castles, carriages, beasts, and magic. We bring stories to life using live music and foley, object theatre, puppetry and physical theatre. Some say that limitation breeds invention and that seems to be the case with us.

Director Lou Corben is Artist in Residence at Battersea Arts Centre, and has trained with prestigious directors including Rebecca Frecknall, Robert Icke, Lyndsey Turner and Emma Rice. Musical Director Becki Jayne Reed is a choir leader and composer for theatre, and writer Kate Webster is a Criterion New Writing participant, longlisted for The Old Vic 12 and recently commissioned by Harrow Arts Centre and Talking Birds.

How You Can Help

We are raising funds to put toward production costs including set, costume, venue hire, publicity, travel costs, and rehearsal space hire. Your help means we are able to properly pay our actors a fair rate and helps us build resiliency, sustainability and longevity as a young independent theatre company.

As a thank you, we'll be sharing a discount code for 15% off ticket prices to all who donate.

Other Ways You Can Help

Money can be tight – we totally get it if you don’t feel you can contribute but here are some other ways you can help:

Our past work

Masque (in collaboration with Chronic Insanity Theatre): “[the company]​​ have come up with something intriguing and at only 20 minutes it won’t consume a lot of your time; however, it manages to say quite a bit more than many productions a dozen times the length” - 2ndFromBottom

The Tiger’s Bride: “A plush and captivating take on one of Angela Carter’s famously subversive fairy tale retellings… There is luxury enough to sink into” – Daily Info | “inventive staging and production, beautifully-drawn characters, sensual and engaging” - audience comment | “Gaspingly good. So, so tender” - audience comment

ORLANDO: “succeeds in teasing out provocations within Woolf’s story… [an] intriguing, thoughtful production.” – Newbury Weekly News | “Witty, inspiring, moving, musically smashing” - audience comment | “I’m uplifted by the whole experience – buzzing in fact! - audience comment