It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad Madge – The Glitch, London

Writer: Packham & Kealy in co-creation with Anna Hale

Director: Clare Packham

Seventeenth-century polymath Margaret Cavendish is back and is ready for her very own ‘sexy period drama,’ ideally starring a famous edgy actress and with a soundtrack that is as ferocious as she is. Wife to a Duke 30 years her senior, writer of multiple unread books and English Civil War survivor known to Samuel Pepys, Anna Hale’s ‘Madge’ describes this show as a ‘cultural moment’ in which her resurrection takes place at The Glitch in Waterloo. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad Madge is part stand-up, part biography, part art experience, but, she insists, it definitely isn’t theatre.

And certainly, creators Packham & Kealy adopt a deliberately loose and non-linear approach to Margaret’s story, a one-hour piece that skitters between topics and performance styles that seem to reflect the restless combustible energy of Margaret herself. Defying convention and categorisation is the point, a homage to the protagonist who is equally elusive in her interest in art, science, philosophy and theology. The character of Margaret admits to being an unreliable narrator and rejects the notion of history as a ‘comfort blanket’ all the while revelling in a self-importance vested in certainty that the same history has conveniently ignored her.

Packham & Kealy’s show unfolds in discrete segments that flow into one another through the ‘experimental musical theatre’ choices that mix different styles together in ways that seem to reflect the personality of Margaret Cavendish. Sometimes in song, she is intense with electronic and headbanging rhythms, at others more traditional such as the number about eating her fingernails and keeping the rest in a box, while later in the show, Margaret is more ethereal, even mystical as she loses herself in the science fiction stories of other worlds that she created – and much of the show is drawn from her writing – with superbly eclectic vocals from Hale.

There are some strong through-lines here about the limitations placed on women’s lives with Margaret admitting to buying her way into posterity by getting her books published in an era when women were largely excluded from writing and her love of fashion which speak to her self-awareness as well as an ability to express and impose her personality in multiple ways. But there are darker tones as well, especially lingering notes of violence directed towards women whose lives are controlled by the viciousness of men and a powerful scene later in the show explores the possibility that Margaret witnessed the exhumation and desecration of her relatives’ corpses during a Parliamentarian siege in the 1640s with the sense of violation particularly well depicted.

Yet the nature of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad Madge also keeps the audience on the outside with its many, admittedly inventive, distancing techniques. But what it is that PINCHY Theatre want the outcome of their show to be? Is it something as conventional as drawing attention to who Margaret was or that there are many equally fascinating and belied women in history? The original Margaret and her resurrected self may defy categorisation, but from peers and audiences, they both want a kind of recognition in the end that perhaps makes this theatre after all.

Runs until 10 March 2025