David Hennessy spoke to Finn Anderson, creator of the new folk musical Ballad Lines which is having its London premiere at Southwark Playhouse.
Ballad Lines, a new folk musical, is currently having its London premiere at Southwark Playhouse.
Ballad Lines, which deals with themes of identity, belonging and the stories we choose to carry with us.
The original score weaves together new songs with centuries-old traditional Scottish, Irish, and Appalachian ballads performed live, breathing new life.
The Irish World spoke to Finn Anderson who is the show’s co-creator and composer/ lyricist.
In the story Sarah realises she still has a chance to be a mother.
As a queer woman living in New York City, she had long severed ties with the folk traditions of her upbringing.
But when old ballads resurface, so do the voices of her ancestors — pulling her on a life-changing journey across time.
Spanning continents and generations, Ballad Lines follows three women bound together by blood, song, and choice.
In 17th-century Scotland, Cait, a minister’s wife, wrestles with the constraints of her role.
In 18th-century Ireland, Jean, a spirited teenager, faces an uncertain future. In 21st-century New York, Sarah is caught between the life she’s built and the pull of the past.
Ballad Lines explores themes of music, tradition, motherhood and choice.
Finn Anderson is an award-winning Scottish musical theatre writer and singer-songwriter.
He is currently on a writer attachment at the National Theatre, London and is an Associate Artist at Lowry, Salford.
He was the Cameron Mackintosh Resident Composer at Lowry and Hope Mill theatres.
As a singer-songwriter, he has released two albums and toured across the UK and US, playing alongside artists such as Patrick Wolf, Rachel Sermanni, Sam Lee, Douglas Dare and Horse.
He has performed regularly with Bogha-Frois: Queer Voices in Folk, a collective of musicians working to increase visibility for LGBTQ+ stories in the Scottish folk tradition
He is co- creator and composer/ lyricist of Ballad Lines.
How did the idea of Ballad Lines start?
“It really came from a collaboration between me and Tania (Azevedo), who’s the show’s director and co-writer.
“Me and Tania had been given an opportunity to write a musical for a group of transatlantic students from Northwestern University in Chicago and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow.
“But we got talking about what we were both interested in at that time.
“I was really interested in this idea of how music travels and how songs migrate, looking at the Scottish ballads and how those travelled and how they informed music elsewhere in the world specifically in this show looking at Appalachian culture and how that’s evolved from a combination of things including Scottish music and obviously Irish as well.
“Tania was really interested in questions around motherhood and female bodily autonomy and female choice.
“I guess we were also interested in exploring both of those different themes through a queer perspective.
“I guess both the song migration and the evolution of song and the evolution of choice in those issues surrounding motherhood and pregnancy are things which have changed and evolved over generations.
“We were excited to explore how we could bring them together to tell a story that takes place in multiple time zones.”
The show displays the power of these ballads being sung by different women of different generations..
“I think there’s something amazing about the fact that somebody would have sung a song in the 1500s/ 1600s and it might remain mostly intact today in a lot of ways in terms of the sentiment and the story that’s being told, and the idea that you can sing that song now and you can be having a different experience or you might be having a similar experience to that woman back then.
“But the idea that people have sung these songs as ways of processing whatever they’re going through in their life or as telling stories of what’s happening in their life and the fact that we can sing them at different points in history- I’m always obsessed with the idea of tradition and how by tapping into our traditions, we’re kind of in conversation with the past but we’re also in conversation with the future and it also plants us somewhere in that journey.”
In the story Sarah opens this box that has been left to her by her late aunt and is unprepared for the songs, memories and family history that she finds in it..
“That’s a beautiful way of putting it, that she’s unprepared.
“You’re right, she is unprepared and I guess the box is a metaphor for a lot of other things in her life that she’s turned her back on: The elements of her childhood and her upbringing that she feels don’t align with who she is now.
“The story is really about her learning to move forward in the world in a way that feels authentic to her, that honours the new things she’s found since she left home but also allows her to be at peace with the elements of her tradition and culture and upbringing and family that she does like and does.
“And she finds a way to sing those ballads in her own way and feel like she belongs within those songs and within that music and that culture in a way that she maybe at the beginning of the story, doesn’t see a place for herself in.”
Sarah didn’t have parents growing up which is why she was raised by her aunt.
Does finding her ancestors’ stories in this box mean more to her for not having parents?
“I think that is a really good observation and that is something that we talked about a lot in the room.
“Does she (Sarah) have more of a yearning for these nuggets of information because she wasn’t able to have those conversations with her own parents?
“All we really find out in the story is that she never knew her real parents and the idea that she was raised by someone who raised her, in many ways, very lovingly, in other ways more challenging.”
There’s regret in the story of Sarah and her aunt in that they remained estranged and never reconciled before she passed..
“I think there’s different things in the story that different people will relate to.
“For me that’s one of the big things that I relate to, that challenge of just how family works and how you navigate family.
“There are always fallings out and how do you come back from that and the regrets that you might hold on to.
“I think the power of music and song to bring people together and to overcome some of those barriers and some of those fractures is one of the big messages of the show, that music can help us through some of those hard times and songs can be there for us if we need a way to process whatever it is we’re dealing with.”
There is a common theme of motherhood between the main characters with Jean finding herself pregnant out of wedlock in a time when being a single mother was unacceptable, Cait the minister’s wife who doesn’t want to have the baby and then Sarah realising she wants to be a mother..
“They’re all thematically linked with parenthood and pregnancy and motherhood and choice but they’re all making very different choices and they’re all in very different circumstances.
“Actually there are many women like Cait.
“There are many women like that right now in America and in other places in the world that do not want to have children and are pregnant but don’t have the options that many women do elsewhere today so it’s knowing that those stories, while they’re old, are also still happening in different ways.
“There’s people like Jean also still having to figure out single parenthood in a culture that still finds that quite taboo.”
Ireland voted to Repeal the Eighth just in 2018 so that shows how modern these issues are..
“Absolutely, I think we talked a lot about why we’re telling this story now and all of those things.
“I guess all actors bring their own kind of experience into the room so I think everyone in the room will have had a different relationship to the story and obviously, for the women in the room, it’s a very particular thing.
“But also, it’s kind of about the idea of tradition.
“I grew up around a lot of folk music and around a lot of Scottish tradition but it wasn’t till I was really an adult that I realised how absent queer stories are from a lot of those stories and those songs.
“I guess this shows also us kind of hoping to try and address some of that in in making space for queer characters in a same sex relationship within a style of music that maybe a lot of queer people I know don’t necessarily feel represented in.
“There were also actors in the room that wanted to talk about that as well.
“There’s a whole load of themes going on that we could tap into in the room and it was made for some very heated discussion in the rehearsal room which is great.
“Everyone was really engaged and everyone had different things to offer.
“And I think when you get actors that are at the calibre of the cast we’ve got, they’re being brilliant performers and they really inhabit those characters.
“Once you get them in the room, then you learn so much from them about how they see the character as well, and that informs the writing.
“It’s exciting to be part of that.”
How have you found audiences reacting to the story? Have these elements struck those chords?
“I guess people within the LGBT community that are seeing that relationship played out on stage.
“Some people feel really seen by that and feel really like they’re seeing themselves in a story in a way that they haven’t before in musical theatre.
“I think that the audience response has been really special but I also think it’s wider than that.
“Different people have their own ways into the story and it’s been beautiful to see it resonate really emotionally.
“There was an 80 year old man I was talking to the other day and he was so deeply moved.
“And there have been teenagers in the audience that have been really moved by it.
“It’s not really a family show but we have had people of most ages, from all around the world who’ve resonated with it in different ways.
“I think that’s been really special for me to see because it is very specifically a Scottish story, Celtic story but to see that it’s a story about one specific niche of culture and music but that it can resonate with people that have come from different places in the world and have their own stories.
“That’s always the hope when you’re telling a story is that then other people meet you with their own life experience and with their own stories and then you meet somewhere in the middle, and that’s where the magic happens with a lot of people coming back to see the show a second time, a third time which is really beautiful to see and shows that people want to get more out of the story.”
The poignant part of the story for me is when Sarah reaches out to hold Jean in a time of need. Although they are living in different times and have never met, they feel very close..
“I think it’s kind of this idea that the past is with us now.
“We’re kind of walking down the same streets as those who’ve walked the streets before us and we’re singing the same songs as those who sang the songs before us and those who’ll sing them after.
“But also, for Sarah, she opens this box and these historical characters kind of begin to take over her space and her apartment and her life and so by the end of the story, she’s really in it.
“She’s really in those stories.
“She’s, like you say, really invested in the stories and really engaged and kind of can’t escape it.
“The final step of that for her is to step in and help Jean give birth and comfort Cait in her dark moment.
“It’s like Sarah is able to help the woman from her past and they also help her in turn to move forward in her life.”
Have you been surprised by things you have found in your research on this history of music migrating to America from Scotland and Ireland?
“I think, especially at the moment, we really think of culture as being fixed to a country or fixed to a place and there’s borders around that and we want to preserve the culture. but culture is just always traveling and shifting and changing and it’s informed hugely by migration.
“And that migration is the thing that makes culture what it is in most parts of the world, especially in America.
“Migration is what’s evolved most contemporary American music and most of what we consider American culture has been the byproduct of migration and people coming and going and traveling, and people exchanging songs and people exchanging stories.
“It feels important to me to tell a story that highlights the positives that come from migration too.”
Ballad Lines is at Southwark Playhouse (Elephant) until 21 March. For more information and to book, click here.