10/10/2025
Performed by a cast of 20 brilliant Cornwall based actors and a live band!
Tickets are now on sale for the new play at Gweek Village Hall, Cornwall. For early seats 'promotional' code: EARLYBIRD
12 - 15 November
Director: Aline Turner
Musical Director: Helen Gibson
Tickets are online from 13 October but you can book an early seat now with the following 'promotional' code: EARLYBIRD
Some background:
Mary Bryant was an 18th Century Fowey woman who was transported to Australia for committing a highway robbery. Three years later, she escaped Australia in an open top boat with her young children, husband and a small group of other convicts. Incredibly, she survived and returned to Cornwall as a free woman and a national heroine.
There are many versions of Mary Bryant's story from Judith Cook's landmark book 'To Brave Every Danger' to the very clean Amazon Prime series where sexy Mary flounces around in a lot of white dresses with barely a stain in sight!
In this large-cast adaptation, Mary is very much a woman of Cornwall; she embodies the growing resistance among the poor; where the Cornish scrambled for land and trade, amidst civil unrest.
Drawing on real accounts by social reformers of the notorious prison in Exeter to the unimaginable conditions aboard the prison ship held off Plymouth, the play explores the terrible conditions under Britain's penal system and highlight broader issues such as the peculiar notion that we could get rid of 'bad blood' by sending criminals to Australia!
