There is no better way to tell you about this show than to reproduce this review by Rosie Upton
'The definitive folk opera is without doubt Peter Bellamy’s The Transports and for me it is the yardstick by which all subsequent folk musicals compare. Yet in The Navvy’s Wife Mick Ryan has produced a show from which comparisons can be easily drawn.
Not only does it tell the stories of those who their contemporaries would have regarded as the dregs of humanity, and it tells it from their own perspective, but Mick has brought together some particularly fine singers and musicians whose names are well known on the folk circuit and beyond.
Mick’s collaboration with Graham Moore produced the hugely successful folk musical A Tolpuddle Man and he has since gone on to compose other musicals in his own right; A Days Work about the First World War, The Voyage about emigration to America in the mid 19th century, and the eviction of the villagers of Tyneham in Dorset during the second world war in Tanks for the Memory. The Navvy’s Wife is the culmination of all this hard work and it is a masterpiece.
Mick is a fine singer, his voice is rich and eloquent, and he knows instinctively how to tell a story. His voice is always authoritative but especially so in this production because members of his own family had worked on the canals and railways. His love of this subject and empathy with these men and the unfortunate, forgotten women and their kin who had no choice but to follow them, despite their own strength of character, was obvious from the start.
The result is songs that are both lyrical and elegant but also measured without any trace of that maudlin emotion that could so easily have made this a melodrama rather than a moving glimpse of harsher times.
It provides a clear picture of a world where deprivation, poverty, drunkenness, love, sexual adventure, cruelty, death, inequality and above all prejudice and bigotry were the norm. It is all too easy to think of navvies simply as a group of men and to forget that they had wives, lovers, mothers and children. Also easy to assume a racial stereotype that exposes our prejudices that they were all Irish when in fact we learn that the majority were English.
It was a time when even well-to-do women had little power and the navvies wives and women no power of their own. Throughout history it has been the voices of women especially those who have suffered injustice, oppression, exploitation, isolation and social exclusion that are forgotten. Mick has given this group of women, many who suffered abuse and abandonment, forced to move from one partner to another just to survive, an enduring voice beyond their own lifetime. This is powerful song writing and it allows the performers to speak for themselves.
Easy then to assume that this might have been a gloomy production but that is not the case. Paul Downes as a sometime priest, parson and missionary as the story progresses through different ages brings great humour to his performance. Jackie Oates, Judy Dunlop and Heather Bradford as the navvies’ women each give moving and well-sung performances. Roger Watson was as accomplished as the enterprising railway contractor as he was the old retired navvy. It was Roger’s musicianship, Jackie’s fiddle playing and more especially Paul’s expert guitar work that underpinned the show throughout and lifted the emotions. But it was Mick’s words that make this a masterwork, his music and skill as a writer, as well as that unmistakeably commanding and silky smooth voice as Paddy or Sean, the Irish Navvies, that continued in my head long after the performance had ended'.