Following up her plays The Life and Times of Fanny Hill, Playhouse Creatures  about the first women actresses in the 16th century, and A Laughing Matter, about 18th century actresses, April De Angelis has written another costume drama, but this time it’s a musical developed with China Plate and English Touring Theatre and opening at the Royal and Derngate in Northampton.  Lucy Rivers has composed the music. 

In 1751, William Hogarth published two prints, Gin Lane and Beer Street.  Whereas Beer Street showed the well nourished, well clothed and well behaved inhabitants, Gin Lane was the centre of depravity and moral degeneration.  Hogarth’s friend was Henry Fielding, the magistrate, and novelist known for Tom Jones.  Henry Fielding (Alex Mugnaioni) together with his brother John (Peter Pearson), concerned about the level of crime in gin soaked parts of London, campaigned for people to drink beer instead of gin, for the water then carried disease like cholera.   The Fielding brothers went on to form the first police force, the Bow Street Runners in 1749.

Three years after the death of his first wife, Henry Fielding caused gossip when he married her maid, Mary Daniel (Aruhan Galieva) who was pregnant.  Samuel Richardson novelist and author of Pamela said, “Only a congenital idiot would marry his servant.”

It is Mary’s backstory which forms the narrative of Gin Craze!  We see her at, maybe 19, pregnant by the hypocritical Reverend Thomas Wilson (Peter Pearson) and cast out from her post as a servant by her mistress (Paula James).  She gives her baby to Suki (Rosalind Ford) to care for, promising to return when she has earned £4 the equivalent to a year’s wages. 

She and her friend, a herbalist Lydia (Paksie Vernon) set to making gin and Lydia disguises herself as a man, Jack, to give their business more clout.  By way of context we have the marvellously comic Debbie Chazen as both Moll, a drunken prostitute and as Queen Caroline of Ansbach (isn’t that a rather good brandy?) wife of George II who finds London streets frighteningly full of crime. 

The inhabitants of Gin Lane are brought to life, full of bawdy humour (a warning of Anglo Saxon words for anatomical parts if you are thinking of taking children), almost all of them also playing a musical instrument as well as singing and acting.  Director Michael Oakley has assembled a brilliant company of talented actors, six women and two men. 

This musical is a celebration of feminism, there is a Lesbian romance and everything is seen from the feminine perspective.  There are also social comments: we learn that in Southwark in 1736/7, 9000 children died from gin poisoning.  It seems that the 18th century equivalent of “gin on the dummy” was even more prevalent than in the twentieth century.  We hear about the terrible fate of babies given away by their mothers and the outcome for those that survive babyhood without their mothers, like Lydia/Jack.   

Mary is arrested for selling gin without paying the exorbitant gin taxes but meets Sarah Fielding (Rachel Winters) John and Henry’s sister, eventually ending up as maid to Henry’s sick wife.