'She'd be buzzing!' Billy Nomates & Maureen Lennon on Mary Wollstonecraft
'It is important that the music has some guts, and a rawness ... I don’t think Mary listens to Ed Sheeran'
Mary Wollstonecraft is known as ‘the mother of feminism’: her 1792 treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Women is one of the earliest and most influential works of feminist philosophy. She advocated for equal rights for women, for them to be given the same education and opportunities as men, leading one critic to dub her a “hyena in petticoats”. She had a turbulent life – seeking out fellow radical intellectuals and resisting marriage, although she eventually wed the philosopher William Godwin, dying at just 38 after giving birth to her daughter Mary Shelley.
On a tide of fourth-wave feminism, Wollstonecraft has received more attention in recent years, publicly reclaimed and celebrated – from Maggi Hambling’s naked statue to an upcoming movie by Mia Hansen-Love. This month, she’s also stepping on stage at Hull Truck Theatre – and breaking into song: Maureen Lennon’s new play Mary and the Hyena’s sees Wollstonecraft telling her life story to the daughter she never got to know, and features brand new songs by Billy Nomates aka Tor Maries. Also available as an album, Billy Nomates’ defiant, expansive, 80s-inflected synth pop is a properly thrilling match for Wollstonecraft’s irrepressible spirit. I spoke to both artists about why Wollstonecraft still has so much to say to us today.
Holly Williams: What was the original spark of the idea for Mary and the Hyenas?
Maureen Lennon: I’d been a fan of Mary Wollstonecraft for a really long time. My mum is a philosopher who writes a lot about gender and is really passionate about Mary. And, little known fact, Mary grew up in Beverley, really near where I grew up in Hull – we’re claiming her as a Yorkshire lass.
In 2018 Hull Truck approached me about writing a show. There was a report released that year, ranking all the local authorities in the UK based on how they were upholding the rights of girls, and Hull was something like the sixth worst place to grow up as a girl. I said I’d like to write something about ‘how do we raise women?’. And that felt like a really great tie with Wollstonecraft and her work.
Holly: Did you always know you wanted to have music in it – for it to be gig theatre, or a play with songs…?
Maureen: It is not musical theatre, but it leans more into MT than gig theatre. It’s all [pre-recorded] tracks – we really wanted that freedom to be quite physical in the staging. A lot of really horrible things happen to Mary and there’s a real risk that you just sit in that? But her energy is the thing about her that is incredibly magic – and the songs can help to represent her energy. That was one of the reasons we were so buzzing when we found Tor, because it felt she like could encapsulate all of that spirit and give something unique and unexpected.
So much of what happens to Mary and what she says is so relevant to now, but when you’re caught in the historicism, how do you cut though? I wanted permission to be playful in the text, and the music gave permission for that – for speaking in contemporary language.
Holly: And how did you get involved Tor – how did they find you?
Tor Maries: Someone was outside my house for weeks… no, I just got an email! I’ve never written for theatre before, it’s not my world at all, but it just landed at completely the right time. I’d come off a really really long tour and things that had happened to me, that I’d experienced through putting myself out there with my work… when I read about the premise of [the play] I just thought, yeah I need to be part of this.
I was nervous about not being able to do it justice. One thing hopefully that I’ve done – and that I always try to do in my music – is take heavy subjects and make them palatable. I feel like that’s my job: to take the shit, and go ‘but how are you going to sing the chorus to this so it’s a banger?’ You’re putting the medicine in the food a bit.
Holly: How was it writing songs for a stage show?
Tor: Yeah, it was definitely a challenge! I remember sitting with Maureen and her words and going, what’s the overall feeling here? I work a lot on feeling. Once we’d gone through that, I felt like I had a map. What I didn’t want to do was make it like musical theatre songs – if it falls into that category that’s fine, but for me it was important that they’re just songs, that it works as an album too. It was also important that it wasn’t a delicate recording – that it has some guts, and a rawness to it. In my head, I don’t think Mary is someone who listens to Ed Sheeran!
I’m always drawn to 80s synths and 80s riffs, and I liked the idea bringing those sounds in but in a contemporary manner? I have a lot of conversations about the sonics of conscience, how music is presented as new but there’s something old about it well? So that worked for me, in bringing the songs into the now.
Maureen: That’s such a theatrical idea, isn’t it? Because theatre is always here and always now, and then you’re bringing stuff from the past to here…
Holly: Did you know much about Wollstonecraft before starting the project, Tor?
Tor: I’m not gonna lie, I had no idea. And she is a very prevalent figure for feminism, but not a readily known name? I started to learn about her, you piece it together and you go, shit – she was big!
Maureen: If Mary could know we were sat here in 2025 going “shit – she was big”, she’d be delighted! That woman had an ego.
Holly: Can you say a little bit more about who Mary Wollstonecraft was?
Maureen: Mary is around in the 1800s, and she’s middle class but without any money. She isn’t really given much education, but she reads a lot and discovers big radical ideas. She is from a family where there was quite a lot of domestic abuse and she had to physically fight her dad to protect her mum when she was a teenager. She refuses to marry, and tries being a governess, but she’s got a really big mouth and always kicks off when she sees injustice – and aristocrats don’t love that when you’re doing it in their house…
She writes a little treatise called Thoughts on the Education of Daughters – she becomes one of the first female writers, and does loads of translations of really famous German philosophers, and then ends up in France in the French Revolution. And she dies at 38, of sepsis, ten days after giving birth. It’s amazing what she achieves by 38: the amount of things she wrote, and then giving birth to Mary Shelley…
Holly: Did you always know that you would have Wollstonecraft in conversation with Mary Shelley, as a storytelling device?
Maureen: It came when I found this quote about her first daughter – I’m phrasing it differently, but she said ‘I’m scared when I look at her, because I want to bring her up and unfold her mind and make her the best she can be and the most powerful she can be… but I also want her to be loved and I want her to be happy, and I know the world will ask her to sacrifice one of those things’.
It’s such an alive question – I’m in my thirties, all my friends are onto their second, third kids, and it was a question I was seeing them ask themselves – particularly about daughters. They’d say, I want to her to feel like she owns the world, and we’ve also discussed when we talk to her about sexual violence. How do you raise in a girl in a world that is hostile to their power?
The idea that she never got to have that conversation with Mary Shelley… well, the play can give her the chance. It’s her telling her story to her daughter, and what lessons she wants her daughter to take. That’s the only thing she can do to protect her from the world – god knows she’s tried her hardest to change it! But she also knows that they’re not there yet. And I think we’re not there yet – we’re still having to ask these questions about how to raise our daughters.
Holly: Wollstonecraft is today known as ‘the mother of feminism’…
Maureen: A Vindication of the Rights of Women is the thing that gets her the name ‘mother of feminism’, but I think that title is given to be torn down: the whole point of feminism is it doesn’t come from one person. But it is one of the first published texts that sets out ‘this is the condition of women in our society, and this is not working.’
The argument she’s making – and it sounds mad now – is that women can be rational beings, they can have intellect and thoughts! It does spend quite a lot of time criticising women, there’s a lot of ‘women are just artificial and sentimental and they fuss all the time’ but the argument she’s making is that if you don’t give people opportunities, then don’t judge them on what they are? That to be is an argument we’re still not great at acknowledging now. People still have such a hard time distinguishing between equality and equity, and that’s something she really understands.
There’s a lot of surface level discussion of feminism at the minute that is about ‘empowerment’ and I think Wollstonecraft is really clear that with agency and power comes moral responsibility: arguing for women to have freedom and power to do what they want, and telling them that once they have go that power they should think about how they are using it.
Holly: Tor, you said earlier that Mary’s life felt recognisable to you. Could you talk a bit more about what you see in her story?
Tor: She’s an intelligent woman who is good at something and she’s up there with what all the men are doing and it’s just because she’s a woman that there’s a shitty attitude towards it? That’s a weird thing – it’s weird! But I just think any woman of any age, when you go out and do something in the world – and for me it was doing Billy Nomates, which I produce and record as well – there is just this strange attitude… I was raised by a single dad and I had no idea that the world was gonna act weird to a woman doing something? It was genuinely a shock to me – and still is, because fuck normalising it.
That’s what I meant by timing: this landed in my lap at exactly the right time, because I went, ah, I can categorically tell you this stuff is still happening, and especially in music. We may as well still be in the 1800s in many respects. We’ve come so far, and yet we really, really haven’t. But hearing Mary’s story and going wow this is as old as time… I was like, well shit, it ain’t about me! This has been happening for a long long time, its systemic, it’s historical.
Holly: You have a song in the show and on the record called ‘Strong Woman’, investigating how we depict women, and especially women from history, where it can go to the other extreme where they have to be a ‘badass’…
Maureen: Holly, honestly, can we just ban the phrase! I’m fucking sick of it. I get it all the time, all my work centres women, and all I get it ‘oh it’s great that there’s a strong female character…’ What does it mean? It means nothing, unless you would say it about a man, or unless you would say the opposite – ‘we loved this weak female!’ It’s reductive, and it’s exhausting, and it’s another way to not actually engage with the idea of women as human beings? They’re one thing or the other: the princess or the Strong Woman. That’s not an interesting character to me. Mary is a very flawed human being. I am sure she was quite difficult, and that’s why I love her – she’s an interesting person!
Tor: I agree with all of that. It’s written about female artists all the time, and you’re right – it’s done to try and box them.
Maureen: And with Mary it’s used as a gotcha. She has some horrible relationships where she’s treated very badly, and the biggest one of her life, with [Gilbert] Imlay, she writes him a lot of letters – and people go ‘oh this woman is writing letters begging him to come back’, as if that invalidates her work or her writing? She was on her own in revolutionary France, with a baby and no money and she wasn’t married and he abandoned her… I think I would write a few letters, you know!
This idea that you are given the title of Strong Woman and then if you fail to live up to it, we can ignore all the things she said is so frustrating. What, because she cares about women being seen as human beings, she’s not allowed to fall in love? Also: is she responsible for the way men treat her? Just because you are being treated badly doesn’t invalidate your intellectualism.
Holly: Do you think she’d be pleased that people are writing pop music about her?
Maureen: I mean, hard to say! What I can say is she would not have been neutral about it. She was really balls to the wall about everything she believed, so she might have been really behind it, but she does have a treatise about theatre where she dismisses a lot of it for being sentimental! Maybe she would be really cross, like ‘you should all be reading Kant’…
Holly: I understand your mum, Kathleen Lennon, set up the Mary Wollstonecraft lecture?
Maureen: Yeah that’s something Hull University have been doing for a long time – an annual lecture, about an aspect of her philosophy that can be found in others’ work. But this year it is going to be about Mary – it’s called Mary Wollstonecraft: A Philosopher and Feminist for Our Time – and it is being given by my mum, my own hero. It’s at the same time as the play, so that’s a really mad and lovely combination.
Holly: There’s also a film about Mary Wollstonecraft being made by Mia Hansen Love – I sort of hate this journalistic phrase, but do you think she might be having her moment?
Maureen: It really feels like it, doesn’t it? The Wollstonecraft Society have really fought for that, they’ve done a lot of stuff, and there’s been books and novels… So why is this happening? Because she’s a woman who doesn’t have the stature she deserves: we should know as much about her as we do the Suffragettes, or Mary Shelley. But why is this happening now? I really do strongly believe it’s because a lot of what she’s got to say feels like it’s speaking to the current moment.
And I’m just really pleased for her, because she really did want to be Plato – she’d be buzzing, she’d want the statues! And why shouldn’t she?
Mary and the Hyenas is at Hull Truck Theatre 7 February to 1 March, and at Wilton’s Music Hall, London, 18 to 29 March. Billy Nomates’s album Mary and the Hyenas is out now.
Holly Williams’s novel The Start of Something is out in hardback now, or available for a special discounted price of 99p on Kindle till the end of month
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