★★★1/2

Adelaide Fringe. Heaps Good Productions. Ayers House. 27 Feb 2026

 

On this evening Adelaide audiences trembled slightly and awaited the deluge. It was the Friday evening we had been promised great rains and there was anticipation. Were we to get a flood of biblical proportion? It seemed appropriate.

 

We are joined by an old woman, hunched and walking with a cane. Dressed in pre-Victorian period costume, this is Mary Anning the Elder (Michele Kelsey), wise and worn out, our narrator for the evening. She is joined by Mary In The Middle (Mia Ferraretto), who is the young woman who clambers across the cliffs of Lyme Regis uncovering ‘curiosities’, fossil ‘thunderbolts’ and ‘fairy hearts’ to sell to keen tourists. The two are joined by young Mary Anning, a precocious 11 year-old (Adele Binns), who explains she was struck by lightning as a child and it ignited her passion (so to speak). It should be noted this is the accepted story of Mary Anning, it being difficult to flesh out the picture with accuracy, though writer and producer Michael Mills has a near encyclopedic knowledge of the topic.

 

This then is the story of the English geologist Mary Anning, told in stages, and by means of a musical. Yes, her story is the basis of the 2020 Kate Winslet movie Ammonite. Here there are three Mary Annings on stage, it’s a theatrical device and for the most part it works. The three burst into song, and are in good voice, working well together. Adele is at times a little shrill, but this is a question also of sound balance, which is at time underpowered, yet the piano recordings which accompany seem to chatter the melody. But this is a Fringe show, the costumes seem excellent, the set design simple, and the performances are of high quality.

 

There are problems. Most are structural rather than in the performance and they are important. How do you tell the relatively obscure story of a woman from over 200 years ago who lead the science of paleontology, so new a field that it had no name? Not through song, evidently, because key concepts remained obscured or were unheralded. The problem here was one of focus: Anning was apparently wedded to her geological hammer and the fact she discovered a trove of dinosaur skeletons (and thus hitherto unknown species) seems to be made a sidenote. The central prop is a beautifully painted representation of the Plesiosaur fossil embedded in its [rock] matrix and yet very little is made of it. Oh, for some focus lighting! Periodically Mary In The Middle picks up a brush and gives it a desultory sweep.

 

What is needed is less song and more detail, but here’s the rub. The writer knows his history, is entranced by a minor historical figure and determines she should be made famous, but how to set the historical context? To my mind you cannot mention the Reverend William Buckland, the foremost English geologist of his time without making it clear he was the principal ‘Deluge-ist’ of his time, a strong proponent of the Biblical tale involving a flood and an ark. Likewise, you cannot allow Anning to casually mention Baron de Cuvier (the Frenchman was the most eminent anatomist and scientist of his time bar none) without explaining how important a part he plays in this story.

 

And yet, fifteen minutes after we are told the story of Lightning Mary, we are back at that same point, the song is sung and hammers flourished. I get that it becomes a motif, but at the end of the show we know it’s the end of the show because the song is given a reprise. This interrupts a powerful original narrative since we are invited to overlook the death of Mary Anning as a logical endpoint in the story.

 

Mary Anning died in 1847 at the age of 47, worn out by a life a near grinding poverty, thus missing Mr Darwin’s famous treatise on Natural Selection by a mere decade. Why do we not know this fact, concentrating instead on holding a hammer aloft? It is an artifice, and twee at that.

 

This is not a bad show, despite the criticism. Indeed, with some minor tweaks and some more narrative (y’know, the part where the story’s told) it would be a very fine show. Or, as I overheard one person say, “You don’t need a whole song about a dog, do you?”

 

Alex Wheaton

 

When: 25 Feb to 21 Mar

Where: Ayers House

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au