Maiden Voyage Review: the musical tale of Tracy Edwards and her all-women crew

Maiden Voyage, a new musical at London's Southwark Theatre, is running 19 July - 23 August.

As a long-term musical theatre fan, classically trained dancer, and now sailing journalist, the Maiden Voyage musical seemed like a uniquely perfect combination of things when I first heard of it. 

I was thrilled to have the chance to write up a review, particularly as most other press in attendance would be coming from a theatre and culture writing background, with little interest in the show’s maritime– well, everything.

On entertainment value alone, this show is an evening pretty well spent for our musical-minded seafaring readers. It’s production design does a lot of the heavy lifting, but for younger audiences it can offer a sense of adventure, possibility, and inspiration (and some pretty catchy songs).

Yet the writing itself left me wanting. Maiden Voyage is a 2025 show with an 80s message, and an equally limited understanding of its own politics. The story never quite manages to transcend, or even interrogate, its original premise of “Girl Sailors.” It might as well have been written at the time of its events.

Modern sailors don’t usually end up having much to do with musicals, or starring in them.

There’ve been a few shows that tend more towards the sashaying, swashbuckling, and historical (Pirates of Penzance, The Pirate Queen, Gene Kelly’s The Pirate); are set on cruise ships and ocean-liners (Sail Away, Anything Goes); or feature an entirely different kind of sailor, one in a cap and a military uniform (Follow the Fleet, On the Town, South Pacific). Sting’s largely autobiographical The Last Ship, a personal favourite, was set in a shipyard outside Newcastle. 

But rarely, if ever, does yachting itself figure on stage. In that sense Maiden Voyage is a novelty.

Most of the show takes place on the deck of a sailboat, specifically of Maiden, the 58 foot aluminium ocean racing yacht that took Tracy Edwards and her all-female crew around the world for the 1989-90 Whitbread Round the World Race (now The Ocean Race, which sets off again in early August).

Set designers opted to build out the idea of a boat, rather than slug through a direct reproduction of it. Their ability to evoke not only a working sailboat but a genuinely maritime atmosphere turned out to be the show’s greatest strength.

Geometric cuts of fabric loosely reminiscent of different sails acted as screens for projected maps, newsprints, the masts of docked sailboats, and most importantly, the sea. With just a few strokes (and excellent work from the lighting team), these animations recreated the expanse without turning it into a gimmick. No small feat inside a small, dark theatre.

The feeling of being “on board” also came from a skilled use of physical theatre.

The women of Maiden’s crew were in a constant state of motion. They rocked on their feet through beats of dialogue, seconding the water’s imagined movement so naturally that it was easy to forget the deck wasn’t actually shifting beneath them. They cranked winches, clung to guardrails, climbed masts, hoisted sails, pretended to tie knots, and generally threw themselves about with the kind of restlessness you’d expect from actual sailors. The show only stands to gain from leaning further into its more embodied, dance-like elements. 

Similarly effective were moments where the front rows got flyers, and later flags to wave at the end of each race leg. These small, immersive interventions helped recreate the buzz and excitement of racing, and built a genuine sense of atmosphere.

With most of its action set on one deck, the show approximates a chamber play. Chamber plays typically strip down on setting and costume to focus on their characters, their dynamics and interpersonal dramas. By containing the drama, you can often increase it. 

Our seafaring readers will know well that sailboats can have a curiously similar effect, amplifying personal sensations and underlying dynamics, acting a bit like a pressure cooker. Reduced spaces, heightened stakes, and limited resources have a way of manufacturing intensity, and forcing things to the surface.

Unfortunately, in Maiden Voyage, not much comes up. The skilful production design isn’t enough to mask a certain thinness of character, a shallowness of emotions and human relationships that runs throughout the show.

The vocals are technically sound (if not inflected with much personality); the harmonies are tight, the songs genuinely catchy. Yet the show is undermined by a homogeneity of vocal tone, casting, and emotion.

The women of Maiden‘s crew, the protagonist among them, feel wispy, ungraspable, interchangeable. They are simply “Girl Sailors,” as a song by the same title trumpets, (apparently) an oxymoron the show never manages to move past.

The writing reflects, or perhaps informs, this overall tendency towards the literal. Like much of sailing media, it gets caught in its own imagery, drawing overwhelmingly on metaphors about water, sailboats, maps. Tracy sings “My life is an ocean I’m ready to chart”; the girls later invite audiences to self-determination in a song titled “Make Waves.”

The female-empowerment messaging, too, is heavy handed. They might get away with it if any of it played as tongue in cheek, but the necessary self-irony, or even self-awareness, to pull it off is missing. When Tracy tries to mortgage her house, the man on the phone turns her down. “He says I’m too young to own a house,” she huffs. “Or is it too female?”.

In the welcome note in the program, the writers explain, “As children of the 70’s and 80’s, we have both been raised to believe that we were equal to men […] The Women’s Suffrage Movement, Rosie the Riveter, the Bletchley Circle, even the days of the Feminist Movement in the 1960s seemed to us part of a distant past.

“But here was a group of women still trying to prove themselves in the 1980s– and it was shocking to us that they still needed to break barriers. As we developed Maiden Voyage in readings and workshops prior to this world premiere, we discovered that many young women today still face these kinds of challenges – albeit in any field, not just sailing – to their right to do anything, be anyone they choose.”

Reading these words, it is not difficult to imagine how the show ended up with this bland, white, yes-she-can brand of feminism, as well meaning as it is limited. The most empowering thing a woman can aspire to, it seems, is do what the men do, the way they are already doing it.

Tracy and the crew sing, “Nothing but a sea of men, out to prove you don’t belong.” They seem to have little identifiable ambition or sense of self beyond the need to prove them wrong. Aside from a brief jostle for leadership between Tracy and the other skipper (worked out through the confusing refrain of “Women like us we have to lead, it’s what we are, it’s what we need”), the show’s only real conflict is between the Girl Sailors as a group noun and men’s perceptions, represented by the (male) press. 

But isn’t a whole show about proving men wrong still, somehow, a show all about men?

Couldn’t this have been an opportunity to make a show that was actually for and about women, and at that, about different kinds of them? 

The value of a contemporary show lies precisely in its ability to see beyond its historical setting, and to find new meaning in its source material.

In limiting itself to reproducing Maiden story, the show missed an opportunity to add to it, and expand on what it can really mean to be anyone that isn’t a man at sea. Does the gender of a crew actually matter at all when someone isn’t constantly reminding you of it?

Even the infamous bathing-suit clad arrival at the end of the race was present. Sure, I thought, watching half the cast suddenly strip down in the last minutes of the show. That did actually happen. But is including it really serving the story or its desired message? 

There are, thankfully, a few glimmers of more nuanced critique.

When Maiden‘s crew arrives after completing a leg of the race to find the (male) members of other crews partying and creating general disorder, they point out the double standard. They could never afford to behave that way; they have a hard enough time being taken seriously as it is.

They also note how the journalists ask them different questions than they ask the male sailors, and more often no questions at all. 

‘Why don’t they ask us why we do it?’ one of them complains. 

The women briefly share their motivations for racing, speaking to each other instead of the press. They wanted to defy those who said they couldn’t; they were raised into it by sailor parents; pure love of the craft. It’s an aside, but at least they’re actually talking about the thing they’re all meant to love doing. It’s also one of the few times they play directly to each other instead of to the men, the critics, the press.

There is another such moment in the song “Winning”, in which Jo and Tracy compare two different ideas of success. Tracy wanted to place higher in the race; Jo reminds her what an achievement it is already for their all-women crew to have taken part at all.

They are winning, Jo says, just by having done it together. A wholesome, necessary reframe, but it was too little and too late.

It’s no surprise that the highlight of the show was in “Monster,” one of the few songs where the women were able to sail without making it all about the fact of women sailing. They brave a storm, offer medical advice over the radio, react to their unsettling proximity to death. For a moment, we glimpse who they are, what they are sailing for, what they feel and fear and can do beyond the fact of  their being women.

As I watched them get thrown around by rogue waves in their thin, costume foul-weather gear, I turned a memory over: my first ever passage as skipper, a 140 NM trek from the Island of Elba to a port below Rome. 

It was an uneventful stretch. I left at 10pm, sailed through the night and all the next day. The waters were mostly empty of traffic. It was June. I remember the nighttime cold, unusual for that time of year, and the waning silver moon, how I sang to stay awake in the strange quiet, grasping at the feeling of being everywhere at once and somehow just out of reach. How little difference there is sometimes between feeling brave and remembering you are very, very small.

I wondered now, watching the strobes signal “lightning”: What is it, really, that sends us any of us out there? What is it we think we’ll find? Even in a night made of flash and projection, the question remained slippery. But I was there again, if just for a moment.

Soon the stage lights getting warm with the break of morning. The waters calmed. The storm was gone. So, too, the eternity of night. The women clung to each other, crying out, “The horror has subsided”. They remarked on the smell of land, how they caught it before they could see.

Oh, I remembered, combing back to the last time I wasn’t on land, almost a year ago now. That’s true.

In that sense, the show did what theatre is supposed to. It took me out of the black-box room, pulled me into another dimension.

It moved me, too, to see the Maiden girls cry out with relief. Not because of what they had been through, but because they had been through it together. Some might not find all those women onboard so groundbreaking anymore, but in most of my time at sea I’ve been lucky to find even one. 

I found myself thinking of a recent comment from Belinda Joslin, founder of Women in Boatbuilding, who has worked with the British Boatbuilding Academy to encourage women to enrol.

“We all just want to be ‘boat builders’ working in an environment where gender is irrelevant,” she says. “The more diversity becomes the norm, the less we need to talk about it.”

For now, at least, we do still need to talk about it. I only wish Maiden Voyage had been able to add more to the conversation.

“Maiden Voyage” is running 19 July – 23 August at Southwark Playhouse: Elephant.

Tickets are available online.  Ticket Prices: Standard from £20 / Concessions from £16. There is no booking fee. 

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