New performances and films in progress (2012)

In May 1827, Maria Marten was shot and stabbed to death by the father of her child, William Corder, who then fled to London. He buried Maria in a shallow grave in a barn on his tenant farm, where she was found accidentally nearly a year later by her own father after he ”put down a mole spike into the floor... and brought up something black, which I smelt and thought it smelt like decayed flesh.”

What makes this typically sordid and revolting murder different from others committed before it is that “The Murder in the Red Barn“ was one of the first whose details were promulgated and elaborated by sensational media reporting of the kind that subsequently became the norm throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and into the 21st, leading to public hysteria and wild overestimations of how widespread murder and violent crime actually are.

Britain already had a long history of broadsheets and ballads about crime, strange events, politics and other ”news”, but these were essentially free-floating fictions loosely inspired by real events if they were about real events at all. It was the 19th century's nascent mass media that really spun fact into entertainment for the masses, and initiated the “based on a true story” genre with sensationalised incidents like the Red Barn murder. The trial of Corder was an entertainment spectacle and so was his death by hanging, which was attended by about 7,000 people in the otherwise rural and uneventful market town of Bury St. Edmunds. The barn was broken up to for mementos (what we would now call merchandising); Corder's clothes, the rope used to hang him and even his skin were also sold off as ghoulish souvenirs. The story of Maria's murder was spun off in fictionalised form into novels, stage melodramas, songs and- most bizarrely of all, from a contemporary perspective- puppet shows for working class children to watch in the sleazy urban “gaffs” that specialised in such things at the time. The image above shows part of Staffordshire pottery set exploiting the Red Barn mania: here Corder is enticing Maria into a ridiculously romanticised version of the agricultural barn where he will shortly afterwards murder her and bury her body.

I'm particularly interested in this story because it's local and somewhat folkloric to where I grew up in Suffolk (in the east of England), so it's a great opportunity to work with the aesthetics and sensibility of the early part of the 19th century, and also with the now mostly lost imagery and culture of rural East Anglia in that period. Incidentally, the “Red Barn” is obviously redolent of blood and murder but in fact most barns in Suffolk were traditionally painted red.