SHE WAS EVERYTHING you might have wanted to be as a teenager in a conservative society. She was wise and bad, rule-breaking and brave. She was sexy and had history, and all the young wannabes made tight black leggings and wild blonde hair a fashion in her honour. And up close, her life was terrible and frightening, but to the fan on the other side of the recording, she was a hero. This was Marianne Faithfull, who died in January this year. And a tribute to her life and work is currently being staged at P.O.P. Arts Theatre in Parkwood, until 9 November.

A convent-educated girl who was noticed at a party when she was just 17 in 1964, Faithfull was a reluctant icon in world culture. She became Mick Jagger’s girlfriend, and experimented with lots of drugs, sex and rock ‘n roll, as the cliché goes. Hers was, however, a hard and lonely life, that took her again and again from the front pages of the world to the gutter, with horrifying rapidity.  

But as the script of this guttural and very fine production by Fiona Ramsay and Tony Bentel – and introducing Aidan Rabinowitz on guitar – attests, it is a life to hold in awe, music worth celebrating, and words that trigger all the nostalgia buttons that you have. The songs, many of them anthems of their era, from the tragic Ballad of Lucy Jordan to the explicit and furious song Why d’ya do it?, offer an ambit of her anger, her quirkiness and her sense of beauty in a world coloured by protests, freedoms and enemies.

The script is written in the first person, and Ramsay offers a gloss on her own life in relation to Faithfull’s, with an intimacy that is intriguing and a crossing of paths that is at once poignant and funny. But this is not only about the peaceniks of the 1960s or the proliferation of drug-users of the 1970s, it’s a piece threaded through with Shakespeare, from Hamlet to Lear with a bit of Midsummer Night’s Dream to make you weep. It casts a glance at Faithfull playing God in an episode of Absolutely Fabulous, touches on Cher’s Dark Lady and Leonard Cohen’s eponymous song, taking the voice of an angel to the depths of the demonic, with the aid of cigarettes and time.

Structured along the lines of Kerry Hiles’s tribute to Eva Cassidy and Judy Garland and Daniel Anderson’s, to Vincent Van Gogh and Charlie Chaplin, this is a fiery gem of a piece which takes Ramsay’s voice through its range and deeper than you might think possible. It’s a show which deserves legs all over the country, if not farther afield.

So Long Marianne is written and performed by Tony Bentel (piano), Aidan Rabinowitz (electric guitar) and Fiona Ramsay (voice). It is onstage at POP arts theatre, in Parkwood, until 9 November 2025.