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A woman who commanded at sea and challenged authority might seem to demand an elaborate theatrical entrance. Debs Newbold proposes something simpler.
“It’s storytelling, so I’m alone on stage. No fancy lights, no costume, no props. I have just a chair, which I use in different ways.”
The rest is a collaboration with the people in front of her.
“I’m not a character. I’m very much me. But in collaboration with the audience - that is, with their imaginations - I create a whole world.”
That's the invitation behind Dauntless: Grace O’Malley, Pirate Queen, written, directed and performed by Newbold and coming to Yorkshire through Red Ladder Local. Its autumn dates take an Irish seafarer’s story into a Leeds village hall, a Horbury community centre and a Staincross parish hall.
The scale of the venues bears no necessary relationship to the scale of the story. Here, a chair and a roomful of imaginations are asked to accommodate an extraordinary life.
Grace O’Malley, also known as Gráinne Ní Mháille, was a sixteenth-century Irish maritime leader associated with County Mayo. Trading, clan power and conflict with English authority all form part of a history that the phrase “Pirate Queen” can only begin to contain.
Her dealings with Elizabeth I provide an especially compelling meeting of power and self-preservation. Surviving petitions and answers to questions from the English court record O’Malley making a case about her life, family and circumstances.
Such documents offer access to her account, while also reminding us of the conditions under which it was given: she was seeking something from a powerful ruler. A petition is both testimony and an act of negotiation.
For Newbold, the attraction is personal as well as historical.
“I wanted to tell it because it's an historical example of a very clever, powerful, and remarkable woman who defied expectations and made her own rules. And I wanted to tell this story because it's a story from the west of Ireland, where my grandmother was from.”
Speaking in a syndicated interview supplied by Red Ladder Theatre Company, she also traces the show’s beginnings to a commission from the Royal Armouries to create a storytelling performance about a female warrior.
Her interest in the Elizabethan period had developed through a long association with Shakespeare’s Globe. The subject brought that professional knowledge together with a family connection to the west of Ireland.
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There's a temptation, when recovering a woman’s place in history, to make her exemplary. Newbold’s account of the show suggests a more interesting intention.
“It shows this woman loving people and it shows her being violent towards people. It shows this woman defending herself and asserting herself.”
The contradictions are part of the attraction. Courage doesn't cancel violence; power does not make a life uncomplicated. Allowing a historical woman those tensions gives her more room than a polished emblem of empowerment could.
Newbold describes a story containing humour, tragedy, loss, frustration and righteous anger. Her argument for telling it reaches beyond the recovery of a neglected name.
“And in a world where we're increasingly encouraged to be polarised, I think stories like this, and theatre spaces where we can get together to share them, are incredibly important.”
A shared story doesn't require everyone in the room to arrive at the same judgment. It can give people the opportunity to consider a life at greater length than a label allows.
The Yorkshire setting adds another dimension. Red Ladder Local takes professional performance into familiar community spaces, addressing some of the practical and cultural barriers that can make conventional theatre-going difficult.
Newbold’s own route into theatre makes that more than an abstract concern.
“I'm from a working-class background. We didn't go to the theatre. I went to the panto once as a kid but that was it.”
She describes joining the Birmingham Rep Youth Workshop at 14 as a moment of relief: a shy young person discovering somewhere she could be herself.
Her earliest storytelling inheritance was closer to home.
“My nan could make a trip to the supermarket sound like an adventure.”
That memory places storytelling within ordinary family life. It also offers a useful way to think about a community-hall performance: the imaginative experience begins with people listening to someone who knows how to hold their attention.
Newbold’s career has since included work on very different scales. Among the projects she recalls with pride is Rising Up, her 2019 play connecting women’s lives across the years of the Peterloo bicentenary, which premiered at HOME in Manchester.
The connection with Dauntless is suggestive: women moving through histories of power and resistance, brought into a present-day room through performance.
Newbold hopes audiences will experience a film unfolding inside their heads. The promise is of a full ninety-minute encounter, made through the performer’s language and the audience’s attention.
“They'll have a date with their own imagination, as well as with me and Grainne.”
For Yorkshire audiences, the invitation comes close to home. The adventure travels from Ireland’s western coast towards an English queen’s court; the performance travels into spaces already woven into local life.
Both journeys make questions of access and authority visible. Who is allowed to command? Whose account survives? Who feels entitled to walk into a room and expect a story worth hearing?
A chair might be a modest place to start. Newbold’s ambition for what can happen around it is considerably larger.
Dauntless: Grace O’Malley, Pirate Queen - Yorkshire dates, 2026
Running time: 90 minutes without an interval. Age guidance: 14+. Contains descriptions of birth, postnatal bleeding, sex, violence and death.
Booking and individual venue access information.
Debs Newbold’s quotations are taken from a syndicated interview supplied by Red Ladder Theatre Company. This feature adds MagNorth’s editorial framing and contextual reporting; it is not a MagNorth interview or a performance review.
Header image: Dauntless (FlyGirl)
