Mollspeak
Mollspeak is a new sound work, written and directed by internationally renowned writer Maria Fusco, with an original score by Olivier Pasquet and is voiced by actor Maxine Peake, recorded during the first lockdown of 2020. The piece, experimental in form, explores and embodies working-class voices of eighteenth century servants in England. The work’s title, Mollspeak, is taken from a phrase used by employers to denigrate or belittle their servants’ way of speaking. Its negative connotation is subverted by headlining a work that illuminates the importance of working class narratives.
The work takes two forms, onsite as an eleven-channel sound installation inside the Museum of the Home’s Undercroft chamber, and online as a broadcast 24-minute long sound piece, which we were delighted to host at Mercurius Magazine for a two week limited period from 27 December 2021 to 9 January 2022.
Fusco’s original script is informed, in part, by eighteenth century ballads, high court testimony, and archival research; departing from normative history telling by mashing genres to challenge hackneyed and less visible representations of the working-class. The script’s audio is both percussive and incandescent due to it being written in anapestic tetrameter, which was a period meter traditionally used in comic verse of that period. Fusco’s written script meanwhile captures authentic lived experiences of the time.
The newly composed electronic music and sound design, by Pasquet, is derived solely from intimate recordings of objects collected from a servant’s box from the Museum of Home’s collection. This audio intervention radically transforms the artefacts’ creaks and sighs, abstracting their quotidian qualities. Unique access to the collection was granted by the museum to begin making the work, ahead of the March 2020 lockdown. As a result, the confidential sonic relationship with these objects summon an entire brash universe of labour. The musicality of the score is both contemporary and unconventional.
Servants were not allowed keys to the houses they tended, Mollspeak kicks down these doors.
Mollspeak is commissioned by the Museum of the Home, and funded by Arts Council England, The Arts Fund and The Elephant Trust. For more information regarding Mollspeak see: #Mollspeak #MariaFusco mariafusco.net/events/mollspeak