“I just happened to have a pocket full of songs”

Longstanding Singing Loins member Rob Shepherd spent years working with Chris Broderick on a musical adaptation of Wpockoyzeck, an unfinished 19th-century German play. Four years after Broderick’s death, Franz & Marie is finally opening in London. Steven met Rob to talk about how two Medway musicians ended up writing for a major Korean theatre company, bringing the show back without Chris, and what remains of the musical they created together.

Rob Shepherd is a Medway musician and member of The Singing Loins and Staggered Ray. I previously interviewed him alongside fellow Loins member Chris ‘Arfur’ Allen for our sister title, Local Authority.

During that interview, Rob mentioned a musical he had been working on with Chris Broderick before Broderick’s death in 2022. At the time, he was not sure it would ever reach the stage.

Four years later, Franz and Marie is about to make its London debut at the Charing Cross Theatre, opening on 28 September and running until 14 November.

I'm catching up with Rob at Gillingham’s Mast and Rigging pub to find out how it got there.

Franz and Marie is based on Woyzeck, the unfinished play by German dramatist Georg Büchner. The text is much better known in South Korea than it is here.

“In Korea everyone knows it. In England we don't.”

Rob took early retirement and now divides his time between travelling with his wife Alison and continuing to make music. Most recently, that has included recording at Ranscombe Studios’ new Rochester base with Billy Childish and the North Kent Folkways Revival.

He plays banjo, mandolin, accordion, guitar and the fiddle “very badly.” These days, the music is “all folk”, partly for practical reasons.

“It means you don't have to carry big amps around. I figured out about 25 years ago that I didn’t need the back-breaking 100-watt Marshall amp that I was lugging up and down my stairs, if I was in a folk band.”

Rob joined The Singing Loins in 2004, but had known Broderick since the 1980s, when Chris played in a band called Dumbfounded with Rob’s brother-in-law Glenn.

“I loved them, and went to all of their gigs I could.”

By the late 1990s, Rob and Chris had started talking about working together. Broderick had written a musical called Punch and Judy.

“He tried it with various other musicians, because Chris could never write music, but he had the lyrics and the book.”

Within three days, Rob remembers, they had the musical.

“I just happened to have a pocket full of songs. They all fitted exactly.”

They recorded the tracks in a day with Jim Riley at the original Ranscombe studio. “It used to be over the river, on the old Ranscombe farm.”

I subsequently found out it was quite a big thing

Broderick entered the show into Greenwich Futures, Greenwich Theatre’s competition for new musicals.

“I subsequently found out it was quite a big thing.”

The production drew on a suitably Medway collection of talents: Gillingham FC announcer Doug Hudson narrated alongside a slide show, while the musicians included Glenn Barnes, Zoe Barnett, Vern Hampton and Jim Riley, who wore a policeman’s helmet and impersonated a crocodile.

“Vern, do you know Vern? He fixes guitars, but he's in a lot of bands.”

Which is a very Medway music sentence.

They won, “which was incredible”.

Rob and Chris went on to write another two musicals: The Ballad of Elizabeth Sulky Mouth, which included future Singing Loins bandmate Arf Allen on bass, and Prince of Fire, about Jezreel’s Tower on Chatham Hill. Both were also staged at Greenwich Theatre.

By then Rob was a full member of The Singing Loins. Then came a considerably stranger opportunity.

“ACOM, a Korean theatre company, got in touch with Greenwich Theatre, looking for a writing team to work with on a musical for Woyzeck.”

After six months of auditions, discussions and competing against other writing teams, Rob and Chris got the job.

The musical was first staged in Seoul in 2014.

“In a huge theatre. But it was called Woyzeck there.”

For its English incarnation, the title became Franz & Marie, partly out of concern that British audiences would struggle with Woyzeck.

Georg Büchner died at 24, having already become involved in revolutionary politics.

He was “involved in the production of pamphlets. This was before Germany was unified. He was trying to get the working man to stand up to the ruling classes.”

One of those pamphlets was deemed illegal, though Büchner avoided prison.

Büchner died with Woyzeck unfinished, leaving around 30 scenes that were “discovered as a pile wrapped up in ribbon.”

Its focus on an ordinary working man was radical for the period. Franz and Marie became the central characters in Rob and Chris’s adaptation.

“It's very dark. Franz is a put-upon soldier and desperate to marry his girlfriend, Marie.”

“Franz has a son with Marie, but he won't be given leave from the army because they're in a holding position in an unspecified Eastern European war. They're in trenches, and he's been experimented on by being fed a diet of peas to see how much a soldier can take before he breaks down.”

“The local village is where Marie lives, but they won’t give him leave to get married, and then the drum major, a well-connected soldier, almost rapes Marie, and this is used to taunt Franz. As an experiment as to how the common man can be driven mad.”

So not many laughs.

Broderick spent years working with ACOM to turn the fragmentary, bleak source material into a musical. Its producer, Yun Ho-jin, usually referred to by Rob as Mr Yun, had a particular ambition.

“His dream was to have an English writing team, create a musical of Woyzeck and have a hit with it in England.”