Forget Jack Sparrow - real pirates of the Caribbean Anne Bonny and Mary read are the subject of a new musical coming to The Groundlings in Portsmouth

The most famous are legendary, figures like Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, Calico Jack.

But what is less known is that there were also female pirates aboard these ships disguised as men, and two of the most notorious were associated with Calico Jack – John Rackham.

The stories of Anne Bonny and Mary Read have now been turned into a musical – Bonny and Read, which comes to The Groundlings Theatre in Portsea later this month. The musical has been written by Claire Novello, who came across their stories while a film studies lecturer at SOAS University.

‘I was interested in cross-dressing in film. There are quite a few films about male cross-dressing like Tootsie and so on, and it's always comic when men dress as women, but there’s not much about cross-dressing women, so I got interested in that. I came to the conclusion that when women dress up as men, it tends to be treated as tragic – they're escaping their women's condition, or escaping some kind of tragic thing in their life, or it's romantic.

‘Then I discovered these examples in the 17th and 18th century – there’s lots of examples of women who dressed up as soldiers or sailors, and I came across Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

‘There's so much literature about male pirates but hardly anything about women, so I got very interested in that and found them really inspiring characters – they completely defied the conventions of their time. They had equal status with men on the ship and they were also survivors – they escaped terrible poverty, one of them was widowed and had lost their children. They were actually beating their male pirate counterparts at their own game. It's quite a story.

‘I tried to look at what drove them, the reasons why they eventually became pirates, why they first went to sea.’

The musical centres around the real-life piracy trial of Rackham in Jamaica – Bonny and Read were part of his crew, indeed the former was his lover.

Claire says: ‘I'd never written a musical before. I started off by thinking, how do I tell this 18th century story and make it attractive and relevant to a contemporary audience?

‘It's sort of a dramatic narrative but to give it that 18th century flavour I'd put it in rhyme – but the language is quite modern.

‘To get away from it becoming a straight historical documentary, I wanted to give it more emotion, so I thought songs would bring out the comic and the tragic element.

‘When they're disguising themselves as men, there's quite a lot of comedy there. When they first met they both think that the other woman is a man – there's a bit of that Shakespearean woman-in-disguise thing going on.

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‘I wrote 12 songs, and the lyrics were then set to music by a composer I know, Frederick Appleby who made a really good job of it.’

And they are looking forward to putting on the show in Portsmouth with its strong maritime tradition.

Claire adds: ‘Groundlings will be an ideal venue because it's an 18th century building and it's got a lot of history itself...’

The four-strong cast will perform at The Groundlings from September 14 to 17.

For tickets go to groundlings.co.uk.