A love affair between two suffragettes who meet in HM Prison Holloway is the centrepiece of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s new play – and an apt one, given that it’s the first play by a living woman to be staged in the Olivier. It’s good to see a talented young female playwright smashing this theatrical glass ceiling. And Lenkiewicz’s drama does run rings around the National’s recent historical drama commissions from great white males (being neither as plodding as Howard Brenton’s ‘Never So Good’, nor as preposterous as Tony Harrison’s ‘Fram’). Despite this, I found it slightly disappointing. In the first half, context-painting and plot-thickening rarely go hand in hand. Too many short scenes go nowhere. And in the second half, as the erotic relationship between autocratic bohemian Lady Celia Cain and abused young seamstress Eve Douglas fizzles out (Lady Celia abruptly loses interest), it also loses its power to intensify and indeed invert the questions about the abuse of power that are so vital here.
Rob Howell’s set – a raised cage of metal grilles which descend, ‘Tetris’-like, to imprison the women in the Holloway scenes – makes an impressively brutal backdrop. Against it, the actresses shine in some affectionately imagined and beautifully caustic roles: Lesley Manville makes a restlessly hungry and disappointed Celia; Jemima Rooper is poignant as her mutely suffering Eve. Susan Engel steals several scenes as the spryly indomitable old campaigner Florence Boorman: when quizzed by the sinister prison doctor about some suffragettes who horse-whipped a medical man she retorts, ‘I hope he paid them the going rate.’ It’s one moment when the difficult marriage between contemporary and Edwardian viewpoints is really achieved: the horrific force-feeding climax, visually reminiscent of waterboarding, is another. Lenkiewicz’s evenhanded portrayal of the disintegration of Celia’s marriage to her lawyer husband William (played with anguished devotion by Adrian Rawlins) adds some much-needed complexity to this sweeping period panorama which so effortlessly fills the Olivier.
,rail
