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Watching this bioplay about poet Stevie Smith is a bit like pulling up a comfy armchair with a slice of Battenberg, and then having someone like Stewart Lee turn up to entertain you.
Hugh Whitemore’s 1977 play goes some way to demonstrate a little of Smith’s intriguing, eccentric contrasts. It takes place entirely in the front room of her exceptionally suburban house in ’50s and ’60s London, where she lived with her aunt for the majority of her life. But as Zoë Wanamaker’s excellent Smith begins to tell us about her life – from her childhood rejection of her wayward father, to her rise as a writer and her love of her ‘Lion Aunt’ – it’s clear that this irreverent hermit from Palmers Green was actually pretty punk. Her thoughts on life and her writings show a death-obsessed woman who loved to mischievously rip the piss out of everything. In Christopher Morahan’s revival, Smith’s brown-tinged home quickly becomes the shadow to this remarkable and vivacious woman.
But it’s difficult to make a play out of mostly one character holding court, no matter how unusual she is. While it’s insightful and informative when it comes to the life and works of Smith – most famous for her poem ‘Not Waving but Drowning’ – too often the play plods with exposition. Smith and her aunt’s domestic comings and goings are peppered with appearances from Smith’s friends and lovers (all played by Chris Larkin). And though Whitemore assuredly weaves the narrative with poetry and Smith’s very funny musings (like her dismissal of Coleridge: ‘I think he was already stuck in the middle of “Kubla Khan” and was just looking for an easy excuse’), it doesn’t make for the drama it could.
Wearing neat dresses, woolly tights and sensible shoes, Wanamaker plays Smith like a tiny, wilful bird, flitting about Simon Higlett’s brilliantly detailed and cluttered front room set. She sits on tables, leaves books lying everywhere, while her elderly aunt (played with a beautiful warmth by Lynda Baron) tidies up around her. Stevie is a grown woman with a child’s outlook and Wanamaker superbly brings this to the fore.
Wanamaker is the star, then, of this strong but imperfect attempt to demonstrate a little of the joyful, quirky anarchy of a great London writer.