Change at the top can completely alter a theatre’s character. But there is something quite lovely about the fact that the great US playwright Lynn Nottage and our own fast-rising directing superstar Lynette Linton have done a play together for each of the last three Donmar artistic directors.
Josie Rourke’s reign ended with the monumental working class tragedy Sweat, which did much to establish both Nottage and Linton’s UK reputations. For Michael Longhurst there was Clyde’s, Sweat’s beautifully redemptive, almost magical realist sort-of-sequel.
Now Linton moves on to Intimate Apparel. Where Sweat and Clyde’s were both UK premieres, Intimate Apparel is an older Nottage work that was her first US hit back in 2003 and had a very decent UK premiere a decade ago. But more Lynn Nottage is always a good thing.
It’s a period drama, following a selection of characters in New York City, 1905. The story centres on Esther (Samira Wiley), a hard working but shy and emotionally repressed Black seamstress who specialises in ‘intimate apparel’ – that is to say underwear, which in 1905 includes a lot of fancy corsets.
Neither Nottage’s play nor Linton’s production really gives a sense of what the wider city – or indeed country – was like at the time, and that’s the point. Each of Nottage’s characters exists on some sort of margin, or we only see the marginal side of their existence. So there’s Esther: shy, self-doubting but determined in her passion for her work. There’s her friend Mayme (Faith Omole), a hooker. There’s Esther’s landlady and confidante Mrs Dickson (Nicola Hughes), who acquired her wealth somewhat dubiously. There’s Mrs Van Buren (Claudia Jolly), the rich but lonely white lady who Esther makes clothes for and who confides in her but who will never treat her like a social equal. There’s Mr Marks (Alex Waldmann), the orthodox Jewish clothier who Esther buys her fabric from: the two of them clearly have a thing for each other but are sundered by race and religion. And finally there’s George (Kadiff Kirwan), a Bajan labourer on the Panama Canal who has taken to writing romantic letters to Esther, who is thrilled, although she herself cannot read.
An exquisite drama about what happens when human longing is filtered through human society
They’re all transgressing in each others’ spaces: they have intimate relationships more complicated than simple friendship. A lot of it is about touch: Mrs Van Buren, who is probably queer, trembles and gasps when Esther laces her corset and looks self conscious and embarrassed when she looks at her pale hand holding Esther’s dark one. Mr Marks is discomfited when Esther grazes his hand – the only woman who is allowed to do so is his betrothed, who he has never met and lives in Romania. When George finally comes to NYC, Esther is torn between fear of and hunger for his touch.
It’s a beautifully acted and exquisitely written drama about what happens when raw human longing is filtered through the strangeness of class, race and rulebound human society. Yes, it’s a period piece, but even today, an Orthodox Jew and a working class Black woman would have quite the gulf to surmount to form a public relationship. It’s only in their one-on-one connections away from the public eye that their desires have a tiny measure of breathing space.
US actor Wiley is excellent as Esther: shy and self-doubting but with an unshakeable core of passion and ambition. And I think Kirwan does a particularly fine job with the complicated role of George. When he finally arrives in NYC he is not all his letters suggested. And yet rather than make him out to be a simple cad, Kirwan and Nottage are very good at capturing his justifiable frustration at an American society that won’t let him be the man he wants to be.
Both Linton’s direction and Alex Berry’s design is light and unshowy – we get a sense of the period through costume and furniture, but we’re never drowning in detail, and the characters are always put front and centre. Linton’s only big intervention is a series of projections in which the Black characters are shown as figures in sepia photographs. ‘Unknown negro seamstress, 1905’ reads the caption to a final image of Esther. It’s a blithe description that reduces a profoundly complicated life to almost nothing. But Nottage has shown us her boundless depths.
