Author: irispearso

The young woman (Inge-Vera Lipsius) and her husband (Ross McIntyre) sit side by side, each reading a newspaper, each picking up on different stories. The husband gets up to answer the phone, relays the conversation to his wife. She is disinterested. But she’s more than that. She is brimming, poised, stifled. There is a circularity to the couple’s conversation that is comical but also threatening, and each time her husband asks what she is reading, the young woman’s answer is darker. Lipsius manages this feeling of domestic restriction, the resentment-turned-hatred that characterises her relationship to her husband, with an impressive confidence and maturity, and she (as is McIntyre) is at her best in this scene.

Lipsius’s performance is not perfect, however. She starts at fever-pitch and ends at fever-pitch: not much seems to change in her character as the play progresses. Perhaps this is a challenge presented by the play itself, as the intensity of the writing demands emotional strain from the beginning, but I felt that there were a number of moments where the climactic power was lost as a result of this lack of change. At the end of the newspaper scene which I described above, Lipsius’s character stands up and shouts into the darkness, deciding in this pivotal moment that she will do anything to be free – even murder her husband. This had scope to be such a terrifying moment, but by the time it was reached, it no longer felt like a climax.

What was most successful about the rest of this scene, however (and indeed in my opinion, the rest of the play), was the use of rhythm. The speech of ‘Machinal’ is constructed out of rhythmic phrases which seem to form parts of a song, perhaps in evocation of the eventual machine, or to emphasise this play as performance, and not merely story. All of the actors managed these rhythms skilfully, making them sound natural and not letting them interrupt the flow of speech, while still recognising and doing justice to the beauty of the speech movements.

Indeed it is not just Lipsius whose performance is to be commended: Louisa Stuart-Smith was hilarious as the mother, her shrill garrulousness verging on the chilling in its imposing sense of expectation; Charlie Saddington was wonderful in his casual softness in the speak-easy, and then in his wandering storytelling when he and Lipsius are in the bedroom together. The unspoken (and sometimes spoken) intimacy between the two actors in this scene was moving and uplifting, as the hopeful uncertainty of ‘quién sabe’ was repeated again and again and again.

The whole play centres around this idea of the possibility freedom, around the excitement of a coin flip to decide who will pay a bill, and around the imagining of dark mountains to be climbed in a future not yet unfolded. We see a glimpse of freedom in this bedroom scene – the first time we see Lipsius’s character smile – but the only real liberty comes moments before the play’s tragic ending. Just when there is nothing to hope for, for a split second, this young woman is unchained from the expectations of society, her mother and her own self.

When I left the theatre, however, I was struck with a sense of incompleteness, and of something being not quite there. Perhaps I was wondering just what exactly the play made me think. This is a play set somewhere we, the Cambridge student audience, are not, in a time almost a century in the past, in a society where gender relationships, sexism and the pressures on women are, objectively although not completely, more extreme than anything we experience ourselves. These facts alone don’t deny the play relevance to a Cambridge audience, but I think for a play to have a lasting impact it should make us think about our own situation here and now. This is what the cast and crew of ‘Machinal’ did not quite get a hold on. The expressionism of the deconstructed scenes, broken down into locations and then into more suggestive abstract words, and then further into sounds and bursts of speech was artistically and aesthetically exciting and gripping, but more work could have been done to engage with the audience’s reality even within this disjoint.

All in all, the cast and crew of ‘Machinal’ should be proud of what they have created. This is a difficult form of theatre to pull off, and they have done so rhythmically and energetically, capturing the insane word-associations of this stifled young woman as she is pushed from the working scene to a domestic one to the maternity ward and then, eventually, to the law court. This is a daring artistic creation performed with skill and intensity, and maybe the fact that it isn’t perfect should be taken as part of the glory of modernist theatre.

Published anonymously in Varsity, January 2019: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/16845

It’s not very intellectual to write a theatre review about crying. It’s just that Billie Collins, in her newest masterpiece ‘Bastard’, doesn’t make us cry like we usually do.

When we watch a play and cry, we’re not (most of the time) crying because we have a shared experience with the character on stage. Normally we cry because of some abstract connection with the scene, or because the thought of being sad reminds us of what upsets us in our own lives. When you watch ‘Bastard’, you’ll cry about the awfulness of the experience of sadness, and the failure of human expression in the face of such experience. Essentially, Collins nails grief.

What I admire most about Collins’ writing is her ability to capture the everyday in all its quirkiness and theatricality, even within a play which is very much not about the everyday. The power of her style is in her similes which present every element of the world, every interaction and experience, in terms of what we knew so well as children. Her method is simplification, and yet with this comes glorious precision.

Collins’s almost novelesque style merges character monologue with the sharp immediacy of dramatic interactions, as Charlie (Stanley Thomas) is pulled in two conflicting directions throughout the play. On the one hand he wants to tell his story, giving what feels like a speech as much to himself as to a roomful of people, speaking as a way of coming to terms with what has happened. On the other, the moments are passing within these scenes, the other characters are waiting with bated breath for his responses: this is much more complex than pure character exposition.

And yet, of course, there are no other characters in the scenes. Stanley Thomas is alone on stage for the whole 90 minutes. He speaks mostly as himself, but sometimes he speaks the lines of his mother and father, or his half-daughter or his newly-appeared biological father. This should be ridiculous – if you’d pitched it to me, I would have said this can only come out as farce. But Thomas captures perfectly the storyteller role that Collins proposes, aware of the fragility but also the egotism of the lone actor’s position. He is caught between the world of the story he tells, and the world of audience and storyteller that exists now in hindsight.

It is in the details that Thomas’s acting is most impressive, however. His mannerisms are so carefully thought-out and rigorously maintained from beginning to end (he rubs the back of his neck, he pulls down his t-shirt), transforming him into the uncertain young man who suddenly finds that everyone around him has been lying for much longer and in much more depth than he ever imagined possible. He has been unsteadied; he is still in the process of thinking. It’s one thing to play a magnificent king in a Shakespeare play, and quite another to play a pretty ordinary student whose not-knowing and not-being-able-to-cry isn’t anything more than ordinary human failure. It’s not romantic or angry, and Thomas deserves infinite praise for this subtlety.

Just as it would be wrong to simply term this play a ‘one man show’, it’s wrong to describe the staging in terms of any kind of minimalism. It’s true that the Corpus Playroom stage is pretty much untouched, except for one chair and long pieces of white paper covering the walls from floor to ceiling. But this isn’t an aesthetic, and I think this is one of my favourite things about the play. The lighting changes only minutely, with the occasional shift to orange or blue or brighter white; the total number of sound effects in the whole play is a single figure. Collins isn’t making a point with this – she just chooses light which fits with place and time of the scene. The paper on the walls becomes a kind of drawing board for Charlie, a place to express himself visually as he draws on his route from the station to his house, and then the outline of his father, Stephen, and then (tracing around his own body) the outline of his biological father, Mark. The drawing can be symbolic, but it can also just be a way of better getting his point across and a way of helping his audience understand the story he is telling. What makes this play, written in what I have called an almost novelesque style, not a novel, then, is that Charlie’s thinking becomes an act of thinking through this drawing, a physical action which illustrates and makes sense of the thoughts and feelings that pile one upon the other in Charlie’s mind.

‘Bastard’ is a play which makes you want to write your own play, because you want to say these things that you have always felt and never put into words. Except Collins has already put them into words, and watching this play is an experience that I cannot recommend more highly. It’s not sensationalist, it’s not even tragic – it’s cathartic.

Published anonymously in Varsity, January 2019: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/16774

The preview written for Varsity promised a focus on and a control over Pinter’s language – words which are terrifying and yet also endearing, comic and yet also unsettling. It is this confidence about what they are saying that comes through most clearly in the actors’ lines in this play, as they unravel the dark comedy that is Pinter’s ‘The Homecoming’.

This play is difficult to watch. Director Angus Jackson makes his characters have a hardness, a grim bitterness which perfectly suits the conversations which seem to approach emotional matters only to withdraw from them into a violent outburst. The play’s climax is expertly managed and skilfully executed, creating in the audience a sense of disgust but also daring us to keep watching: we become strange voyeurs towards the end of this final act, and the characters take pleasure in this manipulation. All of the actors display, in this scene, such a bravery of acting, not shying away from the hideous movements in the script but embracing them and carrying them to their full extreme – it is the only way Pinter can be done.

A particular mention should go to Theodora Mead for her performance of Ruth, the only woman in this household of men, whose role shifts from object to ruler, pivoting on male sexuality and the insatiable lusts of these men who have been cooped up together, womanless, for so long. What was most commendable in Mead’s acting was her amazing physical stillness in the opening scenes, a stillness which added to the sense of her being out of place in the household, an object for the men to gawp at and label as a prostitute and eventually decide to keep with them to satisfy their sexual needs. In the scene between Lenny and Ruth there is a power in her unflinching stillness which transforms into active power as the scene draws to a close – the tension is shuddering; the complete silences in the audience which the cast achieve throughout are impressive.

What is most to be praised in this production, however, is the way in which the actors handle the language. Jackson and assistant directors Helena Brann have clearly spent time working on the rhythms of Pinter’s speech, not just on the pause but also on the relationship between each part of the line, and the effect is almost musical. While all of the actors achieve this rhythm, I was particularly impressed with Isaac Zarnet’s performance as Max: the anger with which he speaks, which rises at moments which can seem completely ridiculous, and the pure aggression of his every interaction, can be hard to maintain, but Zarnet’s Max oscillates between deeply humorous and terrifyingly unnerving – and never once are his words lost at the end of the lines.

Where there was room for improvement, I felt, was in the blocking of the scenes. There were some moments of symbolic brilliance – for example, when Ruth takes Max’s chair in the centre of the stage for the final interaction, representing her taking control of the family in her femininity – but in general I felt there could have been more creative blocking, particularly in such a large space as the Robinson auditorium. There were moments, often the ones with underlying sexual implications, that I felt could have been drawn out and experimented with more physically, and some of their power was possibly lost.

The set, too, posed a problem for me. It must be said, as the play went on, I grew to appreciate its appropriateness more and more, creating a living room which felt not quite right, not quite a home, with something unsettling in its bareness but also gratuitous ornaments that I could not quite put my finger on: this fit with the play’s general sense of the unnerving. Where it fell short, I would argue, was that the actors did not interact with it enough. Apart from Joey boxing in the mirror and one significant movement of the chair in the scene between Ruth and Lenny, the set felt a bit like a background against which the action was happening, rather than a room which the characters were actually inside. A few moments of interaction with the set, acknowledgement that this is a room of a house in which the characters have lived for so many years, could have added a little more coherence and authenticity.

Putting on Pinter is an incredibly difficult task – getting the timing of the pauses, capturing the comedy and the darkness, presenting the relationships between the characters not just as completely monstrous but also as somehow human. I really admire Jackson and his cast for what they have done here – and I think they did a lot of things right. Pinter’s words, his timing, his pauses are what matter most in this production, and as a result the production feels in control – and thus even more disturbing. Each of the actors held their own throughout the performance, sticking closely to their character even in the moments when they were not talking, giving the audience not one single moment of rest or reassurance. It’s always a good sign when the audience are afraid to make any noise during a silence on stage.

Published anonymously in Varsity, November 2018: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/16520

To anyone who has ever read Austen, the prospect of putting on a play with her words might be a puzzling one. Her writing relies so much on long and winding clauses, on sentences which change perspective halfway through, and on description which would surely be lost in the transition from page to stage. At the end of Madeleine Trepanier’s production of ‘Northanger Abbey’ last night, I was no longer puzzled.

Trepanier’s script is wonderful in its preservation of the complexity that is so fundamental to Austen’s writing, as the twisting and turning sentences unfold into a kind of adventure in the scenes in front of us. Lines are shared between characters as perspectives shift and fragment, and the characters often find themselves narrating their own actions in the third person: the sense of dramatic self-consciousness that this creates is enthralling.

Kay Benson’s Catherine delivers her lines with such clarity, relishing every word of the text and reminding the audience that this play is, in the end, about Austen’s language. The story is there, and it is tense and charming, but it is the language to which we should be paying attention. Benson’s performance is generally brilliant; she perfectly captures the figure of a woman coming out into the social world for the first time in her sultry looks down the chapel aisle, but also the innocence and curiosity of one so unprepared for reality. She is earnest; her emotions swing wildly through every changing situation. She plays a Catherine so beautifully caught up in the novels that she reads, novels which are heaped upon her by the characters in the opening scene of the play as they pile books into her hand and thus metaphorically seem to construct her understanding of the world.

Of course what I have failed to mention so far is the setting of this play. Selwyn Chapel provides a startingly new and yet intensely perfect backdrop – although it is used much more cleverly than just as a backdrop. The spotlight which lights up the majestic stained-glass window in the second act is a nice touch, and a particular highlight is the moment when Catherine stands in the raised seats behind the choir, framed by the Gothic carvings and drowned in red light. The cast use the space interestingly and excitingly, the pew becoming the stalls of a theatre, the aisle a ballroom and then the halls of Northanger Abbey itself. The Gothic imagination is preserved and emphasised.

The props which construct and deconstruct this space are deployed with smoothness, from frames to sheets to candles – my favourite was the construction of the carriage out of chairs turned to face different directions as the characters looked out of the front or the back windows. These props create a strong sense of Austen’s place, yet never let the play break out of the space of the chapel.

The costumes evoke typical Victorian clothing: the way in which they manage skilfully to tread the line between indulging these 19^th century fashions and yet not being overly complicated or exquisite is certainly to be praised. The coordinated ribbons and sashes for each of the three female protagonists, a different colour for each, gives each of them an almost symbolic presence in these scenes which show so many different young women coming out into society.

This is something completely new, something which you won’t have seen at Cambridge and probably never will again. The script has obviously been scrupulously thought-through, the acting clear and beautifully light, and the music and costumes complement the awe-inspiring setting of Selwyn Chapel. The cast fill Austen with a newfound energy that will excite anyone who has read her (and intrigue anyone who hasn’t). It is impossible to sit there, in the pews of this Gothic chapel, and not feel the pull of the Gothic imagination that runs through Catherine, or the longing for the ballroom and the social world of these women as they talk about books and men and life. It is impossible not to be charmed, gripped and thrilled.

Published anonymously in Varsity, November 2018: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/16448

Bumping into school friends in a pub somewhere once you’ve left school and you all have separate lives, is an inevitability. For some, it’s a joy and a pleasurable surprise; others dread it and will avoid it for as long as they can. It is in this liminal space of reunion and re-stirring of half-buried feelings that Alice Tyrrell sets her new play ‘The Ladies’, which takes place over one night inside (and in the corridor just outside the door of) the ladies’ bathroom.

“I wonder what goes on in there,” muse the play’s only two male characters, separated from their girlfriends and exiled to the corridor by the necessity of gender. The first act shows Ella’s boyfriend Harry (Freddie Bartlett-Evans) passed by a wonderful array of characters as he waits outside the door of the bathroom, and the conversations that take place are marvellously awkward both in their writing and their execution. There is a naturalism to Bartlett-Evans’ acting which nicely complements the words of Tyrrell’s script; all the silences come in just the right places. This first act bursts with humour, sometimes chuckling and sometimes roaringly hilarious but always keeping the audience close to these characters.

We are physically close, too, as a wall stands only a couple of metres in front of the first row of seats, pasted with concert posters which evoke the pub setting but also become a kind of cruel joke for Harry, whose stagnated career as a musician haunts him through every encounter. The set is pleasingly minimalist and yet brightly atmospheric, providing a rectangle of colour and interest in the middle of the grey space of Pembroke New Cellars.

On the surface, then, the first act of ‘The Ladies’, beautifully crafted as it is, has little relation to queer theatre. It is in the second act, after the audience have stepped through the doorway and entered the once-secretive space of the ladies’ bathroom in an exciting piece of staging that the queer focus of Tyrrell’s creation comes to the fore.

The hidden is unveiled; the mystery is clarified. Here the women are left to interact outside the gaze of men, and the range of relationships that Tyrrell explores give the scenes a vibrance and an intensity that is skilfully navigated by the actors. A special mention (which is hard to do in such a talented cast) should go to Kay Benson, whose performance as the pouting, hair-twiddling Jess creates a character almost uncomfortably sassy and yet so real. The gossiping drama of Jess and Poppy (Vee Tames) contrast with the cynicism of Freya (Fran Davis) who comes to centre stage in this act. She is the ‘other woman’, the girl Ella (Hannah Lyall) is trying to avoid with all her might because she doesn’t want to hurt Harry – but mostly because she cannot admit to herself her attraction to Freya.

Lyall and Davis bounce off each other with a simple quietness in their interactions, as Ella’s bubbly expressiveness comes up against Freya’s quiet knowing. If there is one part of this play which did not work for me, it would be Freya’s outburst; while its message was an important one, it seemed too abrupt, too compressed, which was a shame at the end of a play which is so tightly-constructed, with half-hearted comments from the first act taking on new meaning in the second. Ella’s response, however, when Harry finally breaks the magical line and enters the bathroom to find Ella and Freya there, is breathtaking. Tyrrell and Blackburn’s directing here is perfect, as they have Lyall facing each of the two in turn, speaking in the third person as if she cannot quite face up to what she is saying: she cannot quite take ownership of the pain that she is causing. The ending is perhaps a little abrupt, but it is certainly moving, and its foregrounding of queer issues is incredibly powerful.

Yet what makes this show so heartbreaking and so wonderful to watch is not its queer message. It is the humanity of its characters, whose interactions are performed with a subtlety and naturalness that is difficult to perfect: but when it works is enlightening and riveting. To have written something so nuanced and cleverly-crafted, with its layers of meaning running from the first to the last second, is such an exciting achievement, and the cast and staging more than do the words justice.

Published anonymously in Varsity, November 2018: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/16483

A detective series with a female protagonist. Two female protagonists even. It’s what we’ve been clamouring for, filling a space in a world which so often fails to express female experience.

But there is so much more to ‘Killing Eve’ than just ticking boxes and satisfying quotas. The BBC’s newest drama does something really special. From the first episode I was captivated; I felt as if this was this what I had been waiting to watch for so long.

Let’s start with the character of the villanelle. Her identity is no secret; there are as many scenes of her life as there are of Eve’s. Waller-Bridge has created in her villanelle an incredible paradox. Oxana (Jodie Comer) is terrifying in her ruthlessness, chilling as she smiles over her victims’ blood-soaked, mutilated bodies which, unafraid to stare into a man’s eyes and shoot him in the head: but she is also, terrifyingly, charming. She doesn’t seem to feel things, but there is also something decidedly endearing about her which draws in the audience and makes us powerless to stop watching. We don’t necessarily want her to be free, even, when she is in prison; we don’t believe she is innocent – how can we? We just want her life to continue to be visible to us. As she sits in a pink tutu in the middle of the grey of Europe in winter, eating a sandwich as she unpacks Eve’s stolen luggage, we cannot help but be charmed by her.

The relationship between Oxana and Eve, if it can be called a relationship, is dominated by these ‘feminine’ images: Oxana sends Eve clothes and perfume, and during the confrontation scene Eve is dressed in a tightly-fitting black and white dress, as if she has dressed up especially for this moment. That Eve’s marriage begins to break down as she comes closer and closer to finding Oxana is no coincidence. The villanelle replaces the husband. When the two women face each other in the forest, the music evokes the sense of a love scene, and the close-up shots create a certain sensuality which runs through the scene. In one of the show’s final scenes, the two lie side by side on a bed, juxtaposed but also in a wonderful kind of harmony.

It is important that each of these moments is inevitably and suddenly punctured by violence: in the forest, the villanelle draws a gun to break the intensity of eye contact; Eve stabs Oxana as they lie side by side on the bed. Violence and blood drench this series, but it is a violence aestheticized, romanticised, executed with skill and a certain beauty which both horrifies and captivates the audience. We want to dismiss it as completely barbaric and murderous and contemptible, but we are unsettled because we cannot. We are drawn to it and to the people – to the woman – who creates it.

What I have skirted around so far, and what any review of ‘Killing Eve’ would be incomplete without, is its humour. Konstantin tells us he must rescue his daughter because she is so annoying, and Eve agrees even as she holds the girl hostage, a gun to her head; the scenes between Eve and Bill are crammed with sarcasm and hilarious cynicism (if there’s anything the show falls short of, it is duly lamenting the death of Bill, which seems to pass almost unnoticed after a couple of episodes, despite the glorious warmth of his relationship with Eve). The humour in this show arises also from its absurdity – from the complete ridiculousness of the villanelle sniffing her sandwich as she rifles through Eve’s stolen suitcase, or nodding her head contemplatively when Nadiya asks if she is going to kill her. We laugh, but we are also deeply disturbed. We cannot cast this woman aside as a villain, and we can’t take her crimes completely seriously, because even at the darkest moments we cannot suppress a snigger.

What Waller-Bridge has created is something entirely new, only partly serious, brimming with female strength but also female vulnerability. There is a naturalism to her scenes which express a detail which makes it almost impossible for us, the audience, to decide who we want to survive: Eve or Oxana. And it becomes clear that neither of these women can decide either, as each negotiates a professional pursuit which brings them together and develops into a kind of obsession, an erotic fantasy. The final note is one of violence, as Eve stands covered in the wounded villanelle’s blood, but even at that moment it does not pick a side: Eve stabs Oxana, and Oxana tries to shoot Eve. Violence streams through this show, yet, despite its set-up as a detective drama, the laws of depraved murderer and moralising detective are upended, and it is never obvious who should be held responsible. What are we left with, then, is the story of two women just trying to live their lives.

Published in Varsity, October 2018: https://www.varsity.co.uk/film-and-tv/16223

The first thing that strikes you about the Corpus Playroom’s latest production is the set. The walls are lined with huge cabinets crammed to bursting and then some more, filled with everything from dictionaries of hymnology to a packet of Frosted Flakes, from glassware to a coat stand. It could give the sense that every detail has been carefully attended to, every object carefully placed, but I’m worried that the effect was more one of haphazard hoarding – and of course, from a narratorial point of view, that was the intention. I wonder, however, whether there’s a difference between the characters being haphazard and the director being haphazard, and I’m not sure how carefully thought-out the set felt.

The opening of the play, sadly, was the shakiest part. I say this because the rest of the performance was far from shaky, Leigh and Bullard shining with confidence in their complexly difficult characters. Alfred Leigh as Daniel was incredible in his interpretation of the autistic Daniel, sitting emotionless and intensely frustrated in his yellow T-shirt at the centre of the cluttered room, wishing Peppy would stop talking and yet humouring her with a wonderful tenderness. Anna Bullard’s Peppy is garrulous, the elder sister who describes to her brother every detail of her day: the woman with a coat, the buses not running, the shops not being open. She tells Daniel to use his listening ears and yet, we feel, she is talking not so he listens but so she can talk: this is what normal people do.

There is a sense throughout the play, neatly captured, of the necessity of upholding an illusion. What is charming and endearing in Daniel in Act One becomes dangerous and suspicious in the eyes of the police in Act Two; what is friendly and zealous in Peppy quickly turns to hysteria and a desire to stave off the silence. They both dance together in this harmony of concealment, avoiding the world and its gaze, but also, it seems, their own.

The double-vision that this play provides is so important. On one side is the audience’s perspective, the events as the innocently fixed ‘truth’ that Daniel writes in his notebook; on the other is the overly suspicious perspective of the outside world as they look in at Daniel and Peppy and their reclusive lives. What we see is an endearing scene, two lonely people curled up on a chair on a rain-clogged evening, reading from Daniel’s diary and celebrating what is gloriously different about them. What the police see is a dangerous man who poses a risk to Ben and to children, and who must be arrested. The moving becomes sinister as the forensics people come in to search the house and cover it in white cloths, constructing the interrogation table out of this whiteness that is terrifyingly eerie, moving to the same piano music as haunts the whole play but this time more minor, with more of an undertone of the sinister and the uncertain.

It is worth pausing here to heap praise on Emily Beck, whose naturalism in playing what is of course a difficult part in the eight-year old boy of Ben was incredible: she was full of energy, bouncing around with a curiosity and complete social innocence so perfect to an eight-year old who cannot understand anything beyond doing what he wants to and spending time with whoever he wants to spend time with – even if this means climbing out of his window at night and scrambling under the fence.

I was pleasantly surprised by the play’s ability to hold its audience’s attention even after two hours without an interval: I was gripped until the very end, enthralled by the characters and their difference which was refreshing and interesting and so complexly layered that I wanted desperately to uncover the reality of their selves beneath all the levels of concealment.

The range of emotions which the actors are able to command in this play is certainly impressive, moving from the tension of the police investigation to the breakdown when Daniel returns home and Peppy takes his place in the chair in the centre of the room, crying out for those who she has lost while Daniel bangs on a metal bowl with a spoon, desperately calling out for the cat. In the final scene there is a new lightness, a brightness as Peppy sews together the bunting and a breath of fresh air as Karen Parry (Charlotte Husnjak) swirls into the scene with her smiles and her picnic and her determination that things will change.

‘The House They Grew Up In’ is a beautiful study of what happens when we are left to ourselves, cut off from the world, through a play which is touched by Daniel’s words as he describes in his jolting and yet perfectly ordered the world that moves around him, every thought he thinks. This is a play drenched in Odysseus and Titian, cluttered with symbolism which is not always obvious but nonetheless beautiful in its sense of an order that lies beneath. There is something we cannot quite put our fingers on – and this ‘almost’ is delivered with such a tenderness and subtlety that we cannot help but sigh when the actors come up for their bows.

Published anonymously in Varsity, November 2018: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/16442

Spend a summer reading the diaries of Virginia Woolf, and it’s impossible not to want to meet her and the people who moved around her. The words of her diaries and her letters seethe with the intellectual, with perfectly-placed adjectives, as she navigates the light and dark of literary society in the 1920s. It is these letters, specifically the ones written between Virginia and her lover Vita Sackville-West, which Eileen Atkins has adapted into the play ‘Vita & Virginia’, and which Sarah Taylor and her wonderful women are bringing to the Corpus stage next week.

The words of this play tremble between the intellectual and the erotic, interspersing discussions about the latest publications and criticism with expressions of tenderness, revealing a relationship fraught with paradox, tension and intensity. Emmeline Downie (Virginia) and Corinne Clark (Vita) have never acted together before, hadn’t even met before the call-backs for this play, but there is something so intuitive in their connection. These two have studied their characters in exquisite detail, reading biographies over the summer and realising how much they have in common with their characters. They seem to feel a real affinity with Virginia and Vita.

The passion they feel is clear: the best part of the whole show, Emmeline and Corinne tell me, is the authenticity of it, the fact that the words they are speaking are words actually written by Virginia and Vita. Even if it means that the loosely-structured sentences are very difficult to piece together and speak on stage, there is something wonderful in following the trains of thought of these two influential figures.

What struck me as I watched the two actors rehearse was the surprising lightness of the letters, and Taylor tells me this is a sense that she wants to create in the play. When people think of Woolf, they think of her suicide, filling her pockets with stones and stepping into the river, but her letters are full of life, laced with excitement and the pleasure of living. The scenes are bursting with irony; Vita and Virginia smirk at each other as they recount stories about their daily lives and the people who move around them. Part of the beauty of this play lies in the necessity of interpretation: these are the exact words that these women wrote, but they are still only words, which Downie and Clark have to invest with tone and character. These literary silhouettes become filled-in people through the course of this play: they become more than genius words on a page.

The presence of the letter in this play is an enduring one. Taylor discussed the difficulties which the letter form poses in terms of movement: the play straddles inner monologue and dialogue, some of the lines directed to the audience, some to the audience, as each of these women hide behind their writing, in their own spaces, protected from the reality of what they are saying and the emotions they are expressing. Keeping it lively has been a challenge, but I have hope that this team will succeed. And at times stillness is perfect. Some questions are never answered, lost in the letters as they lurch from one topic to another, and the audience hang captivated in this unfulfilled answering.

This is a show which really should not be missed. The four women involved – directors Taylor and Williams, actors Clark and Downie – feel a passion for the play and for these characters which we, as the audience, cannot help but feel. The relationship they depict is one which flickers between tension and irony, described throughout in the gorgeous words of these two writers, whose character analyses and overflowing sentences will leave you breathless.

Published in Varsity, October 2018: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/16178