UK Edition
Review
The Writer at Almeida Theatre, review - Romola Garai is searingly plausible in this sophisticated play for the MeToo generation
Writing about Ella Hickson’s The Writer is a tough-ish assignment. Not because it’s a play about feminism now, and the way a woman writer might endeavour (and struggle) to make a truthful piece of theatre in a world putatively male-dominated, if not to say positively patriarchal – and I’m a (boo, hiss) male critic who was somewhat lukewarm about her last play at the Almeida, 2016’s Oil.
It’s more because it proceeds as an ingenious series of ambushes that invite a set of conflicted responses. These responses induce a feeling of issues needing to be thrashed out, heated debates had after the show is over, and yet the more you reveal what’s in store the more you risk diminishing the head-spinning impact.
Over two unflaggingly inventive hours, directed by Blanche McIntyre, I found myself by turns goaded, irritated, delighted, challenged. In a recent interview for Radio 4, Romola Garai – one of its four actors – said that it’s audibly dividing audiences every night. I well believe her.
The opening scene establishes the evening’s archly theatrical conceptual framework. It’s as if we’re observing an accidental post-show encounter: a young woman (played by Lara Rossi) has returned to the auditorium to retrieve a bag; she encounters an older man (Sam West) who’s intrigued by the immediate sense – soon elaborated upon – that she didn’t like the play. He’s aloof, charming, quizzical, unrattled as she unleashes eloquent and entertaining arias of disgust at the female-objectifying, phoney, politically irrelevant work she has just seen, lambasting British theatre and its ‘famous people doing boring things badly”.
Impressed, and explaining he’s on ‘the board’, he invites her to write a play. There’s a hitch – twist: they’ve already met – he’s actually the director and propositioned her years ago when she was starting out – a grim #MeToo moment: he was only offering her a leg-up to get his leg over. “Stop playing the victim,” West’s character retorts. A similar defensive contempt oozes from the male director (Michael Gould) we see in the next scene when – another twist – it’s revealed, via a drolly excruciating simulated audience Q&A, that what we’ve just witnessed is a work-in-progress penned by Garai’s angry-nervy ‘Writer’.
The evening operates like an elaborate conjuring act, playing with artifice as we enter the Writer’s domestic life which is no less a work-in-progress – surrounded by a knowingly basic set and dominated by a sexually proprietorial boyfriend (West again) who can’t get his head round the idea that she would turn down a lucrative film adaptation offer and spurn marriage and kids. In exchanges funny, raw, true, he challenges her refusal to settle for ordinary life and demand for ‘more’ - communicated with searing, palpable, plausible yearning by Garai.
Combining cheap-shots with profundities – scrambling our sense of which is which – Hickson takes on theatrical imperatives and career expectations in one fell swoop: underlining the Writer’s fear of motherhood, fake lives, commercial compromise, we’re treated to a baby on stage (a wicked dig at The Ferryman). “That child belongs to the woman in the wings!” she exclaims, struggling to free herself from coercive pretence – which she does, after a fashion, voyaging into a mythic dream-like utopia of sensuous Sapphic excitement away from man-kind.
That reads like the ultimate ‘j’accuse’ against the bloke-iverse – and yet this sophisticated evening pushes further into something like a ‘je m’accuse’. With the rug pulled so often from our feet, it’s hard to say quite where we are. The final simulated acts of lesbian congress (Garai, Rossi), obscured behind a sofa, lead to some awkward questions about the need for power in every human relationship. Then it’s all over, as if in a puff of smoke, leaving us (well some of us) gasping.
Until May 26. Tickets: 020 7359 4404; almeida.co.uk