This new play by Rebecca Lenkiewicz is being publicised as the first work by a living female playwright on the Olivier stage at the National Theatre. The concept of a play dramatising the lives of the suffragettes is a natural one for the big stage, and this play gets a terrific production from the hugely experienced Howard Davies and a top-notch cast, plus a great set by Rob Howell. So where did it all go wrong? Unfortunately the play reads like a first draft, and would have benefited from some serious script-doctoring. With recent memories of Saint Joan and Major Barbara on the Olivier stage flashing through my mind, I kept wondering what that old windbag Shaw, or Ibsen, might have made of this subject matter.
I often chair the weekly discussion at Player-Playwrights, where we generally spend up to half an hour picking holes in the script our actors have just read. It's a useful process for writers, and one from which this play would certainly have benefited. We give points out of 10 according to the premise or theme, the characterisation, the plotting, the dialogue and the performability, so I'm going to try to discuss what I see as the flaws in Rebecca Lenkiewicz's play using the same method.
Premise: 8/10 The idea of a suffragette play with a big cast looking at the personal and the political conflicts of the women's movement just before World War One is an ambitious one, and potentially very rewarding. Lenkiewicz takes the background of the suffragettes' imprisonment, hunger strikes and force-feeding, and foregrounds the story of Lady Celia Cain, an upper-class mother of seven who falls in love with an East End seamstress, Eve Douglas. Is that kind of same-sex affair plausible for 1913? I can't see why not. And I don't agree with those who say that foregrounding the love story inevitably weakens the political aspect of the play.
Characters: 6/10 Although I greatly enjoyed Lesley Manville's performance as Celia, I could never quite believe in her. I felt that the writer was uncertain at key points in the script about Celia's motivations, and it showed. She seems at the start totally committed to the suffragette movement as a veteran of several spells in prison, but also at times semi-detached, and there's no clear storyline tracing this. My alarm bells always ring when one character asks another, 'Do you remember when...?' which always strikes me as an amateurish way of building up a backstory. When Celia breaks up with Eve, it's not clear why, and the relationship with her husband William also seems uncertainly drawn. We don't ever learn why she became a suffragette in the first place. The best written character in the play is the elderly suffragette Florence Boorman, wonderfully played by Susan Engel. Eve, played by Jemima Rooper, seems too articulate and well-spoken to be a working class seamstress. I don't feel that the interior conflicts of the characters are well dramatised, and the male parts aren't as convincing as the females.
Plot and structure: 4/10 Lenkiewicz seems to have difficulty establishing the link between her background and foreground stories, which take place on parallel tracks without ever meeting. She doesn't seem to be able to find a way of setting up the usual conflict between Love and Duty. Celia and Eve are suffragettes, and they're also in love, but these double commitments never properly come into conflict. Neither really has to make a choice. The suffragette story suffers from a lack of political insight and I came to the conclusion that the author's historical grasp of what it was all about is quite shallow. This was a movement riven by conflict between moderates and extremists over tactics; there are lots of really interesting questions to be asked about the psychology of militancy, about the conflict between the personal and the political spheres, and about whether the Pankhursts in particular allowed their egos to get in the way of the cause. Might the suffragettes have achieved their goals sooner without using violence? Or did the arson attacks, the suicides and the violence just give arguments to their opponents who could point to such tactics as good reasons why women shouldn't be allowed to vote? How legitimate is it to break the law in a good cause? That's a highly relevant issue at a time when climate change protesters are being treated by the boneheaded policemen of Kent as being beyond the law. Unfortunately Lenkiewicz isn't interested in asking any of these questions. Her portrayal of the men on the other side of the debate is a caricature and she seems not to have heard of Shaw's idea that the way to make a good play is to give the devil the best tunes. So anyone who goes to this play wanting a fresh political look at the politics of protest or the role of women through the prism of the suffragette movement will be disappointed. The imprisoned suffragettes form a static presence like a Greek chorus in their metal prison cells, but they don't have a dynamic storyline with a beginning, a middle and an end. Despite the women serving long prison sentences, we seem to stay for almost the whole play in 1913.
Dialogue: 4/10 A lot of the writing is banal, sometimes verging on Mills and Boon, and the individual scenes struggle to get out of second gear. Lenkiewicz's grasp of how the Edwardians talked and behaved seems shaky and the words she puts in her characters' mouths are often anachronistic. Unless you have the wit and talent of Stoppard who uses deliberate anachronisms, it's best to keep the dialogue in period and my teeth were put on edge by all sorts of 21st century phrases: 'Her health's not great', 'We'll get you out of here just as soon as we can', 'Now you want me to be a no-show'. The last was particularly grating, but Celia's reference to her husband as being 'plastered' and the use of 'piss off' as an upper class insult also upset me. Edwardians didn't go in for sunbathing, and I don't think urban foxes roamed London as they do today. Not only the words but sometimes the body language seems out of period in this play, and I don't think the author has spent quite enough time immersed in the period. Of course the Edwardians had affairs, but generally with members of their own class and with the opposite sex; Lenkiewicz seems to play down the size of the taboos that Celia and Eve would been breaking. The same-sex relationship itself is plausible enough and played with great conviction, but the stakes don't seem high enough.
Performability: 7/10 I feel that despite these flaws the play justifies its place on the big stage. The horrendous force-feeding scene, which has upset some people writing on the Guardian website, is not for the squeamish, but it's not as bad as the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear, a scene that always gives me nightmares. More importantly, it's dramatically justified by the subject matter of the play, even though its place in the play seems rather arbitrary. The set with its Guantanamo-style metal cages is highly effective, and so are the sound effects and music. Visually, it works well. There's what amounts to a double revolve, with the cages on the upper level being spun around by hand and the furniture and scenery being spun into place by the mechanised stage revolve. The only problem is that the cages are so high that they mask the projected images at the back of the stage, including Emily Davison's throwing herself under the King's horse at the Derby. Some people in seats at the side may have had poor sightlines in the prison scenes.
This may be a rather reductive way to analyse a play, and I wouldn't apply it to the tiny minority of playwrights who are great enough to ignore all the rules. But for most scripts, it works reasonably well. Rebecca scores 58% for her play. It's a pity the NT didn't give her the time and opportunity to rewrite it. Perhaps they did, but the process didn't dig deep enough.
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