Taking liberties
Lloyd Evans
Her Naked Skin Olivier Elaine Stritch At Liberty Shaw
In 2004 Rebecca Lenkiewicz got the black spot from the Critics’ Circle. Sorry, I mean she was voted ‘most promising playwright’. Less a gong, more a millstone. Praising writers for what they’ve done is fine. Praising them for what they may do in future is like congratulating a pregnant woman on her foetus’s A-levels results.
Lenkiewicz’s latest work about the suffragette movement arrives with fresh honours. The programme grandly announces that Her Naked Skin is ‘the first play by a living woman writer on the Olivier stage’. How aristocratic. It demands respect on account of its status at birth. The setting is 1913 and we’re watching the aftermath of Emily Wilding Davison’s suicidal prang with the king’s horse at the Derby. The flattened suffragette languishes in a coma, the terrified Cabinet have been thrown into a tizzy and the feminist rebels are preparing for a new wave of agitation. We watch four posh gels in long skirts, ankle boots and nice hats sidle up to a shop in Regent Street. They pop open their leather handbags, out come their hammers and smash bang wallop, with a delicious shattering of glass, they ventilate a few retail outlets and are rounded up by the rozzers.
At Holloway Prison cruel treatments await them. A hose-down in the shower-room is followed by a meal of warm porridge forced down their throats by vindictive warders wielding orange tubes. Thrilling stuff for sadistic penological historians perhaps, but it won’t engage the general viewer. Too many scene changes make the rhythm fractious and unsettled. The characterisation is binary. All the suffragettes are heroic, single-minded and politically sophisticated while the men who oppose them are a bunch of stupid, frightened smug little bullies.
Another difficulty is the audience’s unconscious expectations. A play about social justice set amid the bustle and flummery of the Edwardian era is bound to remind us of Shaw at his most powerful, so we’re mentally prepared for muscular plotting, deftly drawn characters, gags galore and dazzling intellectual sword-play. None of this Lenkiewicz can hope to match. Her political antennae are woefully underdeveloped. We get no sense of the historical context, of the feminist cause as a component in the wider democratic struggle in Britain and across the world. Little is made of the frictions within the movement and no attention is given to the majority of anti-suffragist women. Most upper-class ladies feared general suffrage because it would entitle their scullery maids to discuss politics with them on equal terms. And with their husbands too.
The play drifts away from political debate and into the developing relationship between a posh bisexual woman and her lovely Cockney toy-girl. Both characters are as tepid as leftover soup unfortunately, and neither offers any insight into the movement that thrust them together. Instead they sit around on park benches smoking cigarettes — a badge of liberation — and engaging in chaste guilty gropes. Bizarrely, this relationship seems to pander to the oldest chauvinist prejudice of the lot: all feminists are lesbians. Still at least there are plenty of entries for Anachronism Corner. ‘Prioritise’, ‘lunatic fringe’ and ‘Do you think I’m mental?’ sound very odd in 1913. The speaker of the Commons introduces an MP with, ‘Pray silence’, and a member of the Cabinet says, ‘Curzon’s going loco about them.’ Yeah, spot on, Curzie.
Women’s suffrage is a large theme that deserves the attention of a decent dramatist, but this tiny, lavishly produced show won’t do the trick.
Talking of tiny but lavish, Elaine Stritch flitted briefly into town with her prize-winning solo performance, At Liberty. Written with the theatre historian John Lahr, and already boasting a Tony award, the show is a brilliantly polished mixture of show-tunes and anecdotes about Marlon Brando, Rock Hudson, Ethel Merman, Noël Coward and all the characters Stritch has met during her decades in showbiz.
The will to survive, the will to entertain surges gloriously from her furrowed, silvery little figure. She skips on stage in a plain shirt, no dress, and with her tiny legs wrapped in black tights that make them look like burned Twiglets. Hard to tell if this is just daft or monumentally self-possessed. Her age is a mystery but she gets a big laugh by telling us the Sondheim classic ‘I’m still here’ mustn’t be performed by a woman under 50. ‘You need to be in your 80s to sing that number. But it’s such a beautiful song I can’t wait 20 years.’ And when the guffaws die down. ‘Thanks for that. But what are you laughing about?’
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