The Writer

by Ella Hickson

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 9th May 2018

Blanche McIntye directs Romola Garai, Michael Gould, Lara Rossi and Samuel West in an often dazzling play examining the fraught business of writing for the theatre complicated by the difficulty (or even the impossibility) of a woman exerting artistic freedom in a male-dominated world.

The play begins with a young woman, a member of the audience of a play evidently just finished, engaging in a conversation with an older man who has some position in the theatre. It seems an accidental encounter, and the woman is at first unwilling to stay back and talk, but she soon delivers an impassioned speech about the corruption of theatre by monied interests, and she also objects to the too-easily patronising attitude of the man. 

When it transpires that they have met before, which she remembers and he at first does not, the resonances of the arguments about power and patriarchy take on a more personal tone; the man is unable to understand why personal attraction should compromise his artistic judgement, while the woman is baffled and infuriated by his blindness to her predicament.

There follows an at times toe-curling Q&A session: what we have been watching is the first scene of a new play, now up for critical discussion between the two actors (here, Rossi and West) and the play's director (Gould) and author (Garai). Already the author is on the defensive, boiling with emotion but often talked down by the director - a clear illustration of the power dynamics the previous scene was discussing.

Subsequent scenes show the author with her male partner, in which questions of love and attraction are messily tangled with questions of earning power and self-confidence; the author undergoing an almost mystical experience 'in the wild'; the author in further discussions with the director; and the author with her female partner exploring the physical and emotional boundaries of the relationship. But it remains unclear (satisfyingly so) whether these scenes are part of the work the author is creating, or whether they represent episodes in her life while she is writing.

It's a thought-provoking experience to watch this, not least because of the questions it raises about contemporary theatre-going as a middle-class experience, about the very different perspectives which men and women have about the lives they share at both a personal and a business level, and more especially about the enormous barriers to female expression and autonomy as experienced by a woman passionate to communicate but trammelled by the world around her. The staging, designed by Anna Fleischle, wonderfully moves us from bare theatre to down-at-heel flat (female and male partners) to mystical forest to luxury apartment (female and female partners), and the actors give committed and articulate performances. The arguments may be familiar to some, even for some to the point of weariness, but they are presented cogently and at no time are the actors mere mouthpieces. Romola Garai in particular speaks in great storms of passion which betoken the author's deep anguish, against which masculine urbanity and self-confidence can only look condescending.

I'm not sure that the intense sexual encounters (audible but thankfully not particularly visible) did not come perilously close to being gratuitous. But what was perhaps most shocking about them was the matter-of-factness of their aftermaths - no lingering romanticised post-coital languor (so indulged by the film industry), but rather a fairly abrupt getting on with the next thing in life. And it is a mark of the brilliance of the writing and the acting that, with a group of school students in the audience, there were only a few giggles of embarrassment; on the whole the audience was spellbound.