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. 

Queen Anne

by Helen Edmundson

seen at the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 8 August 2017

Natalie Abrahami directs Emma Cunniffe as Queen Anne and Romola Garai as Sarah Churchill in this new RSC production transferred from Stratford. It follows the difficult relationship between the two women from the last years of William III's reign (when Anne was heir to the throne) until about 1708 soon after the death of her husband Prince George of Denmark. When Anne becomes Queen, England is soon involved in a European War, while domestically the Queen sees the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland as a personal triumph.

Anne, insecure and ill-educated, is seen by many as biddable and stupid, but she has a clear sense of her own entitlement and her duty, even as those around her try to manipulate her for their own political advantage. Her ambitious friend from their youth, Sarah Jennings, has married the brilliant soldier John Churchill - Earl, eventually to be Duke, of Marlborough - and her own driving ambitions conjoined with his make her dangerously impatient with the dynamics of being the special friend of a woman she has come to despise, but who is nonetheless the monarch.