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.
