In seeking a vehicle to present their Young Company
alongside the current repertory cast, Storyhouse could barely have chosen a
better piece than Jessica Swale’s 2013 Globe Theatre success Blue Stockings.
Swale has already created vibrant adaptations of The Secret
Garden and Stig of the Dump for Storyhouse’s Open Air theatre at Grosvenor Park
and this, her first full length original play, seems a natural fit in the
current season. All three works in rep here (it plays alongside new adaptations
of The Suicide and Miss Julie) find different ways of challenging social and
political norms and stereotypes.
Director Elle While has remained faithful to the play’s
original time and place, as it is very firmly rooted in a particular moment in
history. It’s 1896, and young women, although grudgingly given their own colleges,
enabling them to study at Cambridge University, are not permitted to graduate.
We follow a new intake of female students who embark on their studies to find
themselves stuck between patronising male students and tutors and a burgeoning
movement to fight for equal rights.
To further complicate matters, the cause is seen by many as
being aligned to the wider campaign for suffrage, and those fighting for it are
keen to keep the two issues separate lest the politics muddies the water for
them.
The entire cast produce very strong performances, and they
make excellent use of the space in Adam Wiltshire’s skeletal, set, which
surrounds us with universe within universe amongst its dark wood and chalk
boards.
The uncompromisingly bigoted views put forward by many of
the male characters is all the more shocking at times because we know that such
ideas still raise their ugly heads all too often today. The performers pull no
punches in their delivery and at times you feel that some actors (in particular
Macaulay Cooper who plays the slimily self-congratulatory Lloyd) are so invested
in the parts that they may need an escort to get out of the theatre unscathed.
The play opens with a prologue in which a welcome to the new
women is juxtaposed against a frighteningly misogynistic speech from psychiatrist,
Dr Maudsley. At its close we are left with a projected caption, explaining the
length of time that eventually passed before the twin causes of graduation and
suffrage for women were finally won. Perhaps the dramatic flow might have been
maintained for a couple more minutes if this were presented as a brief, dramatised
epilogue, to bookend the piece with symmetry.
Blue Stockings is a splendid showcase of up and coming
talent and is in repertory at Storyhouse until 15th March.
 |
| Blue Stockings Production Photography by Mark McNulty |
Star Rating: 3½ Stars
This review was originally written for publication by Good News Liverpool
Comments
Post a Comment