THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Kristin Scott Thomas and Lily James bring some welcome star luster to the West End for the pre Christmas season in this rare thing - a new play that opens cold in the West End. The result has been (unfairly) thrashed by the critical fraternity but has echoed with audiences, with the run nearly sold out.
Scott Thomas plays Elaine, a successful film actor who 30 years previously walked out on her successful career and marriage and is now living as a recluse in a spartan, sea-battered house in Cornwall. Her ex having passed, she finally feels ready to tell her story and so she summons Kate (Lily James) a young development executive for Lilith, a trendy film company with a record for telling ‘female’ stories, to consider making a film of her story. Turns out her ex, a director who went on to become a national treasure, was a serial abuser and so this story chimes with the #MeToo revolution. Or does it?
Penelope Skinner first came to attention with her comedy The Village Bike at the Royal Court, and more recently The Following Events Are Based on a Pack of Lies on the BBC. She uses this new play to explore such themes as who controls women’s stories and how they get to tell them, but also broader themes like the value of female companionship, the struggle to escape the expectations of society, and how freedom can be curtailed just as much in your own head as by the actions of others.
Scott Thomas shines as the eccentric but still vibrant older woman decked out in wellies and a fur coat over her swimsuit as she heads off for her daily swim in the sea. Her immediate mistrust of the Yuppie Londoner and her city ways mellows but only after she turns the tables on her and asks her to tell her story first. This unlocks something in Kate, and James beautifully calibrates this emotional unraveling. She reveals how her whole life, up till then, was solely focused on meeting the expectations of others - family, friends and work colleagues. Academically a high flyer she now “has it all” as husband Greg reminds her, and yet is deeply unhappy, at least when she has the time to stop and reflect.
Greg, also in the business, is pressuring her to have a second child despite her traumas the first time. James Corrigan is perfect as the alpha male, who, like Nora’s husband in A Doll's House, considers she’s “having a breakdown” because she doesn’t agree with him.
The key women in her life aren’t much help either. Kate’s Mother sides with Greg, and her boss Sue doesn’t want her feminist work idyll besmirched by the real day to day banalities of juggling work, husband and family. Doon Mackichan is slyly brilliant as this chic, faux ally who cracks the whip probably more than any witless male boss might do.
The apparent freedom Elaine and her loyal sidekick Chris (Sara Powell) have, has great allure for Kate and, after relations have mellowed, Elaine decides to recount her story with a mini performance at a standing mic. The three get drunk and dance the night away.
Georgia Lowe’s set perfectly captures the Bohemian squalor of Elaine’s crumbling house and underlines Cornwall’s reputation for myth and magic linked to the omnipresence of the sea. ‘Lyonesse’ refers to the legend of a once thriving kingdom stretching from the tip of Cornwall to the Isles of Scilly, buried beneath the sea by a giant wave on a single night.
It’s certainly no masterpiece, few plays are, and it’s often clunky or laden with exposition, but neither is it a dud. Its ending (no spoiler) shatters some received opinions. The critical mauling it has received from a cartel of critics is a bit rich considering they regularly give a free pass to the torrent of polemical dross that mostly passes for new writing of late.
