THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Emily Jupp
Omnibus Theatre, 1 Clapham Common Northside, London SW4 0QW until August 10, 2024
Wormholes is an uncomfortably harrowing tunnel of a play, narrating the journey of what becomes a brutally abusive relationship. It is unremittingly bleak. It is also enthralling and utterly relevant.
The knack that playwright and freelance journalist Emily Jupp demonstrates is an uncanny one for tracking back to those first idyllic steps in an amorous haze and showing, with an assured subtlety, the tiny fissures in the foundations of such connections between people, fissures that spread open and toxically spread like a cancer, corrupting, permeating and imprisoning, like a Midas touch in negative, all parties involved.
Jupp’s writing is cleverly and tautly structured. She manages deftly to push us into that place of discomfort and darkness by presenting us with psychological phenomena, played out on stage, with which we are all likely to be sadly familiar but which is too seldom societally and publicly acknowledged.
We see the giddy first few anticipatory steps of the narrator, excited by the lovebombing attentions of a narcissist; we see the weaponiziation of male vulnerability as a tool of manipulation; and we see the ways in which women since time immemorial have been co-opted into perpetuating their own oppression, with the ‘boys will be boys’ / ’anything for an easy life’ mantra-like sentiment heartbreakingly triumphing over the courage of personal whistleblowing.
This is due in no small part to the superlatively talented Victoria Yeates (of the BBC’s Call The Midwife), the star of this one woman show. Her utterly riveting performance compels us to white-knuckle this terrifying journey with her everywoman protagonist for just over an hour, with nothing but a bare stage and her physical body, which she uses to great effect in illustrating the more harrowing moments of her story to us.
She is supported by fiendishly clever use of light and sound, with formerly ubiquitous pop earworms like ‘I’m Every Woman’ distorted and tempo rearranged so as to utterly change and ironize the tone and meaning of the song to curdle our blood as we watch events unfold.
Jupp’s literary forbears’ influence is palpable but never derivative. One is put in mind of Poe’s aggrieved and psychologically unhinged servant narrator, but also of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s post-natally depressed and traumatized voice, haunted by the infantilizing patterns of 19th Century male hegemony, with a dash of Toni Morrison's maternal pathos ripping at one’s soul at the center of this narrative.
In a cultural moment in which we face backlashes against feminism, the now perpetual threat of narcissistic misogynists taking political power, and the very real threat of the rolling back of women’s physical and reproductive freedom looming large, rarely has there been a story about power and abuse that has felt more poignant!
