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Taking liberties

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 6th August 2008

Her Naked Skin
Olivier

Elaine Stritch At Liberty
Shaw

Another difficulty is the audience’s unconscious expectations. A play about social justice set amid the bustle and flummery of the Edwardian era is bound to remind us of Shaw at his most powerful, so we’re mentally prepared for muscular plotting, deftly drawn characters, gags galore and dazzling intellectual sword-play. None of this Lenkiewicz can hope to match. Her political antennae are woefully underdeveloped. We get no sense of the historical context, of the feminist cause as a component in the wider democratic struggle in Britain and across the world. Little is made of the frictions within the movement and no attention is given to the majority of anti-suffragist women. Most upper-class ladies feared general suffrage because it would entitle their scullery maids to discuss politics with them on equal terms. And with their husbands too.

The play drifts away from political debate and into the developing relationship between a posh bisexual woman and her lovely Cockney toy-girl. Both characters are as tepid as leftover soup unfortunately, and neither offers any insight into the movement that thrust them together. Instead they sit around on park benches smoking cigarettes — a badge of liberation — and engaging in chaste guilty gropes. Bizarrely, this relationship seems to pander to the oldest chauvinist prejudice of the lot: all feminists are lesbians. Still at least there are plenty of entries for Anachronism Corner. ‘Prioritise’, ‘lunatic fringe’ and ‘Do you think I’m mental?’ sound very odd in 1913. The speaker of the Commons introduces an MP with, ‘Pray silence’, and a member of the Cabinet says, ‘Curzon’s going loco about them.’ Yeah, spot on, Curzie.

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