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Taking liberties

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 6th August 2008

Her Naked Skin
Olivier

Elaine Stritch At Liberty
Shaw

In 2004 Rebecca Lenkiewicz got the black spot from the Critics’ Circle. Sorry, I mean she was voted ‘most promising playwright’. Less a gong, more a millstone. Praising writers for what they’ve done is fine. Praising them for what they may do in future is like congratulating a pregnant woman on her foetus’s A-levels results.

Lenkiewicz’s latest work about the suffragette movement arrives with fresh honours. The programme grandly announces that Her Naked Skin is ‘the first play by a living woman writer on the Olivier stage’. How aristocratic. It demands respect on account of its status at birth. The setting is 1913 and we’re watching the aftermath of Emily Wilding Davison’s suicidal prang with the king’s horse at the Derby. The flattened suffragette languishes in a coma, the terrified Cabinet have been thrown into a tizzy and the feminist rebels are preparing for a new wave of agitation. We watch four posh gels in long skirts, ankle boots and nice hats sidle up to a shop in Regent Street. They pop open their leather handbags, out come their hammers and smash bang wallop, with a delicious shattering of glass, they ventilate a few retail outlets and are rounded up by the rozzers.

At Holloway Prison cruel treatments await them. A hose-down in the shower-room is followed by a meal of warm porridge forced down their throats by vindictive warders wielding orange tubes. Thrilling stuff for sadistic penological historians perhaps, but it won’t engage the general viewer. Too many scene changes make the rhythm fractious and unsettled. The characterisation is binary. All the suffragettes are heroic, single-minded and politically sophisticated while the men who oppose them are a bunch of stupid, frightened smug little bullies.

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