Machinal
The Old Vic, London

WRITER Sophie Treadwell created plays with a female audience in mind, and did a grand job with this piece, first staged in 1928.

The crying shame is that the production, nearly a century later, does not serve its central theme well enough.

It’s a thrill to see expressionist theatre, but not when a treatment delivers style over substance.

Sitting in the stalls, so many decades ago, must have fed the souls of all those women, struggling to survive, let alone thrive, in a system designed to lock them in their sex-specified box.

One such was Ruth Snyder, on whose life and death Machinal was based. This vivacious young woman married the rather dull Albert Snyder, a man with fixed expectations of his wife. So far, so universal, in characters and context.

Snyder starts an affair with married lounge lizard Henry Judd Gray. They plot, and execute, a plan to murder the controlling and abusive husband, hoping to benefit from his life insurance.

It’s no surprise that the notorious case inspired film noir classics Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Body Heat.

Playing The Young Woman, aka Helen Jones in Machinal, is the extraordinarily talented Rosie Sheehy. She had an earlier success at the Old Vic, with another expressionist classic, Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, in which another central character is beaten by a society which ostracises him.

Treadwell meant Jones to be our sister-in-arms. In a script note, the author said: “The plot is the story of a woman who murders her husband, an ordinary young woman, any woman,” and her stage directions advised: “The woman is essentially soft, tender, and the life around her is essentially, hard, mechanised.” (sic)

The production encapsulates much of this, and with finesse. The set is clever, the lighting deft, and the sound complements the chaotic narrative perfectly. Hyemi Shin, Adam Silverman and Benjamin Grant, respectively, deserve kudos for their work.

Sheehy puts her heart and spleen into this demanding role. Her initial appearance resonates with women of every age and time. Stifled by her subway journey, desperate to free herself from the oppressive pressure from strange bodies, she makes it to her office. Here, colleagues are quasi automatons, snapping into repetitive action.

There is, though, no gradual unravelling of this protagonist, no descent to the madness which envelopes her. She is in the grip of psychosis within minutes, and this heightened state remains for most of the 100 minutes Sheehy is on stage.

When journalist and playwright Treadwell devised this piece, she’d eschewed covering Snyder’s and Gray’s trial, instead coming up with a semi-fictional treatment. It seems that she saw parallels with her own life; both she and Snyder were thought to suffer from neurasthenia, a term coined by a psychiatrist (male of course), which covered a random ragbag of symptoms.

This grandiose diagnosis claimed that women suffering from fatigue, listlessness, forgetfulness, anxiety, insomnia, pain, heart palpitations, fainting and trouble breathing, could now be handily labelled.

There is more than a whiff of the “hysterical woman” in this male-dominated psychobabble. In more enlightened times, such symptoms are thought likely to stem from chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia or post-traumatic stress disorder.

A century ago, Treadwell looked to other causes: extreme stress from the absurd demands on women, and a working life which made human beings part of a production line serving the American Dream.

A scene with Jones’ mother (Buffy Davis, brilliant in everything she touches) is full of pathos and maternal banter, though within a minute, it’s played at an exaggerated intensity which leaves the script no room to breathe.

The most poignant moment comes minutes before this convicted murderess is executed in the electric chair.

As a priest mumbles words of no comfort, a fellow prisoner sings a Negro spiritual. Jones finds more comfort in the song than the priest’s words. She says: “He helps me. I understand him. He is condemned. I understand him.”

This production is being lauded for its exuberant embracing of the expressionist genre. Good. It’d be refreshing to see more of this in our theatres.

But this staging seems carried away with the mechanics of realising Treadwell’s brave, innovative script.

At its heart, Machinal is about a fragile woman, made victim of a system which renders individuals as simply part of a machine and not one calibrated to serve the soul.

As always, my review didn’t end in the theatre. I eavesdropped on conversations as we exited. Every one focused on the magnificent staging, and on Sheehy’s energetic performance. Not one mentioned the storyline itself: How was this everywoman driven to murder? What was she oppressed by? Why was she so desperate for freedom?

I thought of an old friend, former director at the acclaimed Lewes Little Theatre, Brian Cooter, who once commented on a production he’d overseen and that had disappointed him. We’d tried to cheer him, saying the set was truly magnificent. “Ah yes,” he sighed: “I’m sure they came out whistling the furniture…”

Treadwell intended to show the terrible consequences of women’s sex-based oppression. I feel that she did that superbly, in 1928. This year, the target is missed, as an audience departs, discussing the lighting, the sound, the set.

Runs until June 1 2024. Box office:http://oldvictheatre.com oldvictheatre.com.