Back from a mini tour of Yorkshire and Stockport and cheering for supporting act Indignation Meeting
Write on
Ella Hickson's acute play about a woman playwright confronting everyday sexism in life as much as in theatre is brilliantly scripted, says LYNNE WALSH
Romola Garai
ALISTAR FINDLAY is mesmerised by this multiple ‘Visions of Scotland’ assault on the audience’s eyes and senses
The Star's critics ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA reviews I Am Love, The Penguin Lessons, Freaky Tales, The Thicket
MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
Peter Mitchell's photography reveals a poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
The Writer
Almeida Theatre, London
IN THE WRITER, the audience certainly has to put the work in. But the rewards come thick and fast. There's resonance aplenty in Ella Hickson’s energy-packed, layered and complex piece of theatre about theatre, which doesn’t so much play with genre as bend it, snap it to smithereens and put it back together again — or sometimes not.
In a tremendous opening scene, a young woman (Lara Rossi) describes watching a Bullingdon Club-type scenario on stage: “The audience is the same!” she protests. It’s reminiscent of the rape scene in The Accused, when women in cinema audiences experienced men sitting around them whooping and cheering.
Hickson's agenda is set, and the titular protagonist (Romola Garai, pictured) comes across as a desperately uncertain artist but that impression is rapidly dispelled — we realise that she’s not neurotic but anarchic. Her yearning is deep, her vision wide, but directors exist to squash a passion for theatre that “should be insurgent.”
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