Intimate Apparel
Donmar Warehouse, London
★★★★★

THERE is a sense of exquisite perfection about Intimate Apparel now showing at the Donmar: a pure delicacy that touches the heart and reflects the play’s setting.

Esther, a young African American woman living in New York in 1905, works as a seamstress. The garments she creates are beautiful, individual designs, crafted from flawless fabrics and tailored to the customer. Mostly she is sewing immaculate lingerie and, as we see her working with clients and with Mr Marks, her fabric provider, we feel her inner beauty and natural finesse.

Esther is a churchgoer who came to New York alone and now saves her earnings to buy her own beauty salon. Unlike her customers, she chooses a style of dress that is modest and sedate, but she can’t help feeling the world is passing her by as those around her marry and move on while she remains hard-working and virginal.

Gradually, the urge within her to find love becomes overwhelming and she begins a correspondence with a certain George Armstrong from the Caribbean, who is working as a labourer building the Panama Canal.

Like a sumptuous corset stitched before our eyes, Esther’s life with George takes unique shape and blossoms. Eventually, they marry. Only then does she find that he was intrinsically make-believe, the real George reflecting perhaps what essential reality is: an assault on all that is beautiful and sensitive and delicate and refined.      

While the first half of the play connects us with tenderness and finesse and blissful hope, the rest stares the material world full in the face and breaks our hearts.

It’s impossible to find a single flaw in this glorious fabric spread before us. Every member of the cast complements the team superbly and Samira Wiley so embodies Esther — in her meek, vanilla, puritanical dress as she grows from private dreams to harsh reality – that we are all at one with her, and love her bravely textured soul.

Director Lynette Linton – fresh from artistic curacy of the Bush Theatre and successes like Blues For An Alabama Sky at the National – strokes and fondles, steams and presses this work to such perfection that it rolls out before us with no word wasted. And Alex Berry’s design – not only of the inventive, constantly surprising set, but also of the sumptuous corsets and pantalettes that so frequently grace the stage – raises the game.

As Esther’s dreams succumb to reality, brutal truth is distilled, not least the gruelling actuality of life for black people forging their lives in a still deeply segregated America. This gets a light touch with little said. But then we don’t need telling. It’s enacted before us, and we feel it hard.

Lynn Nottage wrote this play in 2003. Twenty years on, it’s unquestionably a classic and one of the most produced plays in America.

It’s rare to find a theatrical piece of such beauty, produced and performed to such perfection. Don’t think; just go and see it. It’ll touch such parts of you, you barely knew existed.

Runs until August 9. Box Office: 020 3282 3808, donmarwarehouse.com