“A terrible thing happened in this building,” says Nikki, an undergraduate at a residential college in a venerable and fictitious British university. “And I am going to do something about it.” In Alma Mater, Kendall Feaver’s dissection of one institution’s #MeToo moment, Nikki encourages Paige, who was recently raped by a fellow student, to go public about her ordeal. Soon, hundreds of women are sharing their experiences of what Nikki is quick to brand the university’s “rape culture”.
Too quick? Jo, the first female master of the college, believes so. In the 1980s, she was a firebrand herself, and part of the first female intake at the historically all-male establishment. Now she has the college’s reputation to defend, and seems more concerned about that than her students. Stepping into that role at short notice after Lia Williams bowed out for health reasons, Justine Mitchell shows how a lifetime of fighting to be heard may have cost Jo her empathy. Liv Hill deftly captures the dilemma of Paige, who is emboldened to fight but wary of being defined by trauma. The star of the evening is the electrifying Phoebe Campbell, who keeps Nikki’s humanity and fallibility shimmering behind the character’s single-mindedness.
Polly Findlay’s staging heightens the gladiatorial element of each confrontation, with benches forming a square around the action, and cast members looking on between scenes like warriors waiting to strike. Alev Lenz’s choral interludes offer ghostly transitions, and Vicki Mortimer’s clean set design conspires with Jessica Hung Han Yun’s lighting to create a stark, legible arena. The illuminated ceiling glows red on occasion like a displeased god.
Feaver is good at revealing how race fits into the whole dynamic, with students and teachers of colour moved around strategically like chess pieces by their white colleagues. Beyond Jo’s central conflict with Nikki, who is essentially her 21st-century self, everything else here feels fuzzy and scattershot. There are filler scenes with Nathaniel Parker as the chairperson pining for old-style romance, numerous echoes of other dramas about campus conflicts (Christopher Shinn’s Teddy Ferrara; David Mamet’s Oleanna), a general mood of boomer bewilderment, and so many skeletons tumbling out of closets that the stage resembles a crypt rather than a college.
