Ruth Snyder’s crime was sensationalised in its day and well after it. An American who murdered her husband and paid with her life, her very public death in 1928 by electric chair has served as gruesome inspiration for, among others, Billy Wilder and Guns N’ Roses. Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 play infuses Snyder’s story with compassion and tragedy, without a hint of sentimentality.
This stark, magnetic revival draws on the play’s expressionist roots yet also renders it chillingly modern in showing how female criminality is still often depicted. Immaculately directed by Richard Jones, it is spare yet shocking.
Rosie Sheehy plays the unnamed “young woman” and cements her reputation as an astounding stage talent with her magnificent performance, as physical as it is psychological. The play invites expressive choreography and this revival excels in its movement (by Sarah Fahie), seeming like a dance at times.
Period setting is combined with a non-realist stage (designed by Hyemi Shin), which takes the shape of a distorted dream or Hitchcockian hallucination – garishly yellow walls with long shadows thrown across them. It is a world narrowed in on its protagonist, quite literally forcing her into a corner.
The play’s one-word headings – Business, Domestic etc – are telegraphed and conjured with just a few props, so typewriters for the office scenes, a bed for her honeymoon night and a table for the stultifying tenement home shared with her mother (Buffy Davis, excellently playing her as a desolate, Beckett-like character). The jarring soundscape of the play is central to its sense of alarm, and scenes here are overlain effectively with invasive sounds (designed by Benjamin Grant).
Sheehy captures a woman utterly trapped (“I’m stifling, ma”), repelled by her husband (Tim Frances, chillingly bland) and only coming to life after meeting her lover (Pierro Niel-Mee). Freedom is a theme shared between them and it is this that leads her to murder.
Sheehy flinches at the touch of her husband and at a piercingly loud world which demands passive conformity. She is alienated even from her own body, and moments of dissociation are brilliantly conveyed. She delivers her lines with barely suppressed rage or fear, the dialogue variously gathering in staccato poetry or a savage, spitting quality.
She might be Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa or Herman Melville’s Bartleby, railing against bullying capitalist forces and the mechanisation of the workforce. Unlike Wilder’s Double Indemnity, partly inspired by Snyder’s story and showing a man being duped by an unfaithful, murderous and conniving femme fatale, this play is about a woman betrayed by forces beyond her control, told from deep within her body and mind.
Snyder’s death was infamously photographed, the image of a murderous housewife in the throes of violent death brandished across the media. A scene here captures that horrifying indignity in movement rather than explicit depiction. The photographers and executioners who hound her last days form a line, hand in hand, and become conductors of the electricity fired into her body. We walk away in horror, just as we should.
At the Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal, Bath, until 18 November
