Punched in the stomach, but equipped with a new pair of contact lenses. It is a long time since I left a theatre feeling as I did after seeing Machinal. Richard Jones has directed a skewering production of Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 play, which is generally hailed as a masterpiece of theatrical expressionism. The opening might have been timed to accompany the vibrating canvases of Gabriele Münter and Marianne Werefkin at Tate Modern’s new Expressionists exhibition, but Jones’s staging is singularly complete: every sinew alarmed, from the snap of a black rubber glove to the glimpse of a flower trapped in a glass bowl; everything galvanised by a first-rate performance from Rosie Sheehy.
American journalist Treadwell wrote Machinal after attending the trial of Ruth Snyder, found guilty of killing her husband. A young reporter, taping a camera to his ankle, provided front-page pictures of Snyder’s execution in the electric chair (headline: “DEAD!”). Treadwell refused to report on the trial, instead responding with a play that showed a woman being crushed by ordinary, hostile circumstances: an uncomprehending mother, a robotic city and office, a predatory boss, an empty marriage. She wrote with clarity and imagination, making it evident that while her unnamed heroine is not innocent, the world is responsible.
Buffy Davis as blank-faced Mother, Tim Frances as smug Husband are particularly strong, but this is really an ensemble evening, in which design plays as active a role as any human. Hyemi Shin’s set – that particular 20s yellow, muddier than sherbet but sharper than mustard – is so acutely angled that characters seem about to be nutcrackered out of existence. With art deco lettering flagging up scenes – “At Business”, “Intimate” – the cast, finely choreographed by Sarah Fahie, move jaggedly together like the pistons of a machine; their shadows are elongated and spiky. As the young woman gives birth, the gigantic shadow of a man with a pneumatic drill judders beside her like a persecuting penis. Prepared for execution, she is locked into a metal cage that – Benjamin Grant’s soundscape crystallises fear – makes the stage jangle.
Sheehy is both slumped and utterly resistant. Often the only rounded thing – the only thing that looks like flesh – on stage, she fits in until she breaks; she has nothing between docility and wildness. One of the best bits of my job is seeing actors early in their careers and watching them soar. I first admired Sheehy when, three years after she graduated, she played a sullen teenager in The Whale in Bath: she was clearly one of the discoveries of 2018. She has shone since in Romeo and Julie – and has said she would like to play Romeo. Why not? She has already scaled a new peak.
Director Emma Rice turns everything at an angle so that audiences see straight. Her latest Wise Children production (which, like Machinal, was first seen in Bath – what are they putting into the hot springs there?) delivers the bleakest of warnings about attacks on women, yet is buoyed for much of the time by circus gaiety.
The mixture of high jinks and deep dread is entirely Rice’s: her Blue Beard centres on a stage magician who specialises in throwing knives at women and sawing them in half; the goriest moments take place under a glitter ball. Yet her show is also true to the spirit and the letter of Angela Carter, whose last novel gave Rice’s company its name, and who wrote her own version of the story. The women spangle and sparkle through the action: doing the splits, sauntering through jazz piano, shimmying in little black dresses, playing the violin as if they were about to rip it open. Until the key to the forbidden door is seen to drip with blood (red ribbons trailing over silver) and sister and mother become powerful avengers, charging to the rescue of their beloved, relishing their ferocities.
Carter would also, I think, have appreciated the daring swerve towards the end of evening from macabre merriment to appalled realism. Fairytale and colour vanish as another imagined story – of a young woman, murdered not far from her home, glimpsed in black and white footage as if on a surveillance camera – is unwound. Battersea Arts Centre is a few minutes’ walk away from Clapham Common, where Sarah Everard was abducted three years ago. The shifts in register are bumpy; the range of attitude extraordinary. Early on, lighthearted, hungover women grumble that what last night seemed funny now seems peculiar. Rice proves that what once looked peculiar now seems true.
Bijan Sheibani has provided some of the most rousing theatrical productions of the past decade, from Inua Ellams’s Barber Shop Chronicles in 2017 to Beth Steel’s Till the Stars Come Down earlier this year. Now he has written and directed one of the quietest.
The Cord, which shows a young couple unravelling after the birth of their first baby, looks patiently at intimate, uncomfortable reactions to the welcome new arrival: maternal fatigue, father feeling left out, granny rivalries, sexual intercourse drying up, the division of allegiance between the family into which you are born and the family you go on to make. Every aspect of the production is meticulous. Lucy Black, Eileen O’Higgins and Irfan Shamji act with detail and restraint on Samal Blak’s plain, unruffled, off-white design, accompanied by tactful onstage cello playing by Colin Alexander. The Cord would be an interesting interlude in a larger event. Alone, it becomes saturated in its exquisiteness.
Star ratings (out of five)
Machinal ★★★★★
Blue Beard ★★★★
The Cord ★★★
