Theatre review: Two Ladies

Biddle de-dit de-dee,

Two Ladies sees the Bridge Theatre return - after a glorious summer diversion into Shakespeare - to its official identity as a new writing venue; as well, unfortunately, as to its entirely unofficial one as a rather disappointing new writing venue. Nancy Harris' new play isn't just about two ladies but about two First Ladies, behind the scenes at a crisis summit following multiple terrorist attacks on US soil. The highly conservative American President is expected to respond in the usual way, by declaring war on whichever Middle Eastern country he can blame the attacks on, while his liberal French counterpart, who's hosting the summit, is expected to try to dissuade him. Meanwhile their wives are meant to be making speeches at a women-in-business conference that feels even more like a sideline given the severity of what the politicians are discussing.

But the best-made plans go out of the window when protestors make their feelings about America's military plans clear by throwing animal blood onto First Lady Sophia's (Zrinka Cvitešić) dress.

The ensuing security alert, as well as the need for her to get changed, means Sophia gets bustled into an unused room with the French President's wife Helen (Zoë Wanamaker,) a former journalist whose speech-writing was instrumental to her husband's election, and who is therefore unimpressed by the former model she perceives as a brainless trophy wife. Helen's passive-aggressive bitching is an early highlight, but of course the story will see them find a connection, and it's in the attempt to do this that Harris' play quickly goes off the rails.

There's a number of themes this play could turn out to be about, and Harris has clearly decided that the one to go for is "everything," and as almost always happens in these situations it ends up being about nothing. The two women find common ground in being that close to power but being seen as part of the scenery, and about midway through the play things take a very dark turn as Sophia reflects on a brutal sexual attack during the Balkan Wars that looks like we're in a #MeToo play. But that story moves on with almost unseemly haste, and a storyline involving a poisoned bottle of Chanel No.5 leads to a number of odd twists that left me baffled about what the play was actually trying to say by the (abrupt) end. And while an American First Lady who's an Eastern European former model, and a French one best-known for being significantly older than her husband, are obvious nods to real people, it's made very clear that their husbands are not avatars for their real-life counterparts so I'm not sure what the point of it was. I thought making both women be immigrants to their husbands' countries would be something to bond them, but as it's never mentioned it just seems like they made Helen English because Zwanamaker couldn't be arsed doing the 'Allo! 'Allo! accent.

Cvitešić and Wanamaker give committed performances, and are backed up well by Lorna Brown and Yoli Fuller as their respective aides, but it's a lost cause. Once again I can't shake the feeling that the experience Artistic Director Nicholas Hytner, who also directs this, has most transferred from running the National to the Bridge, is that of having a massive main stage that's notoriously difficult to write new plays for. It's a bit of a vicious circle: It's often said that the reason we don't have many British playwrights who can write on an epic scale is that in order to get onto the map they get used to writing intimate pieces that are cheap enough to actually stand a chance of getting staged on the fringe; by the time they hit the big leagues they've trained themselves out of the ability to fill a huge stage. Hytner giving them this platform to play in a bigger sandbox is a step in the right direction for the future, but there's no question that very few have proven to be up to the task as things stand just now. Meanwhile Anna Fleischle's design rather too accurately captures a soul-suckingly bland conference centre room; the set, like the play itself, gets dwarfed by the venue, and I must admit this became a very hard show to stay awake through: One of those 90-minute shows that feel so much longer, where every time I checked my watch I was amazed and horrified to see it had only been ten minutes since the last time I looked.

Two Ladies by Nancy Harris is booking until the 26th of October at the Bridge Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Helen Maybanks.