Theatre review: Modest

Once again one of the highlights of going to the theatre as often as I do is finding out about people and events you'd think would be better known than they actually are, but have been largely forgotten - either because of an accident of history or, as is often the case and including Ellen Brammar's Modest, because of institutional inequalities. Here the central character is Elizabeth Thompson, a painter who narrowly missed out on becoming the first woman to be elected to the Royal Academy. What makes her such a particular outlier is that it would take another 42 years before the first woman (Annie Swynnerton, because I can Google stuff,) would actually join the institution. Paul Smith and Luke Skilbeck's production explores the gender conflicts in the story by putting Elizabeth (Emer Dineen) at the heart of an empowering drag show.

The story begins in 1874, when Elizabeth's painting "The Roll Call" is selected for the Academy's annual summer exhibition. It gets a prime display spot in a show where the placement of artworks is a matter of much internal politics and competition.

She becomes something of a sensation, not just because of her technical ability, but because the subject matter - a grim scene of dying footsoldiers in the Crimean War - is a world away from traditional female subjects like fruit bowls and flowers, and shows a humane touch often missing from war paintings. Her success excites some, like Millais (Jacqui Bardelang,) who will eventually be the one to nominate her as a member. Other members (a comically toxic trio of Fizz Sinclair, LJ Parkinson and Isabel Adomakoh Young) are threatened, and begin a campaign to belittle and dismiss her.

The title Modest is an ironic one, as Elizabeth shows a remarkably determined confidence in her own talent and entitlement to success that borders on arrogance. But this isn't simply a story of a woman being sabotaged by men because she refused to play the game: Her lack of modesty is also shown as a more complex issue, when her sister Alice (Sinclair) asks her to use her profile to promote the suffragist cause. Elizabeth considers it an affront that the success that's purely down to her own talent should be used to open doors for others, and refuses.

Glorying in its own wilfully anachronistic style and occasionally bursting into song (with music by Rachel Barnes,) Modest is at its strongest when it's at its most tongue-in-cheek - Parkinson and Adomakoh Young drawing attention to the theatrical techniques they're using, or Queen Victoria (Libra Teejay) keeping a submissive on a leash to feed her Skittles. But between these moments the energy sometimes flags, and the show ends up feeling very unevenly paced.

There's actually a very nicely done dramatic ending in which the anger and disappointment that have been bubbling under finally boil over, but it might have hit even harder at the end of a slightly punchier show (a subplot where Teejay plays a young trans woman inspired by Elizabeth makes some of the production's subtext text, but after a while it feels like Brammar isn't entirely sure what to do with it.) An uneven but certainly entertaining, funny and interesting show about a moment when history very nearly went in a very different direction, but instead got conveniently buried away.

Modest by Ellen Brammar and Rachel Barnes is booking until the 15th of July at the Kiln Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Tom Arran.