Theatre review: Alma Mater

Is it something that personally targets just me, or does the Almeida have a particularly unlucky track record of illness among its actors? I worked out that over the last eight years I've had to reschedule three shows there, miss one entirely, and have one performance meant to be a few weeks into the run turn into an early preview after the original star was replaced. The only comparable run of bad luck I can remember is when any RSC actor who went anywhere near a bicycle was guaranteed at least one fracture. Come to think of it that was around the time current Almeida boss Rupert Goold was at the RSC. Has Gooldilocks been a jinx all along? Making that third entry onto the list of rescheduled visits is Kendall Feaver's Alma Mater which had to replace original star Lia Williams with Justine Mitchell at short notice. Additionally, Nathalie Armin was indisposed today, so the supporting role of Leila had to be read in by Assistant Director Connie Trieves tonight.

In the 1980s Jo (Mitchell) was one of the first female students admitted to a historic Oxbridge college that had until then remained all-male; she quickly made a name for herself by responding in kind to a misogynistic open letter. She's recently returned as the first woman to be made Master of the college, and has made a similarly strident first impression with her potty-mouthed, tongue-in-cheek speeches to the students.

But her feminist credentials take a knock when student liaison Nikki (Phoebe Campbell) comes to her to report that fresher Paige (Liv Hill) was sexually assaulted by a third-year on her first night at the college. To Nikki's disappointment Jo toes the party line about there being little she can do, especially if Paige herself won't come forward; what really angers the student though is that Jo point-blank refuses to accept that the assault took place within a rape culture that's been accepted at the college for as long as women have been admitted there, and is still present today.

Feaver's play covers its difficult subject with a huge amount of nuance and different perspectives, which is both its biggest strength and, at times, its biggest weakness. Among the many things that make it a shame Williams had to drop out is that she was Carol in the original UK production of Oleanna, so there was a full-circle feel to her now playing the lecturer in this scenario, but making the character a woman allows Feaver to expand the scope from a straightforward male vs female narrative: Underlying the play is a question of whether different waves of feminism have had conflicting goals and interpretations of what their aims are, and whether Jo's generation is actively undermining what Nikki's stands for.

Jo is also forced to confront her own past in a modern context, namely the fact that she had a brief affair with her tutor Michael (Nathaniel Parker.) It was consensual, she even introduced him to her best friend Leila, now his wife, and he's the Chair of the Board who gave her the Master job in the first place, but she has to accept that their initial relationship was based on an unequal power dynamic. Elsewhere we have the relationship between Nikki and Paige, and questions about to what extent the former is encouraging the latter to go public to deal with her own past trauma, or even to launch her future journalistic career.

There's also an exploration of how the culture imprints itself on the male students. Ghazali (Liam Lau-Fernandez) is a non-practising Muslim Jo likes to call on when a student publicity photo looks a bit too white, but as well as changing his name to Gerald, we learn his attempts to fit in with the other students have gone to much darker places. We never meet Aaron, the student Paige ends up publicly accusing online, but while the play offers no sympathy for him, we do get questions over why, in a college populated by generations of the wealthy and aristocratic, the first student to publicly face repercussions for his actions is one of the few to come from a less privileged background.

So if Alma Mater is a response to Oleanna, Feaver certainly offers a lot more genuine room for question, and doesn't stack the decks one way or the other in the way Mamet does. It's even apparent in the lead - Jo is genuinely unlikeable, and even Leila eventually admits she hasn't liked her for years, but it doesn't stop Feaver from giving her a couple of fist-pumping great speeches along the way.

It's probably not surprising though that all the avenues Feaver opens up lead to an overloaded plot that can feel overwhelming at times: Vicki Mortimer's set is dominated by a thrust square made up of benches, as if the characters are stepping forward into a ring for their confrontational scenes. It appears that all the actors are remaining on stage behind this at all times, so director Polly Findlay scores a small coup de théâtre when Aaron's mother Tamara (Susannah Wise) steps up to join them as the first-act cliffhanger. At the same time I felt a kind of exhaustion at the idea that yet another perspective was being thrown into the mix.

So it's at times messy, but no more so than its subject matter, and I did like how, however stuffed the plot is, Feaver still nicely manages to bring early throwaway comments back later with new significance: Like Jo suggesting the students not be given their activity list until after the parents leave, so they're not worried by the amount of sexually-themed parties they've been invited to; or Nikki's suspicion that the third years have been running a "hot or not" rating based on photos of the incoming female students, that turns out to be be something darker. So even if its attempts at balance can leave it feel bloated at times, Alma Mater remains impressive for the most part.

Alma Mater by Kendall Feaver is booking until the 20th of July at the Almeida Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner and Ali Wright.