Theatre review: Some Woman

Regular readers of this blog may both recall that while I rate Anne-Marie Duff as an actress, as far as her taste in plays goes it's fair to say we don't see eye to eye: Based on most of the shows I've seen her in I suspect she's the sort of person to cite the word "harrowing" as the main, if not only, qualifier of a play's greatness. So I approached Helen Edmundson's Some Woman with my usual trepidation, as Duff plays Julie, a mother of two who, after her divorce from Richard (Geoffrey Streatfeild) gave up her professional ambitions to look after their two daughters. Now both grown up, the eldest Kate (Hannah Onslow) is a terrifyingly ambitious perfectionist who seems to view everything her mother does and says as a sign of weakness, while the youngest Ginny (Grace Doherty) has struggled with depression and an eating disorder but is now hoping she's strong enough to go away to university.

Julie has spent her life not making waves, but when an 11-year-old boy on a train station platform calls her a "fucking bitch" unprovoked, she decides to report it to the boy's school, in the hope that she can nip the misogyny in the bud.

Even this mild form of standing up for herself and her sex can't go unpunished though, and she finds herself in a steadily escalating situation as the boy's family makes counter-claims against her, and ambiguous security footage gets used as ammunition to drag her through the courts.

If Duff was a red flag director Blanche McIntyre was a green one, but even she can't give a spark to a curiously dry evening, the kind of play where you can hear the audience desperately trying to find the odd line funny just for a bit of relief. Instead in the most relentless dose of misery porn since A Little Life, Edmundson heaps indignity upon indignity on Julie. It's all leading to an act of defiance that gives some hope, but getting there has been very heavy-handed.

Clearly the point is that Julie's experience is meant to reflect the way a woman's whole life can feel like an uphill battle that only throws more obstacles in her way the more she fights it, and I did wonder if I was just having a stereotypically male response of dismissing a woman's point out of hand. But going by the frustrated response I heard on the way out, not all women in the audience appreciated the "flat" onslaught of humiliations piled on the lead.

Duff does manage to make a character out of all this and leads a generally strong cast, enough so that I was still giving Some Woman the benefit of the doubt well into its run, but it finally lost me at the climactic scene with the boy's father (Stephen Wight.) What should be a tense confrontation is overshadowed by the fact that Julie would need to be the stupidest woman alive for it to happen in the first place. This is a play that keeps you hopeful it might turn a corner, but which invariably does so in the wrong direction.

Some Woman by Helen Edmundson is booking until the 21st of November at the National Theatre's Dorfman.

Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Ellie Kurttz.