A Woman Killed With Kindness at the National Theatre

Two households. Two women. Katie Mitchell’s new production of Thomas Heywood’s 1603 play splits the stage down the middle: on one side, there is an ancient family manor house and, on the other, an elegant early twentieth century home. This division allows for a process of mirroring, for moments of both harmony and discordance between the play’s two plot strands.

Heywood’s play begins on a joyous note, on the day of the wedding of John Frankford. But the celebratory spirit of these opening moments is soon diluted when his wife Anne embarks on an affair with Wendoll, a friend of her husband who has been invited to stay at their home and treat it - and its contents - as his own. The idea of women as property is made explicit in the secondary but more potent account of Sir Charles, the wealthy landowner imprisoned for his shooting a servant, who in order to free himself from mounting debts, offers up his sister, Susan, to a man she can’t abide.

Mitchell’s production continually contrasts these two women and their predicaments. The events have been transplanted from the early seventeenth century to 1919, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, when social structures were shifting. The Representation of the People Act had recently granted women over 30 the right to vote, but both of these women remain trapped by entrenched social codes, the need for female purity most pressing among them. Whiteness. The wedding gown takes on a toxic symbolism as Susan stands shrouded in lace awaiting the man Charles would have her give herself to and, on the night of her wedding, Anne’s white nightdress is tainted by her own blood, so it seems apt that, later, when her husband interrupts her in bed with Wendoll, she emerges from the room clad in turquoise silk. Heywood’s play offers little in the way of insight into why Anne gives herself so quickly to Wendoll but the walls of the Frankford home are pointedly hung with butterflies under glass. On the other side of the divide, the walls of the Mountford home are methodically stripped of their finery, of the oil paintings and the chandeliers, as their once grand family seat becomes little more than a decaying, chilly prison.

The stage space is actually split into four rather than two since both sides of Lizzie Clachan and Vicki Mortimer’s set are spread across two levels, each connected by a staircase, while Mitchell’s production plays with the vertical as much as the horizontal. Servants are forever flurrying up and down the stairs or gently ascending to the bedrooms above; in one striking moment, Susan, amid a blizzard of activity, walks slowly backwards up the stairs as if tugged by a cord. Visual paralleling also occurs between the upstairs and downstairs worlds: when Anne is in labour both Frankford and Wendoll rattle back and forth across the stage like fingers being impatiently run up and down the keys of a piano.

For all this visual intricacy, Mitchell sometimes seems to be sparring with Heywood’s play rather than dancing with it; a constant process of negotiation with the text seems to be at work. There’s wit here - when Frankford faces his wife over card table and they debate whether to play Hearts and Cheat – but the play is often merely functional, shoving its characters from point A to point B without giving much thought to the journey. It’s full of emotional lurches and leaps in plausibility and neither play nor production ever fully gets under Anne’s skin as a character, neither makes the audience grasp quite why this woman is so quick to hop into bed with Wendoll (Mitchell suggests that sex with Frankford is a brusque, abrupt affair but this feels like a tacked on explanation).

The production is better at painting the fall-out of Anne’s adultery, the pain Frankford inflicts through his stoic determination to drive his wife from her home and her children and the awful punishment she inflicts on them both as a result. There’s a continuing resonance to Anne’s decision to starve herself; a woman of appetite remains a suspect figure and self-denial is a kind of power, a means of taking control. Yet at times the production seems to be pushing too hard to make its point: the final hospital scene – which finally unites the two women’s stories – is as clinical as the space in which it is set, and an earlier scene in which Susan clutches a noose and contemplates escape, are blunt in execution and out of step with the production’s particular rhythms.

Of the performances, Paul Ready’s decent, bemused and ultimately shattered Frankford stands out, as does Sandy McDade, a still, drifting presence as Susan. But this is very much an ensemble piece, elegantly and intricately choreographed. Mitchell seems particularly interested in the relationship between servant and master, the bonds of dependence and affection, and there are always large numbers of bodies on stage, clearing dishes, serving drinks. Gawn Grainger’s turn as Frankford’s paternal, no-nonsense butler, Nicholas, provides a necessary note of warmth.

Amid the near-constant motion and the dramatic use of the domestic interior it’s the moments of connection that mark themselves out. The most memorable image, the one you are left with long after, is of these two women on either side of the wall picking out notes on the piano, briefly connecting with one another, before life spirals away from them.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Time and the Conways at the National

It is difficult to enter the world of J.B. Priestley’s Conway family without thinking of Virginia Woolf’s Pargiters. The Years was published in 1937, the same year that Priestley’s play was first staged, and charts the fortunes of a similarly sized family over several decades.

But while it is the linear passage of time that interests Woolf – the toll it takes, the way people age and change – Priestly has a more idiosyncratic take on time, very much influenced by the theories of J. W Dunne, that time is eternally present, that our pasts, presents and futures somehow exist simultaneously and that, therefore, we are all our moments, the best and worst of them.

The Conways are a large brood: four daughters, two sons, and a mother recently widowed. Spanning the years between the wars, Time and the Conways opens in 1919, on the night of Kay Conway’s 21st birthday. Everybody is dressed up and gathered together, party games are being played, the younger son Robin is home on leave, the mood is celebratory, optimistic about the future.

The second act of this hefty three act play (three hours, two intervals) allows a glimpse of this future. There is a leap forwards, of almost twenty years; the bright young things are now world-worn and disappointed. Marriages have crumbled, promised novels have never been written, the family is beset by money problems and death has robbed them of one of their number. The dominant mood is one of bitterness, the once close family have fragmented, and petty resentments are harboured.

This scene is a kind of premonition, glimpsed by a frightened Kay from her place in the past, a reflection of things to come. It seems fitting that a door, a window and a mirror occupy prominent positions on Laura Hopkins set, one on each wall; in the party scenes the music and laughter from the other unseen room drift in like memories.

Though Rupert Goold’s compelling production is, for the most part, naturalistically played, each act ends with an imposed moment of visual invention – a freezing, a fracturing – that echo the ideas expressed.

However if you remove the theorizing, much of what is left is familiar family saga stuff. The National reinvigorated Priestley’s An Inspector Calls with their renowned 1992 Stephen Daldry production, but Goold doesn’t quite manage to replicate that here. The play remains a stubborn thing, its fusion of ideas and narrative always feeling a little forced. The Conway daughters in particular are rather thinly drawn and it’s all too easy to reduce their characters to one-word descriptions: the beautiful one, the artistic one, the academic one and the youngest, innocent and good – the mechanics of the writing are, at times, too obvious and Priestley seems almost to be enjoying setting up young dreams only to dash them.

Some superb acting helps to counter these difficulties and to make the production compelling despite its length. The whole ensemble is strong, especially when required to age convincingly for the second act, something most of them achieve. The smoke-throated Francesca Annis makes a formidable matriarch, unable to hide her disappointment that some of her children have not lived up to her ambitions for them, and Paul Ready is also quietly impressive as older brother Alan, with his slight stammer and his ever present pipe, content to live an uneventful life even if it means being scorned by his mother. It is Alan who gets to act as Priestley’s mouthpiece, explaining his ideas on time to Hattie Morahan's Kay, consoling her at a point in life when all seems impossible.

Both the magical mirror sequence that ends act two and Goold’s striking coda, with the characters caught up in their very own dance to the music of time, feels somewhat tacked on, reiterating rather than adding anything new, garnish on what is an otherwise straight down the line revival, with the grandfather clock tick-tocking in the hall as the Conway family walk (clockwise) into their future.

Reviewed for musicOMH