Her Naked Skin

Off to the National Theatre last night to see Rebecca Lenkiewicz's 'Her Naked Skin'. Much has been made of the fact that Lenkiewicz's play is the first full-length original play by a woman to be staged on the Olivier stage (the largest at the National Theatre), which by any measure is disgraceful. Sadly what's also disgraceful is that they chose to debut women's writing on our most important stage with such a half-baked affair.

'Her Naked Skin' tells the story of two suffragettes who fall in love while incarcerated at Holloway Prison. Or at least, that's sort of what it's about, but it isn't really about anything much, or perhaps it's half about a number of different things. The first half of the play really only sets the scene and establishes the love story, and is pretty plodding and strighforward. Aside from the lesbian love scenes, there was nothing in this half that I didn't know from learning about Suffragettes in primary school. The second half is more adventurous but also more incoherant. There are surprises to be had, but mostly of the baffled, why-would-she-do-that variety. Little makes much sense, and where it does, it isn't developed far enough to become interesting. Our lead Suffragette, Lady Celia, dumps her lover, working-class Eve, for unfathomable reasons. Celia's husband gets drunk and launches into a stunningly articulate but utterly out of character speech about how she has always rejected him. I got the impression that there were ideas at work, about women having to hide their true natures, or about the difficulties for a man of the period to be married to a progressive woman, but nothing was taken further to the point where some true insight might be revealed.

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the play was the Suffragette setting itself. There was plenty of historical detail on show, both in terms of the conditions of Suffragettes' incarceration, and the parliamentary battles that surrounded them, but barely any exploration of why these women were Suffragettes or why they chose the tactics that they did. The play is framed around a heavily-trailed climactic scene in which a key character is force fed through a tube down her nose, a long and grotesque set-piece deliberately reminiscent of waterboarding. This scene was so extreme in its staging that I had to stop watching after the first minute, and one audience member was taken violently ill, but in the absence of any emotional or intellectual context, any sense of why someone would choose to go on hunger strike and endure this treatment not just once but repeatedly, all you're left with is shock, nausea, the knowledge that "this is wrong" which most people already knew, and a disinclination to eat foie gras in future. It's not enough. A play should make you feel more than sick.

What's so disappointing is that this was not a "bad" play. Lenciewicz is obviously a talented writer - her dialogue was often sharp and witty, and there were the germs of some interesting ideas. The set was beautifully designed, although to my taste a little over-complex. The acting was impeccable, the direction intelligent. It was all competently handled. It just wasn't ready. The play needed several more drafts, perhaps even a change of focus (I found the husband's story far more compelling than the main Suffragette's). There are producers who oversee these things, who should make sure that nothing is staged in the country's showcase theatre that isn't ready to go on. What could have been a four or even five star play given more time barely registered a two on my scale.

It's dispiriting that what should have been a key moment in the history of women's theatre should have ended up as a rushed, botched job, when it had the potential to be so much more.