Gender wars take centre stage

In a recent interview, Romola Garai – one of the four actors in Ella Hickson’s new play – said that The Writer is audibly dividing audiences every night. I well believe her.

The opening scene establishes the evening’s archly theatrical conceptual framework. A young woman (Lara Rossi) has returned to the auditorium to retrieve a bag; she encounters an older man (Samuel West) who’s intrigued by the immediate sense that she didn’t like the play. He’s unrattled as she unleashes entertaining arias of disgust at the female-objectifying, politically irrelevant work she has seen.

Explaining he’s on “the board”, he invites her to write a play. In fact he’s actually the director and years ago propositioned her when she was starting out. “Stop playing the victim,” West’s character retorts as she challenges him. A similar defensive contempt oozes from the male director (Michael Gould) we see in the next scene when it’s revealed that what we’ve just witnessed is a work-inprogress penned by Garai’s angrynervy Writer.

The evening operates like an elaborate conjuring act, playing with artifice as we enter the Writer’s domestic life, dominated by a sexually proprietorial boyfriend (West again) who can’t understand why she would turn down a lucrative film adaptation offer and spurn marriage and kids. In exchanges both funny and true, he challenges her refusal to settle for ordinary life and her demand for “more” – communicated with palpable, plausible yearning by Garai.

Hickson takes on theatrical imperatives and career expectations in one fell swoop: underlining the Writer’s fear of motherhood, fake lives and commercial compromise.

The final simulated acts of lesbian congress (Garai, Rossi), obscured behind a sofa, lead to some awkward questions about the need for power in human relationships. Then it’s all over, leaving us (well, some of us) gasping.