Subservient wife’s defiance
Jane Clegg
Finborough Theatre ★★★✩✩
PERCHED OVER a pub in London’s Earls Court, the tiny Finborough Theatre is one of those playhouses where even two inches of social distancing is not possible, let alone two metres. So, until theatres open, this streamed version of St John Ervine’s engrossing play is the only way to access the work of London’s most potent – and important – pub theatre.
Not seen in the city for three quarters of a century before the Finborough unearthed it last year, Ervine’s eponymous heroine is a later, English version of Ibsen’s Nora from A Doll’s House (1879). Ervine’s play premiered over 30 years later and still has the moral fibre to challenge conventional thinking about marriage and how women were kept subservient to their husbands.
Its plot, however, has more in common with The Stepmother (1924) by Gita Sowerby in which, Sowerby’s Lois is entrapped into marriage by her new husband so that he can pay off his debts with her inheritance. In Ervine’s play Jane’s windfall of £700, bequeathed to her by a deceased uncle, arrives after she is married.
The pleas and threats of her philandering husband Henry to give him the money fail to shake Jane’s resolve to ring-fence it for her children’s future. But when Henry is caught embezzling funds from his employer, the dilemma becomes much starker: pay her husband’s debt or see him go to prison.
Even in David Gilmore’s brisk, 90-minute production Ervine’s writing can feel windy and unnecessarily verbose. Yet it still has the power to make the blood boil with injustice. And, led by the watchful, still authority of Alix Dunmore’s Jane the cast give this rediscovered play the performances it deserves.
Meanwhile, Alex Marker’s detailed set of the Edwardian living room in which the action takes place conveys the respectable formality within which many women were trapped in marriages.
The production is typical of the Finborough Theatre’s ability to find interesting lost plays, but also of the contribution the venue makes to the country’s threatened theatre ecology.
So although the work is presented as part of the ‘‘Finborough For Free’’ initiative, do please seek out and click on the Finborough’s donate page to help preserve the preservers.