The Stepmother
Minerva, Chichester Festival Theatre, Sussex (01243-781312) Until 9 September Running time: 2hrs mins ★★★
“Where on Earth has Githa Sowerby been hiding all this time,” asked Fiona Mountford in the London Evening Standard. Or rather: why has the “male theatrical establishment” allowed this “superlative” female playwright to remain so well hidden? Sowerby’s bestknown drama Rutherford and Son (1912) has enjoyed a critical reappraisal in recent decades. But The Stepmother (1924) had never been revived until unearthed by the enterprising Orange Tree Theatre, in Richmond, in 2013. This “gripping” play – a “closelyobserved character study of a middle-class family under immense strain” – nicely weaves together the themes of women, work and wealth. Richard Eyre’s “perfectly judged” and elegant Chichester revival will now surely restore the Gateshead-born Sowerby to her rightful renown. “A London transfer, please.”
This play “deserves a permanent place in the repertory”, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. When businessman Eustace Gaydon (Will Keen) learns that his recently deceased sister has bequeathed a large sum to her gauche young companion Lois Relph (Ophelia Lovibond), he decides to woo and marry Lois and make her stepmother to his daughters. Fast forward ten years, and Lois is running a dressmaking concern, while Eustace’s financial chicanery has come back to bite him. When Lois demands access to her capital, we witness “women confronting grotesque financial inequalities in a way that still rings horribly true”.
Sowerby’s play delivers an “immensely engaging and faintly shocking indictment” of inequality, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. But it “does so by means of a male protagonist so dastardly in his deviousness he might have escaped from a Victorian melodrama”. Still, Keen makes a splendid villain, giving a “wonderfully reptilian account of masculinity at its most bullying and brazenly hypocritical – all darting looks, weasel words and vulpine smiles”. And Lovibond does full justice to Lois’s transformation from “lowly waif to radiant bob-haired beauty”. I recommend the play: “but men in the audience should be prepared to squirm”.