Sayers’s ode to girl power is no mere Wimsey
Love All (Jermyn Street Theatre, London) Verdict: Girls on top ★★★★
BEST known as a Queen of Crime and for her creation of Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy L. Sayers was also a talented playwright.
Love All, unseen (until now) since it premiered in 1940, is not a lost masterpiece, but it is an overlooked little sparkler, nailing the unfair and unequal career prospects of men and women and wittily celebrating girl power, decades ahead of its time.
When middle-aged romantic novelist Godfrey Daybrook persuaded Lydia, an actress and his mistress, to run off to Venice, she was expecting him to divorce his wife and put a ring on her finger.
Some 18 months later, Emily Barber’s deliciously spoilt, pert, over-privileged Lydia is still single — and sweltering prettily in a flat on a stinking Venetian canal, lamenting the loss of her reputation, her work, and her looks. Actually, she is bored rigid playing the muse to Alan Cox’s vain, patronising, complacent Godfrey, the only role a woman could and should aspire to, in his opinion. Just as he thinks his wife’s job is to bring up the son he abandoned.
Some of the lines have the epigrammatic snap, crackle and pop of Noel Coward or Oscar Wilde. ‘You never know what’s going on inside a secretary. They have meaningless faces, like eggs,’ says Lydia. ‘Every great man has had a woman behind him — and every great woman has had a man in front of her, tripping her up,’ says Godfrey’s wife Edith (Leah Whitaker).
Both are neatly illustrated by the plot, in which the much underestimated women in Godfrey’s life — his wife who has become a playwright, his super-sharp secretary and his lover — first puncture his pomposity and then run rings round him, ultimately rendering him irrelevant.
Period-perfect performances give Tom Littler’s swansong production terrific slice and bite. He’s off to run the Orange Tree in Richmond, leaving London’s tiniest West End theatre — and large shoes to fill.