Show about the travails of childbirth promises much but fails to deliver
Theatre The Welkin
National’s Littleton, London SE1
★★★★★
Lucy Kirkwood’s new play begins with a startling tableau. Twelve women, each individually backlit, are depicted hard at work, washing clothes, feeding children, sewing linen.
There are no words, only the slosh, slap and grind of their labour that oppressively grows slowly louder. It’s Suffolk in 1759, and this is the inescapable lot of rural women: to toil and to suffer, unheard, unseen.
Yet Kirkwood devises an alternative story. Her 12 women, who include Maxine Peake as the local protofeminist midwife, Elizabeth Luke, are to deliberate on whether a young woman, Sally Poppy, convicted of killing an 11-year-old girl, is pregnant, potentially saving her from the hangman’s noose.
Within a Georgian townhouse, where only one man is present but obliged to remain silent, the women are given free rein to speak.
Among talk of useless husbands and unwanted sex, they cheerfully swap experiences of pregnancy, labour, miscarriage and menopause. There is talk of craving onions, of leaking breasts, of exceptional pain and unfathomable love.
This is the unwritten history of maternal experience, delivered with bracing sisterly candour, and it’s extraordinary to hear.
So why is a bit of a slog? As her jurors deliberate on whether the chained, spitting, scowlingly unrepentant Sally (Ria Zmitrowicz, outstanding) is lying (most think she is, even pumping her breasts to prove they have no milk), Kirkwood sets up the competing forces of the age.
Science is pitted against superstition; male expertise against female experience; an inadequate legal system against mob hunger for justice.
There are stories of witches and the devil; a doctor bearing a terrifying looking metal speculum and rumoured sightings of angels and Halley’s Comet (Welkin is an old English word for the heavens).
Yet James Macdonald’s clinical production – its clean lines a deliberate foil to Kirkwood’s earthy vernacular – often works against the play’s grain.
It’s static when it needs to burst with life, remote when it needs to feel intimate, convoluted when it needs to be much, much clearer. Far too many lines, not helped by some dodgy accents, are inaudible, to the extent that I found myself stumbling over various key plot points.
Kirkwood further muddles the story with sub-strands including a maid disguised as a gentlewoman and a tale about a burning child. Peake, usually such a commanding stage actress, struggles to make herself felt.
Bunny Christie’s set, with its muted hues and classical compositions, has the formal elegance of a Vermeer painting. The panoply of distinctive female voices is a joy. The final 20 minutes find a power and coherence previously lacking. But I’m ashamed to say that, much like childbirth, I was relieved when it was finally over.