Seeing Deborah Findlay here, after Jenny Galloway in
After the Dance last week, means I have now seen each of the women involved in the somewhat unfortunate
Madame de Sade and can safely say that they’ve all escaped unscathed! I find Findlay to be one of our most under-rated actresses, equally at home in costume dramas, she is one of the formidable ladies of Cranford remember, as she is in modern dramas, Torchwood, Silent Witness and State of Play come to mind straight off, and it is the latter mode that she is in here. As The Architect, she is all expensive fabrics, statement necklaces and carefully streaked hair as the carefully poised, ultimate career woman.
Findlay’s performance here is by and large stunning: as the dispassionate Architect, obsessed with architecture although we didn’t get to see the poster of Centrepoint(!) and approaching the commission from a pure design point of view with startling results. Her relentless drive to validate the memorial, but almost as importantly the process around it, is utterly believable and the moments when she verbally attacks The Mother for her obstinacy and her faith having regained her equilibrium after the initial shock of the intrusion are just searingly painful to watch. There’s a brilliant natural feel to her delivery of Weigh’s language too, the constant slips between her corporate script about the project (the word stakeholders brings me out in shivers at the best of times) and the emotive language forced out of her by the confrontation.
The last time I saw Sarah Smart was in The Line where she bared her breasts in front of me for what felt like a lifetime so it was quite ironic that her opening scene here was played with her back to me for about 5 minutes. She is excellent though as the working-class Mother, out of place and intimidated at first by The Architect’s grandstanding but slowly unfurling her real strength as she peels back the verbosity and uncovers more about The Architect than she would ever care to admit. The emotional centrepiece of the show is her discovery of the model, seeing her feeling her way through her own village and telling her story of that fateful day is just absolutely harrowing. The confrontation between Findlay and Smart percolates beautifully throughout the show as the balance of power constantly tips between the two, their frequently overlapping dialogue rising to an intense ferocity from time to time as each tries to push the buttons of the other and it really is engrossing to watch. There’s something of the psychological thriller in their battling and a genuine uncertainty about the way things are going to play out.
Elsewhere, Phoebe Waller-Bridge provides some great comic relief as The Intern who pops in and out, overly eager to please her idol and delightfully gauche in her interactions with The Mother, nailing perfectly the unease that people have when newly coming into contact with someone with a disability. Lucy Osborne’s design has a brilliant conceit which I am going to spoil here, so if you want to be surprised, then skip to the next paragraph now. The play takes place in a single room but they’ve built a false wall complete with windows into the theatre which provides the opportunity to create effective illusion of rain falling outside.
Like A Fishbone is a fascinating look at the choices people make in order to continue their daily existence even in the face of unimaginable tragedy, the falsehoods we must entertain to keep the truth from overwhelming us. It’s also great to see a play that focuses entirely on women and the different ways they interact and speak to each other, without there being any anti-men subtext, feminine rather than feminist. It was possibly less successful on the critique of architecture side (the subtitle on the playtext describes it as “an argument and an architectural model”) as that discussion felt peripheral to the main thrust of the show and resultantly not that well integrated. Still, this was but a minor quibble. If you like to be challenged a bit by your theatre then I can highly recommend this, there is some very fine intense acting on display here and an intriguing, twisty piece of drama.
Running time: 80 minutes (without interval)
Playtext cost: £3.50