‘Only little bits of me are developed, and those aren’t the best,” declares Agnes Colander (Naomi Frederick), who married young and has now deserted her husband. This “lost” 1900 play by Harley Granville Barker, who went on to write The Voysey Inheritance and Waste and was a founder of the repertory movement, was written when he was young and it’s not his best. Granville Barker himself declared it “very poor” and suggested it should be destroyed.
Colin Chambers discovered the only known draft in the British Library, gave it to the American playwright Richard Nelson to revise, and the result can be seen in a handsome if sometimes stilted production by Trevor Nunn. It has its moments, but the interest is less in the dramatic – this is a play in which there is lots of talk and little action until the final scene – than as a social document of a woman who feels that she has “failed me”.
Agnes seeks to set that right, but it’s not easy to chart a course of independence in an Edwardian world where respectable women do not discuss sex, live in sin, or try to make careers for themselves as painters. As the second-half encounter with Sally Scott’s Emmeline Majoribanks makes clear, while an affluent widow may wear red lipstick and kiss other women’s husbands, Agnes is more constrained both financially and socially.
Split between Agnes’s London studio and a seaside cottage in Normandy – both beautifully and economically conjured by designer Rob Jones – Granville Barker offers us a woman who, despite the desire to make her own life, is caught between three men. Should Agnes return to the elderly husband keen to have her back? Or should she begin a sexual relationship with her friend, the painter Otho (Matthew Flynn), or take seriously the attentions of the earnest young Alexander (Freddy Carter) who puts her on a pedestal? Alexander is very much in the mould of Eugene Marchbanks in Shaw’s Candida.
Perhaps we are supposed to see Agnes as a version of Ibsen’s Nora after the door has been slammed and she has gone off to find a better version of herself. Perhaps Granville Barker is pointing to the difficulties that will be encountered, and the fact that for a woman of her class in the Edwardian era Agnes’s choices are limited. In some ways he is braver than Ibsen because this is a play that confronts love and sex and the difference straight on. Matthew Flynn devours a chicken with such gusto that we are left in no doubt about his other appetites. But, whereas Nora’s departure feels like a victory, Agnes’s final choice may be more realistic but feels like a defeat.
There is sometimes quite a lot of acting going on here, the kind that offers signposts rather than subtlety, but Frederick is always the most interesting person on stage. She suggests that beneath Agnes’s more conventional exterior lies a woman with an imaginative and emotional hinterland that she can’t quite access. For all its flaws, this is an intriguing, fitfully engaging curiosity. Not least in the way it considers the ease with which men are able to work creatively and how for Agnes it might be that her true work of art is herself.
• At the Ustinov, Bath, until 14 April. Box office: 01225 448844.
