At his best, as in The York Realist and Versailles, Peter Gill writes about personal relationships and historical processes with theatrical intensity. This piece, in which eight London-based women recount their life experiences through intercut monologues, is more of a play for voices. While it contains good writing, I felt I could just as easily be listening to it on the radio.
One problem with the format, consisting of five choruses involving different combinations of speakers, is that some lives come more sharply into focus than others. Sylvia (Lucy Fleming) emerges clearly as an upper-middle-class scatterbrain ruefully dwelling on the amorous path not taken. Marion (Roberta Taylor) vividly recalls a rackety East End youth and excursions to the seaside. Youth and age are also contrasted as Shirley (Olivia Llewellyn) wrestles with her fashionable neuroses, while the widowed Lily (Tessa Bell-Briggs) dwells more happily on memories of a working-class marriage. Best of all is Bridget (Eileen Pollock) who had to cope with the stigma of bearing an illegitimate child in the Catholic Ireland of long ago.
Gill writes with palpable compassion about the trials women undergo, whether as mothers, wives or daughters, and about the resilience with which they confront them: I also got the impression that there was more pluck and gumption among those at the lower end of the social scale. But while the piece is well-acted by all the women, including Indira Joshi, Sharlene Whyte and Hayley Squires, and economically directed by Gill, it still feels as much a literary as a theatrical experience.
• At the Print Room at the Coronet, London, until 23 May. Box office: 020-3642 6606.
