It keeps coming up with the goods. As part of its female playwrights' season, the Orange Tree has unearthed this astonishing play by Susan Glaspell: a contemporary of Eugene O'Neill. Writing in 1922, she tackles not only birth control, but the timeless battle between progressive east-coast liberalism and entrenched midwest conservatism.
Glaspell focuses on the struggle for the soul of a poet, Seymore Standish. Visiting his New York friends, including a passionate advocate of birth control named Nora Powers, he runs with the radicals and writes tributes to Shelley. Back home in Bluff City, he reverts to being a golf and bridge-playing banker. When Nora and the free-thinking chums invade his midwest home, the stage is set for a battle between the forces of revolution and reaction. But there are no easy victories in Glaspell's wide-awake portrait of American life.
In a way, Glaspell harks back to Ibsen and Shaw: Nora, in particular, embodies the Shavian life force and is superlatively played by Ruth Everett who endows her with a mixture of missionary zeal and bright-eyed, bob-haired vivacity. But Glaspell also anticipates madcap American comedies such as The Man Who Came to Dinner in which small-town life is disrupted by an avalanche of urban sophistication. And, even if Glaspell suggests that America in the 1920s was still a deeply traditional country, she extracts rich comedy from the play's cultural collision.
Kate Saxon directs the play with tremendous panache, and there are fine performances from David Annen as the poet, Katie McGuinness as his briefly liberated wife and Helen Ryan as his worldly-wise mother. Apparently, this is the play's first revival since 1922. I can report that it vividly dramatises a deep American cultural divide that may yet determine this year's presidential race.
· Until April 26. Box office: 020-8940 3633.
