No theatre has done more than the Orange Tree to excavate Edwardian drama, and it comes up with a lost treasure in this 1908 play by the pioneering radical feminist Cicely Hamilton, which explores the gross financial and sexual inequalities of a supposed golden age.
Anticipating Harley Granville-Barker's The Madras House, Hamilton begins by exploring the iniquities of the "living-in" system by which female shop employees were kept as commercial slaves. But when the feisty Diana, earning five bob a week in a Clapham drapery emporium, comes into a £300 inheritance, she decides to blow the money on a taste of the glorious life.
Posing as a wealthy widow in a Swiss holiday resort, she finds herself eagerly pursued by an impecunious ex-guardsman and his predatory aunt. The outrage that ensues when she reveals she is simply a shop-girl who struck lucky says everything you need to know about gilded Edwardian hypocrisy.
Hamilton, who went on to write a fierce anti-marriage tract, compromises her own political principles in the play's improbable romantic conclusion. But she is unsparingly honest both about the virtual imprisonment of female shop workers and the ruthlessness of the "ornamental" classes.
Interspersed with socially conscious Edwardian music-hall songs, Caroline Smith's production captures exactly the feel of the period. Cate Debenham-Taylor also exudes a perky self-possession as the upwardly mobile Diana. There is exemplary support from Edward Bennett as her chumpish military wooer and Lavinia Bertram as his aunt. But the real pleasure lies in discovering a lost writer who was a key player in early 20th-century feminism.
· Until March 17. Box office: 020-8940 3633.
