Sophie Treadwell is best known for her experimental 1928 drama Machinal, about female entrapment. Garry, dating from 1954 and one of more than 30 other plays she wrote, is getting what is billed as its world premiere and owes more to Warner Bros melodrama than to European expressionism. Even if its psychological explanations prove a little too pat, it remains an intriguing discovery.
Its eponymous hero is a former reform-school drifter struggling to come to terms with his sexuality. But the focus is as much on his wife, Wilma, to whom Garry confesses that he has killed a guy who lured him to a New York hotel room. Murder gives the plot its mainspring but Treadwell’s fascination is clearly with two damaged young people who seek consolation in each other. The Freudian explanations come thick and fast as Garry finds in his wife a surrogate mother and Wilma sees in her husband a replica of the criminal father she revered. What strikes one is Treadwell’s complex compassion for two lost and strangely helpless souls.
In Graham Watts’s production, the cast of four admirably withstand the microscopic examination that comes from performing in a room over a Kennington pub. Phebe Alys captures exactly Wilma’s journey from besotted affection to quivering anxiety and Thomas Martin is equally impressive at showing Garry’s reluctance to acknowledge he is gay.
There is strong support from Claire Bowman as Garry’s sophisticated, sex-worker sister and from Matthew Wellard who, as a crime reporter who befriends Wilma, is that rarest of all theatrical creatures: a sympathetic journalist. It’s a good enough play to make you hope that other directors now delve into the Treadwell back catalogue.
At the White Bear, London, until 22 June.
