The radical Victorian thinker Harriet Martineau was a woman ahead of her time. A feminist, abolitionist and sociologist, her works of political philosophy outsold Dickens. Yet for a period in the mid 1840s she was known among the population of Tynemouth as “the woman who’s been lying on a chaise-longue for five years”.
Shelagh Stephenson’s play focuses on the obscure phase of Martineau’s career when she retired to the north-east coast to recover from a debilitating condition that baffled physicians (it may have been irritable bowel syndrome).
There will inevitably be a fairly sedentary aspect to a play about someone suffering from an illness, though Max Roberts’s production counteracts this with the vivacity of ideas and gallery of eccentrics crowded into the attic room. Harriet’s favoured companion, Impie, is a socially inept village woman with a strange fascination for seals. Her maid, Jane, is adept at putting people into a trance. Then there is Beulah, an 18-year-old black girl, adopted from a Virginia plantation, who prefers dressing as a boy.
Stephenson neatly balances the impact of progressive thought against the faddism of Victorian pseudoscience: Harriet dismisses phrenology as poppycock, but submits to a course of mesmerism that seems to effect a miracle recovery. Lizzy McInnerny’s portrayal of Martineau is pleasingly astringent without becoming too sour. Amy McAllister is a delight as the moon-faced, seal-besotted Impie. And there’s a priceless response to the slavery question from Deka Walmsley as a bigoted local bigwig: “Were you for or against it? Personally, I can’t seem to get worked up about it either way.”
• At Live theatre, Newcastle, until 3 December. Box office: 0191-232 1232.
