Noma Dumezweni has stepped in at short notice to play the mammoth title role in Penelope Skinner’s new play and is frequently obliged to refer to the script. It’s a perfectly practical solution that Dumezweni handles with great poise, but it can’t disguise the fact that a play that starts as a bracing polemic about the invisibility of older women ends up subverting its own thesis.
Linda is an award-winning marketing boss in a beauty corporation. She is also 55, and when her latest sales pitch, aimed squarely at neglected oldsters, is rejected, her life starts to fall apart. She finds herself answering to a thrusting 25-year-old at work. Her grey teacher-husband is caught with a younger woman. Meanwhile, one daughter seeks invisibility, paradoxically, by wearing a skunk-like jumpsuit, while the other wrestles unaided with her school audition-piece as a Shakespearean male protagonist.
But, while Skinner makes any number of telling points about the plight of the mature woman, her play lapses into melodrama involving reckless liaisons, apocalyptic storms and even attempted murder. Real social issues get lost in sensory overload and, if Skinner is using King Lear as her reference point, she has chosen a dubious model.
Dumezweni emerges from all this with great dignity and it is not her fault that Linda’s breakdown seems luridly improbable. She is well supported by Karla Crome and Imogen Byron as her troubled offspring and by Amy Beth Hayes as a corporate schemer.
Michael Longhurst’s production and Es Devlin’s massive set stylishly evoke the surface sheen of the heroine’s home and workplace but Skinner’s play, which starts so promisingly, ends by making Linda seem a victim of hapless circumstance rather than a tragic archetype.
• At the Royal Court, London, until 9 January. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
