Samira Wiley is transformed in this arresting 2003 play by Pulitzer Prize and Evening Standard Award winner Lynn Nottage, about a black, spinster seamstress sewing lingerie for both wealthy white women and black prostitutes in 1905 New York.
A mainstay of The Handmaid’s Tale and Orange is the New Black, Wiley made her London stage debut in 2022 as the impossibly glamorous 1930s singer Angel in Lynette Linton’s National Theatre production of Pearl Cleage’s Blues for An Alabama Sky.
Here, again for the brilliant Linton, her Esther Mills is cowed, dowdy, purse-lipped and startled by intimacy, though with a lively wit and a resolute dignity. I know, I know – it’s called acting. But Wiley inhabits the part so totally, even during the curtain call, that I had to keep reminding myself it was her.
The play is about artifice and what lies beneath, and in its bid to tell untold stories it flirts with cliché. But it is illuminated by the performances, especially Wiley’s, and by Nottage’s always incisive view into lives most writers might not notice.
At the start, Esther has turned 35 and is running up a chemise for yet another of her rooming-house neighbours who’s found a man and is getting married. Esther won’t join the party and submit to the attentions of overweight luggage porter Mr Charles, though urged on by her tutting landlady Mrs Dickson (Nicola Hughes). Yet she has a repressed sensuality, that emerges in a lovely, awkward flirtation – manifested through an appreciation of fabric – with the boyish, orthodox Jewish draper Marks (Alex Waldmann).
When she receives a request to correspond with Barbadian engineer George Armstrong (Kadiff Kirwan), who is working on the Panama Canal, she is eager. But Esther can’t read or write so her clients, socialite Mrs Van Buren (Claudia Jolly) and sex worker Mayme (Faith Omole) pour their own frustrated romantic longings into letters in her name. With a certain inevitability, Geroge also turns out not to be the gent he seemed from the affectionate phrases scribbled across Alex Berry’s set.
The nub of the play is the photo of Esther and George on their wedding day that closes the first act, captioned “Unidentifed Negro Couple c. 1905”. As Nottage notes in the programme, the stories of black women like her great-grandmother were erased or ignored in official histories and most media from the time. So she conjured their lives from ephemera like small ads, accommodation records and advertisements.
What emerges is a portrait of a world in flux and in motion, where people are moving for a better life, and clothing, industry and music (there’s a token Ragtime score) are changing. Gender roles are shifting more slowly, and racial divisions more slowly still. “How are we friends when I ain’t been through your front door?” Esther asks the selectively solicitous Mrs Van Buren.
Nottage’s dialogue is elegant and succinct, alive to the nuance of George’s Barbadian idiom and Esther’s North Carolina decorousness. George is “sturdy enough”, she shyly tells a nosy questioner. The play is very funny and in some ways romantic but ultimately grounded in harsh reality. Linton’s production serves the material, and the cast, extremely well. And she gets a revelatory performance out of Samira Wiley. Did I mention that already?
Intimate Apparel at Donmar Warehouse, until 9 August, tickets and information here.
