Women have always disrupted the ruling class by getting pregnant by unsuitable men. As St John Hankin showed in his 1908 play The Last of the De Mullins. Max Beerbohm thought Hankin’s heroine preposterous because “abnormal”. She now seems a prophetic invention. She wants a child and not a husband, so takes a lover and scarpers from the family pile, baby under her belt to set up as a milliner in London. Hankin is fascinating on the mercantile details and brings a touch of Virginia Woolf to his description of the requirements for an independent female life: “pluck and brains and £500”.
Joshua Stamp-Simon has done a lovely job in excavating this play, seen previously only in private performance. Hankin, author of The Burglar Who Failed and of a comic sequel to The Doll’s House, drowned himself at the age of 39 and is largely forgotten. His play sometimes nudges melodrama but is for the most part as comic as it is fervent. Stamp-Simon’s direction makes the most of this.
Pompous inheritance is pointed up in Victoria Johnstone’s design by ancestral portraits of which the audience sees only the feet. The beautifully cogent Charlotte Powell wears a sprightly side-of-the-head hat, an ancestor of the fascinator. The ripples of dismay and self-knowledge spread by this heroine on a brief return home are tremendous. Her fallen condition is partly blamed on her reprehensible habit of “bicycling”, pronounced to rhyme with “recycling”. One aunt’s bolster bosom turns into a barometer of indignation. Her mother, the excellent Roberta Taylor, implodes with lost opportunities. As her sister, unmarried at 28, the desolate Maya Wasowicz wilts before our eyes.
In a lovely bit of staging, the family square up to each other only to be interrupted by a maid who flits in to light the lamps. Savouring the atmosphere, she sniggers as she lingers, reducing this ruling class to silent, hostile embarrassment.
•The Last of the De Mullins is at Jermyn Street, London until 28 February
