EV Crowe tends to write about enclosed worlds. In Kin (2010) she examined life in a girls’ boarding school, while in Hero (2012) she exposed the homophobic bullying of a supposedly gay teacher. Set in rural England in the 1700s, her latest play looks like an extension of her fascination with closed communities but, without giving too much away, turns out to be a puzzling if intriguing piece about the influence of technology on the human mind.
It begins with a rapid succession of short scenes showing black-gowned women embroidering a piece of stretched lace by candlelight. Initially there are two of them known simply as A and B. They are joined by a newcomer, C, who starts as an innocent novice but who gradually asserts her authority. She introduces striking colours and radical designs into the sewing circle and when a grieving widow, D, joins them, she assumes complete control. She gets the women to make character-revealing quilts and stirs up mutual suspicions with accusations of theft.
By mid-point, you assume that Crowe is dealing exclusively with power struggles in a hermetic female world. But it soon becomes clear that she has larger targets in view: the clues are there from the start, as when C suddenly announces she is gluten-free. In fact, Crowe is posing several troubling questions. Is the past an artificial construct? Have we created a false image of a paradisal, pre-industrial England? Are we any happier for living in a hectic modern world, where the brain is bombarded by incessant data?
These are valid questions but, at 80 minutes, the play is too compressed to deal with so many big issues and sets up a questionable binary choice between a confined past and a limitless present. Crowe certainly gives a clear picture of the preoccupations of rural women in the distant past but it is also a calculatedly restricted one. The historian Roy Porter has pointed out that in 1700 public life was a men-only club, but he also observes that over half the nation was female, and also that over half were under 21. Crowe’s selective vision omits the possibility of youthful rebellion against a life of chafing domesticity, just as she assumes all women today are wired into a world of technological progress.
But the play operates on several levels, and in Stewart Laing’s astute Jerwood Theatre Upstairs production seems like a metaphor for the theatrical process. We are clearly watching a re-creation of the past, and Fiona Glascott as the disruptive outsider successfully straddles two worlds: she both inhabits the measured milieu of a village community and embodies the feverish restlessness of the present. Alison O’Donnell as the mourning widow and John Mackay as a beneficent pastor lend considered support and the play undeniably teases the imagination. I just have a sense that Crowe weakens her argument by choosing such deliberately antithetical images of the women’s lot: as you sew, one might say, so shall you reap.
- At the Royal Court, London, until 22 December. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
