What fascinates me about the rise of the female monologue in the age of #MeToo is its capaciousness. Earlier this year, Carey Mulligan delivered Girls & Boys, in which every character apart from the heroine was invisible. In Rona Munro’s adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s novel My Name Is Lucy Barton, there are two voices but only one speaker: an utterly assured Laura Linney.
Strolling across the stage, Linney tells Lucy’s harsh story levelly. The details of her childhood – poverty which made children hold their noses around her at school; a war-damaged father; hours spent locked alone in a van – are the more gruelling because they are provided calmly, often with a half-smile, like that of a saleswoman knowing she has a hard sell and eerily aiming to look reassuring.
Richard Eyre’s production is, characteristically, delicate and patient. But there is an odd discordance between imaginative interpretation and literal-minded design. Luke Halls’s videos obediently provide the specified backdrops: the Chrysler building, a solitary tree. Yet they only once evoke what they should – both a setting and an internal condition, when the screens are filled with windows splotched with rain. The drops could be tears. The effect is very fine: it could have stood throughout the evening.
Last month in the Observer, Linney described her task as being like that of a medium. Her performance is like a summoning. This play about memory is an extraordinary feat of memory – one-and-a-half hours straight through. It is also an act of ventriloquism. The speaker is looking back on her life as she is visited in hospital by her mother, from whom she has long been estranged. Linney becomes that mother, giving a rasp to her voice, speeding up the pace of her speech. This subsuming of one voice by another is true to the suggestion in the book of an unreliable narrator. It also carries an echo of Eyre’s earlier work. It is 38 years since he shook the Shakespearean stage with a production of Hamlet in which Jonathan Pryce’s Prince was possessed by his father’s ghost. Now here is a daughter channelling her mother.
Fraught relationships between mothers and daughters are central and dynamic in Leave Taking, first seen at the Liverpool Playhouse 31 years ago and now vibrantly revived by Madani Younis, artistic director of the Bush. Yet the acute feminism of Winsome Pinnock’s terrific play – which has a cast of four vital women and one sprawling chap – is disguised by its dominant discussions: about what it is to arrive in Britain from the Caribbean believing you belong and finding yourself sidelined. “All my life I think of meself as a British subject, then them send me letter say if me don’t get me nationality paper in order they going kick me outta the country.” 1987 – or last year?
Pinnock’s play has always had a finely tuned binocular vision. Two generations, the older still attached to parents in the Caribbean – are fused in a family – and divide it. Jamaican accents versus Deptford vowels. Habits of deference – standing up for the national anthem – versus reflexes of sceptical impatience. Formal dress codes – hats on inside the house – against provocative sloppiness. An acceptance of being ruled against contempt for being instructed.
All this – which might have been an interesting historical capsule – looks urgently contemporary. Not least because it is expressed so physically. This has to be a piece of theatre – it could not be transcribed. Sarah Niles as Enid, the matriarch, is stunned into sadness by overwork and underappreciation but dignified and still. Adjoa Andoh as Mai, the seer, is spiky and agile. The younger women slip around the stage as if they expected to own it – and England. Thank god.
The only puzzling thing is the stage around which they slip. A worrying drip of water from the ceiling turns into an onstage lake in which the cast paddle. Is this England or the Caribbean?
There is no ambiguity about where Killer Joe is set. In a trailer. In ferocity and laxity. So there is a guy who, in order to teach his girlfriend a lesson, sets his genitals on fire. “Was he all right?” asks a wide-eyed virgin. Some of the viciousness in Tracy Letts’s play comes coated, indeed battered, with jokes. Some of the violence is delivered full-on, straight out – point-blank shootings, a head banged into a fridge – though accompanied in Simon Evans’s production with such flashing light and freezes that it has the effect of cartoon. The most hideous of moments – in which a man holds a (Kentucky fried) chicken joint in front of his crotch and compels a woman to fellate it/him – could only be thought not to be an act of force (well, is she actually physically harmed?) in Greerland.
Nasty and knockabout, Killer Joe – first staged in 1993, 20 years before Letts soared to fame with August: Osage County – tries hard to send waves of unease off the stage. But it is rigid with effortful shock. The plot is scanty. A family plan to bump off their mother in order to inherit her life insurance. Their hired assassin wants a retainer – and takes it in the shape of the simple sister of the family, dreamy, awkward and virginal. The characters have one trait each.
Sam Shepard might have made this look like part of a tumbling, terrible folk song, a metaphor of America. Neil LaBute might have made the queasiness look essential. But Killer Joe has no psychological, social roots. It is just one damn thing after another. Orlando Bloom guarantees an audience. He walks like a sheriff from a 50s movie, drawling, flatly emphatic. More hangdog than top dog.
Star ratings (out of five)
My Name Is Lucy Barton ★★★★
Leave Taking ★★★★
Killer Joe ★★
• My Name Is Lucy Barton is at the Bridge, London, until 23 June
• Leave Taking is at the Bush, London, until 30 June
• Killer Joe is at the Trafalgar Studios, London, until 18 August
