Whatever drew Kristin Scott Thomas and Lily James to Penelope Skinner’s shambling, implausible exploration of the raw deal women get utterly fails to materialise on stage. The characters are underdeveloped, the narrative heavy with exposition and the scenario riffs aimlessly on Sunset Boulevard (down the road, much better) and Great Expectations.
There are some funny and some daring moments in Ian Rickson’s production, and we get to see KST go OTT as a scenery-chewing former actress, Elaine Dailey, emerging from 30 years hiding in a house which is named Lyonesse after a lost land and is slowly sliding, from erosion and the weight of the play's signposting, into the Cornish sea. Scott Thomas is one of our finest dramatic stage stars but – how to put this? – there’s very little difference between someone pretending to be a hammy performer and an actual hammy performer.
James fares slightly better as Kate Trellis, the exec from an all-female production company Lilith, who is charged with securing Elaine’s story. Her performance is nuanced though the character is a loosely-tied bundle of issues. A high achiever with low self-esteem, Kate is balancing career, motherhood and the desire of her smug director husband (James Corrigan) to sire another child on her, even though the first nearly killed her.
At the opening, Kate recounts Elaine’s history to her boss Sue (Doon Mackichan, in a mannered performance of alpha-female unsisterliness) as if reading a Wikipedia entry. A teenage discovery, Elaine married a much older actor, ran off with a revered film director, then vanished after the first night of a successful West End show.
In the dilapidated Cornish house, a balefully eccentric Elaine greets Kate in a swimsuit, fur coat and wellies, brandishing a hatchet. But she softens to reveal the alleged act of male violence that caused her disappearance in a frankly bonkers stand-up monologue that culminates in her dancing and singing Ultra Nate’s You’re Free with her lesbian poet neighbour Chris (Sara Powell).
The three women become instantly besotted – mostly platonically – even though Kate’s a wet blanket, Elaine a raging narcissist and Chris a stereotype, and none of them has a shred of interior life. The plot lurches improbably forward as if it is being made up on the spot. I didn’t believe a second of it.
Arguably, Skinner is aiming for a sort of absurdism, rejecting credibility and consistency as potential traps, like marriage or the pressure to reproduce. Certainly Elaine’s swivel-eyed vanity and the suspicion her story might be invented is meant to make us think about how women are dismissed, disbelieved or just not heard.
But mostly this seems like an assemblage of half-baked ideas and lazy conceits. Why Lyonesse? Why does Act One end in slapstick? Why does the supposedly raging sea only hit the side of the house twice? Why, above all, did Scott Thomas, James and Rickson sign up to this? As star vehicles go, it’s a car crash.
