Lyonesse has all the makings of a powerful #MeToo play. In fact, it has the makings of more than one #MeToo play. There are multitudes packed into Penelope Skinner’s script about the horrors women face, from the juggle of work and home life in the face of a covertly bullying husband to coercive control and the appropriation of women’s stories.
It begins with Elaine (Kristin Scott Thomas), a once famous, now reclusive, actor who took flight from a dangerously controlling partner 30 years ago, never to be seen on stage or screen again. Kate (Lily James) is an ambitious film executive and high achieving north London mother sent to draw Elaine’s life story out of her in order to re-fashion it for a film.
They meet in Elaine’s shambling cliff-top cottage, designed by Georgia Lowe, which looks like Miss Havisham’s drawing room has been dragged into Cornwall backwards, complete with a cage of taxidermied birds. What commences is an initially tight, intriguing play about the scars of domestic violence and finding freedom in non-conformity which unravels into an unruly melange: a mix of Sunset Boulevard and Absolutely Fabulous, with Girls Behaving Badly energy on top.
Directed by Ian Rickson, there are some charged scenes, entertaining social satire and some fine acting from its starry cast, Scott Thomas leading the way with her charming performance as the eccentric Elaine. But too much remains unexplored in a schematic second act that veers off in a different direction and flattens out the slightly surreal, eerie edges of the first act.
There is intrigue around Elaine’s backstory. Ever the actor, she “performs” her past in front of Kate and trusty neighbour Chris (Sara Powell), complete with homemade special effects. It becomes a kind of rehearsed truth, Elaine shaping it for dramatic effect and Scott Thomas holds us captive. Kate’s high powered boss, Sue (Doon Mackichan, amusingly over-the-top), whose company specialises in “female driven narratives”, wants to give Elaine’s story her own, different, twists and there are promising ideas here around who owns a story and who shapes it.
But the focus shifts to Kate’s toxic marriage to Greg (James Corrigan), the tone also shifting from satirising the high achieving, have-it-all couple to a far more serious story of marital inequalities and bullying, which rises to the fore in the second act. This raises important questions about contemporary female identity – in the workplace, at home, under the patriarchal nuclear family ideals that dominate and oppress – but might have been another play in its own right. We neither dig deeply enough into Elaine’s story, nor Kate’s. Instead they are thrown in and stirred up in the plot’s cauldron. Scott Thomas shines brightly nonetheless and James is convincing as a woman at a crossroads, although both actors are hamstrung by a script that ends up speaking its themes through exposition and does not breathe enough life into its characters.
We see how patriarchy makes these women its unconscious agents. For a play that puts women at its centre – and high-achieving ones at that – it ends with unremitting bleakness. Bullying men still reign, Kate and Elaine are stripped of their agency and we leave them as caged and lifeless as Elaine’s stuffed birds. A character speaks of the importance of keeping up the fight but that fight seems to have died in them both by the drama’s end. If this is Skinner’s conclusion on where we are in our post #MeToo world, it is bleak indeed.
• Lyonesse plays at the Harold Pinter theatre, London, until 23 December
