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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Arifa Akbar

Ragdoll review – Patty Hearst inspires an audacious account of power and privilege

Ben Lamb, Abigail Cruttenden and Katie Matsell in Ragdoll at Jermyn Street theatre.
Memory play … (from left) Ben Lamb, Abigail Cruttenden and Katie Matsell in Ragdoll at Jermyn Street theatre. Photograph: Alex Brenner

Katherine Moar’s riveting drama is inspired by the American heiress Patty Hearst who served a prison sentence for a bank robbery organised by a radical leftwing guerrilla group, the Symbionese Liberation Army. She had been abducted by the group months earlier and her court testimony told of how she was locked in a closet and raped during captivity.

This memory play traces the fallout of such a case through a fictional encounter between heiress Holly (Abigail Cruttenden) and the attorney Robert (Nathaniel Parker) who lost her case.

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