Everyone has a story worth hearing. That was the message of writer-director Alexander Zeldin’s Inequalities trilogy at the National, about the effects of austerity policies, and it fits this beautiful new work inspired by his mother and her journey from Australia to London.
The story of a woman who struggled against post-war repression and grinding sexism to find fulfilment, it blends a soft-spoken apparent naturalness with overt staginess. The house lights remain on throughout, incorporating us in the narrative. Zeldin’s cast operate as effectively and quietly as a Swiss watch. The whole thing is spellbinding.
Our protagonist, Alice, is a composite character, based on Zeldin’s mum but informed by interviews he did with other older women, as well as her, during Covid. Initially played by 69-year-old Amelda Brown, she ambles onstage and tells us she’s not interesting and was considered stupid by her parents.
A red velvet curtain is then drawn back to reveal her younger self (Eryn Jean Norvill) at a high-school leavers' party. This Alice wants to go to university but her ambitions, like those of her would-be artist father, are crushed by society’s inertia. She ends up married to her naval-cadet boyfriend, whose diffidence morphs into coercive control.
Alice is strong enough to escape to Melbourne, where she immerses herself in poetry, art history and the heated gender politics of the 1970s. But her romantic choices and academic efforts are derided by feminists and predatory men alike.
There is a shocking sexual assault, suffered by younger Alice but overcome by her older incarnation. It’s a slow, stark fusing of past and present, and it’s one of the most wrenching things I’ve seen. Continental Europe offers Alice succour, and London a second stab at family life with an older Austrian refugee. But this, too, proves complicated.
Throughout, the dialogue is hyper-real: halting, overlapping, awkward. Meanwhile stagehands manoeuvre rickety sets in plain sight to splurges of Foals vocalist Yannis Philippakis’s fuzzy electro soundtrack. Alice sometimes addresses us and sometimes her son, Zeldin’s avatar, 'Leander'. It works.
Norvill delicately expresses the emotional advances and retrenchments Alice makes in the world. Amid a very strong cast, kudos is due to Joe Bannister for incarnating two differently loathsome men, and to Pamela Rabe who switches between a firebrand manhater and Alice’s crabbed mother with delicious ease.
The people Alice escapes are more crudely realised than the equally horrible people she meets in the world of art and academia. It irked me that creativity is seen as her only route to ennoblement, given Zeldin has dignified all sorts of lives in the past. But maybe this is a truly biographical nugget in a play that blends life and art into something captivating.
