Intensity is too pale a word for Anne-Marie Duff. It implies something more deliberate than her full-on flaring, and something more solemn than the caustic crackle of her voice. In The House of Shades, Duff snakes into a turquoise cocktail dress to sing I’m Always Chasing Rainbows (and made me long to hear her as Little Voice), slinks into impressions of Bette Davis, snarls – “mardy mustard” as she says of someone else – into disappointment. She does and says monstrous things; she is always magnetic. From time to time she clicks her fingers in the air as if to summon up the next phase of her life.
Duff, playing a Nottinghamshire woman who was not allowed to take up her grammar school place, and is now straining at the leash in her marriage, focuses the different ages not only of woman but of Britain since 1965. Beth Steel’s play begins with the laying-out of a corpse, which is compared to the lifeless shell of a defunct factory. A few years ago in Wonderland, Steel examined the impact of the miners’ strike. Now she evokes the neglect of large swathes of the country in which manufacturing used to happen, and the consequent swerves in political allegiance. This is in part an attempt (the opening of the play was postponed by the pandemic) to show the crumbling of the “red wall”. Here is the decline of trade unions, the rise of Thatcherism, the suffocation of women’s interests by the traditional left; here is Brexit and abortion. Here also are many undiluted gobbets of political information – “the whole postwar manifesto is in ruins” – handed over heavily at the kitchen table.
