I came back to a vicious diatribe against my play, Her Naked Skin, in the papers. Having a production on always feels as if you've been in a boxing match: no external bruising, but sharp internal hooks and punches. But I find I'm beginning to care less about the jabs, which implies I'm entering a state of either Zen or monomania.
This is Rebecca Lenkiewicz writing in the New Statesman about her family holiday in Cornwall, and its end. I think she must mean this piece in the Guardian by Viv Groskop:
Her Naked Skin has been portrayed as a political play, an exciting new feminist piece. It is neither of these things. Instead, it is a play about a doomed - and, frankly, unbelievable - upstairs-downstairs lesbian romance, played out against a suffragette backdrop.... The next three hours follow the increasingly cliched romp between two fictional suffragettes: the youthful Eve Douglas (Jemima Rooper), a cor-blimey machinist from Limehouse, and the middle-aged Lady Celia Cain (Lesley Manville), a plum-in-the-mouth aristocrat desperate to escape her husband and children. The play seems to forget it ever had any politics. Yes, we see the prison conditions the suffragettes endured, the tensions between husband and activist wife, the rows in the House of Commons. But at no point does anyone attempt to explain why these women wanted the vote so badly they were prepared to risk their lives for it.
I agree with Viv Groskop, and I think it's a bit much for Lenkiewicz to call this a "vicious diatribe". As I said in my review, my problem was the play's general lack of depth, and the fact that we never got underneath what we think we know about the suffragettes, or to understand their motivation.
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