Helen Edmundson’s new play Some Woman is described as a thriller, but the experience of watching it is more like a slow strangulation – one that leaves you feeling thoroughly shaken and queasy on the other side.
The ever luminous Anne-Marie Duff plays Julie, a downtrodden mother and divorcee, who puts everyone before herself to such a degree her own needs and opinions are barely a footnote in the minds of her family.
Her ex-husband, Richard (Geoffrey Streatfield), is attempting to chivvy her through the sale of the family home so that he can do it all again with a younger woman. Elder daughter Kate (Hannah Onslow in a cracking stage debut), is sharp-tongued and dismissive – she’s on the fast track to conventional success with a swanky corporate job in Spain, and keen to put as many miles between herself and her dysfunctional family as possible. Younger daughter Ginny (Grace Doherty) is the polar opposite: her mental health struggles make the thought of her leaving home for university seem like an impossibly big mountain.
Stuff’s not much better at Julie’s demanding but dead-end job doing admin in a school. She’s just been overlooked for a promotion that went to some young guy with letters after his name but no common sense.
If it sounds amazingly pedestrian thus far, that’s the point: Julie is an every-woman! But to top it off, she’s had a bad day. An 11-year-old boy called her a ‘fucking bitch’ out of the blue, and Julie takes this as the moment to prove to herself and everyone else that she’s not a doormat. She reprimands the boy and complains to his school (she didn’t want to take it to the police).
But suddenly the case is flipped, and in some Kafkaesque nightmare, Julie is now under investigation for a far more serious offence. The ‘altercation’, as it’s now being called, took place on a train station platform. CCTV footage captures the positions of Julie and the boy, Tyler, but not their words. As with Josef K in The Trial, the accusations against Julie keep multiplying – they’re nonsensical but impossible to argue with.
Is what happens plausible? I mean… it’s probably not implausible, but it’s an extreme instance of worst-case-scenarios piling up.
Under Blanche McIntyre’s direction, the pacing of the earlier scenes is slow and some recurring motifs – like the sounds of chugging trains between scenes (courtesy of sound designers Ben and Max Ringham) – are a tad heavy-handed. But the slow build also seems to be the point: it creates the sense that what happens to Julie could happen to any of us (well, any of us women, anyway). Once the tables are turned, we’re strapped in and fully invested in the ride. Robert Jones’s set shape-shifts from Julie’s naturalistic warm kitchen to a series of frigid grey investigation rooms and an echoey, hostile-looking court in which Julie appears impossibly small when making her plea.
Beyond Duff, the men (each of whom is present only briefly) are especially well characterised, and between them form a sliding scale of sexism. As Streatfeild’s Richard plays knight-in-shining-armour, making breakfast while Julie is in custody, you wonder why he couldn’t have pulled his weight in the home before now. Daniel Millar’s brisk headteacher Mr Dunster barely lets Julie speak in his hurry to handle the situation quickly. As Tyler’s father Mr Blake, Stephen Wight delivers a speech so convincingly violent it rattled me to my core. It leaves no question of his capability to manipulate the legal system to his family’s own sinister advantage.
The Jodie Comer-starring Prima Facie showed us how the British legal system is stacked against women in cases of sexual assault. Edmundson’s play posits that women beyond ‘a certain age’, as they’re so often described, are not only invisible to society, but dangerously vulnerable once they're no longer deemed of value to men.
This is feminist theatre that serves justice to its case.
