Intimate Apparel, 25.7.14

*SPOILER ALERT:  this review contains a plot summary*

Motley's first time at the rather bijou Finsbury Park Theatre for the UK première by Lawrence Boswell's Bath Theatre Royal company of the touching first (2003) work by African-American playwright Lynn Nottage (b1964; Yale & Columbia).  Booked on the strength of seeing Nottage’s Pullitzer-winning ‘Ruined’ at the Almeida in 2010.


Tanya Moodie (Esther) and Ian Goodman (Mr Marks)
share their love of fabrics together

Play centred on the search for love of an “unidentified negro seamstress” Esther (an emotionally transparent Tanya Moodie) in 1905 New York.

 

The eternal feminine: 
Tanya Moodie's Esther

Esther, a plain-but-homely long-term lodger in the “rooming-house” of the redoubtable Mrs Dickson (Dawn Hope) has just turned 35, still a lonely spinster.  She strikes up an unexpected correspondence with George (a dodgily-accented Chu Omambala), a Caribbean labourer on the Panama Canal whom she’s never met.  Illiterate Esther, who’s built up a cottage business supplying ‘intimate apparel’ both to Fifth Avenue white ladies (Sara Topham as the self-absorbed and mildly Sapphic Mrs Van Buren) and Tenderloin tarts (Rochelle Neil as piano-playing sex kitten Mayme) allows her clients to pen the letters on her behalf.  The epistolary romance blossoms into an unlikely marriage. 

Reality though comes home to roost in Act Two as the hapless George, emasculated by racial discrimination, betrays Esther and gambles away her lifetime’s savings.  It emerges that George too had relied on others to pen his letters and, with that shattering disclosure, Esther ends up in Mrs Dickson’s rooming house, poignantly back where she began. 

Whore or dressmaker? 
The choices for black women in early C20 NY
 (Rochelle Neil & Tanya Moodie)

This warmly-feminine well-constructed chamber-piece benefited from deft staging, strong all-round performances and suggestive musical accompaniment (an intriguing mix of klezmer and ragtime). 

What might have been a purely cautionary tale was transmuted into something more hopeful by the sense of solidarity between the women (all variously constrained by white patriarchy) and by a friendship forever teetering on platonic romance which Esther strikes up with the shyly-decent Shtetl haberdasher Mr Marks (a standout performance from Ian Goodman).  

“How we be friends? When I ain't never been through your front door”
Esther confronts wealthy patron Mrs Van Buren (Sara Topham)

Drawing on memories of her own great-grandmother, Nottage gave empathetic but non-preachy voice back to that most forgotten of groups, the black women who helped to power NY’s extraordinary turn-of-the-century growth. 

While lacking the visceral force of ‘Ruined’, it was well worth the effort of getting to the less-than-sylvan Finsbury Park on a sultry summer night.

  

Lincoln, 3.2.13

Daniel Day-Lewis as Spielberg's Lincoln

Arguably Spielberg’s best film yet and, if not, certainly up there with ‘The Color Purple’, this wasn’t a traditional biopic as such but a look at the last four months of Lincoln’s life, between the battle of Jenkins’ Ferry in January and his assassination on 14 April 1865. 

This (on the assumption readers are as ignorant of the finer points of US history as Motley is) was the period when “Honest Abe” was caught between the demands of a “peace now” campaign on his own party’s conservative wing and the need to ensure the Union Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment (outlawing slavery) before the Confederate states were readmitted to Congress on conclusion of a peace (which would have swung the vote the other way). 

The problem was securing a two-thirds majority with an obstructive Democrat House minority and a shortage of twenty votes.  The solution was to lie to the House about the forthcoming peace negotiations, to force the Confederate State delegates to dawdle by boat between Richmond and DC and, quite simply, to buy the flakier representatives' votes.  James Spader, unrecognisable from his Eighties' pretty-boy days ("Sex, Lies & Videotape" etc), was in fine fleshy cigar-chewing mode as the rogue distributing the Wonga on Lincoln's behalf.  'Lincoln' was that rarest of phenomena:  a war movie more interested in political mechanics and processes than in the fighting.

Scriptwriter Tony Kushner

With a strikingly literate script by Tony Kushner (who else would insert a digression on Euclidian maths in a mass-market movie?), the film captured the moment when pork-barrel Tammany Hall politics was alchemised, through the skill, daring and conviction of America’s greatest President, into moral gold.  Before his untimely demise, Lincoln had successfully secured the end of slavery in a legally unassailable way. (His earlier Emancipation Proclamation, in contrast, might have been struck down as a wartime exigency once a Peace Treaty was signed). 

In effect, the film was a resounding statement of faith in America’s "liberal mission", however much that’s been honoured 'more in the breach than th’observance' ever since.  The ironies that, 150 years ago, it was the Republicans who were on the side of the angels and the Democrats who were the obstructive element, are too obvious to belabour.  By focusing on the political procedurals more than the battles, Kushner & Spielberg seemed to suggest that, even from backroom deals and grubby compromises, worthy oaks can grow.  Given the continuing gridlock in the US political system, which at the time of writing has just come within twenty-four hours of a default, this modest message carries real contemporary force. 

'Keeper of the liberal flame',
the inimitable Mr Spielberg

Motley doesn’t mind admitting that (most uncharacteristically) he cried, briefly discovering a hitherto unsuspected Yankee corner in his, ahem, soul. Spielberg has an uncanny knack for piercing the tear ducts of even the most sceptical viewer. 

Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln was quite simply magnificent (you wouldn’t have believed he'd once been the young punk in ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’), commanding his disparate backers through force of personality and anecdotal sleight-of-hand.  Even the American accent didn't waver (so far as this Brit could tell).  The wonderfully craggy-faced Tommy Lee Jones (as leading Congress radical Thaddeus Stephens) was in career-best form, and the ever-reliable Sally Field was also strong as Lincoln’s neurotic wife Mary. 

Kushner found clever ways of giving African-Americans more of a voice than they would have had at the time, while not shrinking from giving airtime to the horrendous racism of the day.  He daringly hinted at Lincoln’s platonic attraction to younger staff-members and soldiers, while wisely resisting re-enacting the assassination.  Flick was well-photographed (in chiaroscuro) and its emotional force accentuated by a powerful John Williams score, never more so than when surveying the battlefields. (The American Civil War entailed the grimmest casualty rates in history to that point, exceeded only by the trenches of the First World War.) 

[Incidentally, this was Motley's first visit to the swanky new Barbican Cinemas on Beech Street.  These were definitely an improvement, in terms of ambience, on the dingy basement that's still home to Cinemas 1 & 2. However the profusion of high-end eateries, with their high-end prices, did create rather a 'them-and-us' feel, separating clients from staff.  Is this what the arts are meant to be about?]