This devastating play is one of the cultural events of the year

Telegraph

27-06-2025

Seven years ago, an unknown young director called Lynette Linton made her name overnight at the Donmar Warehouse with a blistering production of Sweat, a work by double Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright Lynn Nottage.
Now Linton, firmly established as one of the shining stars in the directorial firmament, returns to the scene of her triumph for a revival of Intimate Apparel – Nottage's exquisite 2003 play about a black seamstress in 1905 New York. It is another devastatingly fine production, headed by a remarkable leading performance from Samira Wiley, known to global television viewers for The Handmaid's Tale.
Wiley plays Esther, a skilled and trusted maker of 'intimate apparel for ladies', who dreams of opening her own beauty parlour for black women. She lives in a 'rooming house' and is adequately content with her lot yet, at the age of 35, longs for a little romance.
A mutual acquaintance leads her to start exchanging letters with one George Armstrong (Kadiff Kirwan), a Barbadian man working on the Panama Canal and George's increasingly affectionate replies to her are projected in swirling italics on the theatre's back wall.
The one problem with this epistolary exchange is that Esther can neither read nor write. Fortunately, two people are particularly keen to assist with the correspondence: Esther's no-nonsense prostitute friend Mayme (Faith Omole) and her wealthy client Mrs Van Buren (Claudia Jolly).
The very personal nature of Esther's work means that class and race boundaries are collapsed; one of the beautifully crafted play's many narrative strands involves tales of this rich white woman's increasingly unhappy marriage being recounted obliquely during a series of lingerie fittings.
George is not the only man on Esther's radar. There is also Mr Marks (Alex Waldmann), a Jewish fabric merchant whom she visits regularly on business. There is an unmistakable frisson between this gentle pair, a flirtation via fabric, and if they cannot touch one another, they can certainly caress the Japanese silks that they both so admire. Rarely has someone brushing a hair from someone else's jacket been so exquisitely sexy.
Wiley superbly suggests the emotions bubbling within Esther: pride in her work and stoic decency, as well as an overriding desire to, at last, wear her own intimate apparel to seduce the man she desires. The character is convinced that she is plain, yet when she believes that she has at last found love, her face radiates the pure beauty of happiness.
All six cast members are pitch-perfect and Linton proves once more why she is so highly regarded in a production that marks a magnificent conclusion to Tim Sheader's high-achieving first season as artistic director of this boutique gem of a venue.