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Spectator
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
More drama-school showcase than epic human tragedy: Evita reviewed
Evita, directed by Jamie Lloyd, is a catwalk version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. The actors perform on the steps of a football stadium where they race through an effortful series of dance routines accompanied by flashy lights and thumping tunes. It's more a drama-school showcase than an epic human tragedy. There are no interiors, no furnishings and no props – not even a suitcase for 'Another Suitcase in Another Hall'. Rachel Zegler plays the lead in black pants and a bra from M&S. In Act Two, she changes into a new bra and pants. White this time, with silvery spangles. She looks like a majorette. Why no proper clothing? Evita is a complex character who starts as a penniless street hustler and turns into a seasoned stateswoman manipulating the media from a presidential palace. She needs decent costumes to support and explain this transformation. Zegler struts about in her high street undies, leering and pouting provocatively but she can offer no warmth or tenderness. She's the baddie here. The narrator, Che (Diego Andres Rodriguez), looks like a jobless cocktail waiter. Juan Peron (James Olivas) seems uncomfortable in his Primark suit and tie. He has the truculent air of a convicted mugger at a parole hearing. Zegler sings 'Don't Cry for Me, Argentina' on a balcony outside the theatre for the benefit of a camera crew and a crowd of random Londoners. This is relayed to a monitor on stage. An odd decision. The punters have to watch a video of a performance that is being offered to passers-by for free. Some ticketholders may want their money back. Intimate Apparel is a genteel story about a pleasant chatty woman, Esther Mills, who lives in New York in 1905. She's a strange character for a melodrama because her life is full of delights. She loves her work as a seamstress and she receives lavish praise for her skills. She passes her time paying social calls to an array of amusing and civilised friends. Her wealthy client, Mrs Van Buren, treats her as an equal and asks if she enjoys opera and supports the suffragettes. She's attracted to a handsome Jewish tailor who emigrated from his native Romania but forgot to bring his fiancée with him for some reason. He shares cups of tea with Esther and they discuss the competing merits of taffeta, silk and lace. A romance is hinted at. After a long day of gossip, Esther visits Mayme, a sexy nightclub pianist, who drinks gin and makes cryptic remarks about her profession. 'A gentle touch is gold in any country,' she says. At night Esther returns home and enjoys the affectionate teasing of her wise, twinkly landlady who asks if she has a suitor. Sure enough, Esther is being courted by George Armstrong, an educated bachelor with a steady job in Central America. He's digging the Panama canal. It's unclear how he and Esther met but he writes her long, erudite letters full of amorous implications. George is perhaps the most high-minded navvy ever to pick up a shovel. 'I stood thigh-deep in crimson petals,' he writes, after felling an exotic tree. Esther sends him envelopes containing bits of silk and cotton which strike George as rather puzzling. They're bound to puzzle the audience too. The explanation is that the author, Lynn Nottage, links all her characters by means of fabrics and garments. Hence the show's title. This clumsy device gets more unwieldly as the play grinds forward. When Esther marries George, she surprises him with a smoking jacket made from Japanese silk. This matches the play's formula, of course. The garment happens to be too small for George's strapping frame but never mind. It's crucial to the plot. The pace picks up in the second half when George decides to buy 12 horses and open a stud farm while Esther fights off a lesbian attack from Mrs Van Buren. From here, the story ought to intensify and the characters should grapple with life-and-death decisions but instead the author de-escalates the tension and settles for a banal, soppy conclusion. It feels like a morality tale for schoolgirls written by a nun. And that's not good. Play-goers don't want to see characters having an easy time. You might as well pay to watch people sunbathing. Lynette Linton directs the show with energy and panache. And the actors do their best to bring life to their banal, well-mannered characters. For some reason, the set is a depressingly grimy structure which resembles a derelict warehouse that even the rats have abandoned. And it hardly suits the frivolous mood of the piece. Just ignore it. Instead enjoy the plush, beautifully embroidered costumes and the exceptional hairstyles and wigs arranged by Cynthia De La Rosa. If there were a Nobel prize for hairdos this show would win.
Time Out
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Intimate Apparel
Change at the top can completely alter a theatre's character. But there is something quite lovely about the fact that the great US playwright Lynn Nottage and our own fast-rising directing superstar Lynette Linton have done a play together for each of the last three Donmar artistic directors. Josie Rourke's reign ended with the monumental working class tragedy Sweat, which did much to establish both Nottage and Linton's UK reputations. For Michael Longhurst there was Clyde's, Sweat 's beautifully redemptive, almost magical realist sort-of-sequel. Now Linton moves on to Intimate Apparel. Where Sweat and Clyde's were both UK premieres, Intimate Apparel is an older Nottage work that was her first US hit back in 2003 and had a very decent UK premiere a decade ago. But more Lynn Nottage is always a good thing. It's a period drama, following a selection of characters in New York City, 1905. The story centres on Esther (Samira Wiley), a hard working but shy and emotionally repressed Black seamstress who specialises in 'intimate apparel' – that is to say underwear, which in 1905 includes a lot of fancy corsets. Neither Nottage's play nor Linton's production really gives a sense of what the wider city – or indeed country – was like at the time, and that's the point. Each of Nottage's characters exists on some sort of margin, or we only see the marginal side of their existence. So there's Esther: shy, self-doubting but determined in her passion for her work. There's her friend Mayme (Faith Omole), a hooker. There's Esther's landlady and confidante Mrs Dickson (Nicola Hughes), who acquired her wealth somewhat dubiously. There's Mrs Van Buren (Claudia Jolly), the rich but lonely white lady who Esther makes clothes for and who confides in her but who will never treat her like a social equal. There's Mr Marks (Alex Waldmann), the orthodox Jewish clothier who Esther buys her fabric from: the two of them clearly have a thing for each other but are sundered by race and religion. And finally there's George (Kadiff Kirwan), a Bajan labourer on the Panama Canal who has taken to writing romantic letters to Esther, who is thrilled, although she herself cannot read. An exquisite drama about what happens when human longing is filtered through human society They're all transgressing in each others' spaces: they have intimate relationships more complicated than simple friendship. A lot of it is about touch: Mrs Van Buren, who is probably queer, trembles and gasps when Esther laces her corset and looks self conscious and embarrassed when she looks at her pale hand holding Esther's dark one. Mr Marks is discomfited when Esther grazes his hand – the only woman who is allowed to do so is his betrothed, who he has never met and lives in Romania. When George finally comes to NYC, Esther is torn between fear of and hunger for his touch. It's a beautifully acted and exquisitely written drama about what happens when raw human longing is filtered through the strangeness of class, race and rulebound human society. Yes, it's a period piece, but even today, an Orthodox Jew and a working class Black woman would have quite the gulf to surmount to form a public relationship. It's only in their one-on-one connections away from the public eye that their desires have a tiny measure of breathing space. US actor Wiley is excellent as Esther: shy and self-doubting but with an unshakeable core of passion and ambition. And I think Kirwan does a particularly fine job with the complicated role of George. When he finally arrives in NYC he is not all his letters suggested. And yet rather than make him out to be a simple cad, Kirwan and Nottage are very good at capturing his justifiable frustration at an American society that won't let him be the man he wants to be. Both Linton's direction and Alex Berry's design is light and unshowy – we get a sense of the period through costume and furniture, but we're never drowning in detail, and the characters are always put front and centre. Linton's only big intervention is a series of projections in which the Black characters are shown as figures in sepia photographs. 'Unknown negro seamstress, 1905' reads the caption to a final image of Esther. It's a blithe description that reduces a profoundly complicated life to almost nothing. But Nottage has shown us her boundless depths.
Daily Mail
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Orange Is The New Black's Samira Wiley is a revelation as a lovelorn New York seamstress, putting all her passion into lacy lingerie, in Lynn Nottage's exquisite Intimate Apparel
Intimate Apparel (Donmar Warehouse) Verdict: Tailored to perfection Rating: Lynn Nottage's play was inspired by a faded photograph of her great-grandmother, a seamstress who came from Barbados to New York, aged just 18. That she married her penpal — a labourer on the Panama Canal — is all Nottage knew of her. Her play, set in Manhattan in 1905, reimagines her great grandma as plain, meek, unmarried Esther, 35. For 17 years she has been sewing undergarments for the wedding trousseaus of rich, white women and for her friend, Mayme, a vivacious, piano-playing black prostitute (Faith Omole), wishing they were for herself. A compelling, quivering Samira Wiley (star of Netflix 's Orange Is The New Black) suggests a woman as delicate — yet as robust — as the lace she works with. Esther stitches her earnings into her bed quilt and dreams of one day opening her own beauty parlour. Ingeniously set in various bedrooms, the focus of this intricately woven piece is tight, but its breadth wide, as Nottage expertly unpicks ideas about intimacy, class and race. Esther is not allowed through the front door of bored Mrs Van Buren's home and yet she is welcomed into her boudoir — and her confidence. She longs for love. But in the meantime she pours her thwarted sensuality into her corsets, her passion for sumptuous silks shared by gentle Romanian draper, Mr Marks (Alex Waldmann). As they trace their fingers lingeringly over the fabrics, there is no doubt they are imagining it were the other's flesh. They are clearly made for one another — but Marks, an Orthodox Jew, is engaged to a woman he has never met. When illiterate Esther starts a correspondence with one of the construction workers in Panama, Mrs Van B answers the letters for her, often as Esther laces her basque. When Gorgeous George (Kadiff Kirwan) arrives in New York to marry her, he is a very different man from the sweet penpal. Think Cyrano. Esther's dreams unravel. An exceptional cast make these richly textured characters wholly believable. This is high couture drama, tailored to perfection in Lynette Linton's seamless staging. Unmissable.
Telegraph
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
This devastating play is one of the cultural events of the year
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.
