Illness forced Kim Cattrall to withdraw from Linda, the Royal Court’s new show, and Noma Dumezweni scooped up the debris at the last minute. And what debris. All thoughts of kittenish Cattrall evaporated as Dumezweni strode on to the stage, a luscious blend of high-performance hair and trouser-suited luminosity. Linda is in her prime, at 55, a marketing director at a beauty firm, but she faces problems at home. Her balding husband, in midlife crisis, has joined a rock band. Her older daughter, Alice, is in deep trauma after internet trolls mocked an explicit clip of her posted by a jealous ex. Linda told Alice to pull herself together but Alice has withdrawn from life and exists like a waspish nun concealing her nubile physique in a grey onesie.
When Linda has an office fling whose shameful details go viral she’s forced to recognise the depth of her daughter’s suffering. And she vows revenge. By an unlikely but just about credible coincidence the chief troll in both cases, Amy, is a rising star at Linda’s firm. Stony-faced Amy hasn’t Linda’s charm or generosity but shares her desire to scale the corporate heights. She’s a blonde Machiavelli in heels, a cleavage that’s going places, a pitiless ego firing ambition through her laser-blue eyes and her double-barrel hooters (brilliant work by Amy Beth Hayes). The women square up like cage fighters in power suits.
The play is not perfect. The title is dreary, the plot sometimes threadbare. Two female characters (dad’s floozie and Linda’s younger daughter) are underwritten and the males don’t feel like people but vessels for masculine weaknesses, vanity, pomposity, infidelity and condescension. The set left me in two minds. It’s a huge complex double-tiered coffee-table arrangement with the levels connected by spiral staircases.
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