Shrapnel at the Arcola works for the slayers, not the slain

Quite a hit factory these days, the Hampstead Theatre. The latest candidate for West End glory is Hugh Whitemore’s bio-drama about Stevie Smith. Not an obvious choice. The script, from the 1970s, recreates the atmosphere of Stevie’s life with effortless accuracy. Her vocabulary, her taste in clothes, her habits of thought and expression appear by magic as if drawn from the evidence of intimate friends. Yet Whitemore never met his subject. Zoë Wanamaker plays her as an adorable suburban eccentric, whose razor-sharp intellect peeps out from behind a façade of emerald pinafores and sherry decanters.

Stevie (Florence Margaret Smith) was born in Hull in 1902 and lived nearly all her life in Palmers Green. Aged eight she realised that death was a servant whom she could summon at will. This proved such a consolation to her childhood that she later insisted suicide should appear on the primary school syllabus. She worked as a secretary for an indulgent City gent who allowed her to write novels on office stationery in company time. She became a success in her thirties, fell out of favour, worked with Orwell at the BBC during the war, and made a comeback in 1957 with her best-known collection, Not Waving but Drowning.

The first half of this subtle and tender-hearted act of homage is a linear documentary. Stevie pootles about her Palmers Green home recalling her earliest literary inspirations and her reasonably busy love life. She unburdens herself of pert metaphysical observations about domesticity. Housework occupies those who have nothing better to do, she says, contentedly polishing a vase. Cooking, with all its slicing and bashing and pounding, is just sublimated violence. The play’s second half is more densely packed and dramatically satisfying. The high point is a beautifully detailed portrait of Stevie in the 1960s as a dreamy suburban starlet fawned over by a stable of male devotees (not the marrying type), who tolerated her brusqueness and her disordered lifestyle and who happily chauffeured her to poetry readings around the country in return for doses of maternal affection.