Her Naked Skin
Olivier
Elaine Stritch At Liberty
Shaw
In 2004 Rebecca Lenkiewicz got the black spot from the Critics’ Circle. Sorry, I mean she was voted ‘most promising playwright’. Less a gong, more a millstone. Praising writers for what they’ve done is fine. Praising them for what they may do in future is like congratulating a pregnant woman on her foetus’s A-levels results.
Lenkiewicz’s latest work about the suffragette movement arrives with fresh honours. The programme grandly announces that Her Naked Skin is ‘the first play by a living woman writer on the Olivier stage’. How aristocratic. It demands respect on account of its status at birth. The setting is 1913 and we’re watching the aftermath of Emily Wilding Davison’s suicidal prang with the king’s horse at the Derby. The flattened suffragette languishes in a coma, the terrified Cabinet have been thrown into a tizzy and the feminist rebels are preparing for a new wave of agitation.
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