Linda ***

Royal Court, Jerwood Downstairs

EXCERPT: "Penelope Skinner's play Linda is engaging and sometimes very insightful, but it is also a play that is agenda-led and not subtle about it."

Summary

“I’m an award-winning business woman. I’m happily married with two beautiful daughters and I still fit in the same size ten dress suit I did fifteen years ago. What could possibly threaten me?”

Linda Wilde has dedicated her life to changing the world. She’s won awards for her efforts, at the same time as working hard to become an inspiring mother, and an independent, loving wife.

Now, at 55, she seems to have it all. But Linda isn’t satisfied. She’s a woman in her prime and she’s embarking on her most ambitious plan to date. But beneath the surface, the cracks are starting to show.

“Old for a woman means worthless. Invisible. Of course we’re terrified. You tell us we peak at sixteen and it’s downhill all the way from there. Well I haven’t worked this hard to be pushed aside at the last hurdle. I refuse to be silenced. I will not disappear. I am Linda Wilde. And I’m still here!”

Thoughts

Penelope Skinner's play Linda is engaging and sometimes very insightful, but it is also a play that is agenda-led and not subtle about it. Characters are stereotypes and I don't really believe in the relationships. Too much of it is heavy handed - Skinner needs to go back to school and be told to show not tell a bit more. Because there are real gems here, moments when it becomes really pertinent and thought provoking, but also ones where it feels wooden in its predictability. Noma Dumezweni had to come in very last minute to take over the central role from a very ill Kim Cattrall and she does an extraordinary job - on stage for practically the whole thing she rarely and barely refers to her script. What is frustrating is that this feels like an early draft of a promising play. Because the ideas and links being drawn are very interesting ones - it's just they seem less interesting when we're being explicitly told about them, rather than being allowed the space to examine the relationships we see before us, judge them ourselves, and then turn that judgement in on ourselves. Es Devlin's set is stunning, a rotating transparent thing that is immaculate and impeccably beautiful, like the enviably perfect image that the play's successful women want to construct (even as they seek to sabotage it - whether by Linda's rejection of the idea of typically beautiful women, or Amy's destruction of her idol's career) and that Linda's children and husband can't live up to. The most powerful moment in the play for me is when Alice takes off her invisibility cloak, the skunk outfit that stops men from seeing her, and reveals all her self-harming. These shells we put up are nothing but that.