I do put myself through it don't I?

Sometimes a bit of discomfort is exactly what you need

Miles Molan, Tok Stephen, Amanda Abbigton ad Rosie Day in When It Happens to You at the Park Theatre. Photo: Mark Douet

I’ve been in Edinburgh for the festival this week, because why not, since I’m not gainfully employed (read my roundup here), so I haven’t seen as much in London as usual, but nearly all of it has nudged me at least a bit out of my comfort zone. Which is curiously enjoyable.

This week

Novelist Tawni O’Dell’s debut play, When it Happens to You, got mixed reviews when it played off-Broadway with the writer herself in the leading role. From what I read about that show, Jez Bond’s new version at the Park Theatre (until August 31) is a better production, his sensitive direction and a tight-knit cast, led by Amanda Abbington, elevating a slightly pedestrian, if heartfelt (and occasionally funny), piece of writing (I reviewed this in The Times, which you can read here if you have a subscription). 

The subject is anything but pedestrian. An autobiographical account with - as far as I can tell - only the names changed, it starts with a stricken phone call from O’Dell’s daughter, here called Esme (the O’Dell character is named Tara), minutes after the Esme’s rape by a stranger, who followed her home and forced his way into her New York apartment. The next 70 minutes recounts the years-long fallout from that horrific event, which threatens to tear O’Dell’s family apart. 

On the way that the long, creeping tentacles of rape wrap around a life, this is chilling - the fact that you can never leave the memory of it behind because the site is your own body; that it becomes the thing that defines the victim, both for her and for everyone else, further isolating her from a ‘normal’ existence. Bond’s staging, which keeps all the players onstage throughout, cleverly manifests the ties that hold the characters together even while they’re pushing each other away in pain.

It’s not, in all honesty, a brilliant play, only really coming together with a shocking last act revelation, and it’s strangely low-key - though to be fair I’m not sure how else you can respectfully excavate your own family’s deep and scarifying trauma. 

The cast handles the material well, and Abbington has a warmth and ease that sells this at an absolute premium. In the hands of a lesser actor it would be a very different story. The stats that we’re left with (and I don’t know where they come from, but if you extrapolate from the US figures alone it’s not far off)  - that one in four women have been raped, and this is a conservative estimate - ram home how horrifically quotidian this family’s story is. My walk home that night was not a comfortable one. 

I felt oddly comforted, however, by The Years at the Almeida, an adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s 2008 novel/memoir/collective women’s history. Five excellent actresses play her, one for each new phase of life (and all the subsidiary characters who flit in and out), as she discovers her burgeoning teenage sexuality, experiments with drugs and literature, endures a horrific back-street abortion, rages against the war in Algeria (she’s French, of course), marries and bears children, tries not to hate her teaching job, embarks on doomed affairs and finally, finally writes her book. The story is knitted together by the social and political shifts that have changed the world for women over the course of Ernaux’s 83 years on this earth.