FringeReview UK 2024

Machinal

A Ustinov Studio Theatre Royal Bath Production, in Association with the Old Vic

Genre: American Theater, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, Short Plays, Theatre, Tragedy

Venue: The Cut Waterloo

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Sophie Treadwell’s name was so airbrushed she sounds contemporary: she resoundingly is.

Five years on from Natalie Abrahami’s triumphant 2018 Almeida revival of her masterpiece Machinal this astonishing Ustinov Studio Bath revival now transfers in a co-production to the Old Vic. With Rosie Sheehy as the Young Woman it’s directed by Richard Jones till June 1^st.

Though Machinal – inspired by attending the Ruth Snyder trial months earlier – caused a sensation on Broadway in 1928, Treadwell’s star faded in the 1930s. A writer of comedy and expressionist pieces as well as journalist-inspired social realism, she’s not easy to place.

When Treadwell’s seventh play about immigrants and xenophobia was panned (bad timing: 1941), she retreated from large-scale drama, to novels and journalism, got written out of American dramatic history.

Treadwell wrote her last play though in 1967. U.S. university productions have revived her work, with one late comedy premiered at the White Bear in 2019. Treadwell died in 1970, just short of eighty-five.

Machinal prefigures Treadwell’s airbrushing, albeit differently in just 100 minutes. Usually lasting 90 this gives the earlier narrative room to breathe and land with devastating force, as Sheehy lets rip with Treadwell’s poetry and her character’s agonised writhings.

It’s a phenomenal performance, overtly expressionistic, succeeding in that vein where even Eugene O’Neill only partially succeeded (Sheehy also featured in O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape here in 2015, also directed and cannily cut by Jones).

I’ve never thought of Machinal as poetic; but in Sheehy’s strangulated monologue – she’s thrust vertically from her maternity bed – she screams out as if from a strait-jacket. It’s there from the start and in most one-to-one encounters.

Pent-up fury earlier with the Young Woman’s hapless Mother (Buffy Davis, excellent in her baffled shrinking) is followed by guilty conciliation. Indeed considering others’ feelings is what drives Sheehy’s character to a bizarre mercy.

The lack of a woman’s identity drives the Young Woman protagonist, not to distraction but destruction. Machinal’s French title makes the machine-age sound sleek and critiqued at the same time.

A young stenographer’s hit on by her boss, who makes her flesh “curl” when he touches her in full view of the other eight typists – typing stations prefigure the nine scenes of actions across the play. Not till the ominous eighth scene is she given a name, Helen, not in welcome circumstances. Nine scenes is like the stages of giving birth to an abortive life.

Jones employed a canary-yellow rectilinear box for The Hairy Ape. Here, Hyemi Shin’s

lateral pyramid of a set is in stark Crome Yellow, doors opening off and descending props like a bar table, or bed and cages shot in and out. Scene-titles descend and are replaced like a line of type.

Sarah Fahie’s movement is ritualistic, often like a mob of crows around the Young Woman. And where Adam Silverman’s lighting is starkly effective is pointing moments of individuality, even redemption when tenebrous. There’s a hushed moment of pitch dark.

If Benjamin Grant’s sound is a modernist hymn out of Mosolov’s Iron Foundry, Nicky Gillibrand’s costumes whisper a shift from innocence to experience, with the Young Woman starting in drab office off-white garb moving through deep rose. She ends in blue-striped white.

Sheehy‘s flinch from circumstances is how  Treadwell suggests options then dismisses them. Carla Harrison-Hodge’s smart-talking Telephone Girl shows one way out, outraged for her. But the protagonist is specifically sensitive, without the brassiness to be sacked. Boss Jones admires her delicate hands. Sheehy extends them like something out of Dürer across the desk, the kitchen  table before she realises there’s gloves. Her sensitivity’s her trap.

Tim Frances, both pawing and oleaginous, but also pathetic as Husband is given speech-patters on sales, that repeat so much they’re kin to the mechanical drill that’s brought after the Young Woman has given birth. To emphasise how mere reproductive capacity is deafening too.

Frances’ George H Jones is believable precisely because his power’s withheld: not an obvious monster but every move is repellent; the banality of patriarchy. Oblivious to his chosen one’s humanity let alone individuality, his bluff blankness is what women still face. “I want profits” he says before he first touches the Young Woman. The fact he doesn’t grope her is because it’s all in the threat.

Helen – as she becomes only in the penultimate Episode – gasps a first monologue, breathless against “the purgatory of noise”, asthmatic jerks and snatched short phrases: “I want rest – no rest – earn – got to rest – married – earn- no – yes…” They’re only slightly ameliorated later in more flowing, muted sentences; but the return of “somebody” in her last words in the first Episode foretell her very last.

Rick Lipton’s dialect coaching underscores Treadwell’s virtuoso grasp of psychological shifts and ear for snapped-off dialogues in the virtuoso first Episode which like the eighth has nearly all the sixteen-strong cast bouncing of each other. Cacophonous screeches in Beckett,  Pinter, Mamet find their parent and original in Treadwell.

Helen’s Mother is no help. Davis’s manipulative dependant, hearth-heartless parent manages to accent her way to brutality through wheedling, though here with more pathos. She impels Helen to marriage, reluctant child-bearing: a daughter who’ll face a more privileged version of her oppression.

There’s sudden relief through the fifth and sixth scenes: Prohibited features a Speakeasy with manoeuvring infidelity (Imogen Daines mainly as a woman at the bar harassed into an abortion, egged on by Emilio Iannucci, whose Court Photographer is almost purveying porn (one reporter photographed Snyder dying)

In ‘Intimate’ Pierro Niel-Mee’s Young Man – slippery and seductive, ardent and backsliding – lends a glimpse of heaven in the one scene ached out and extended here. It’s when Sheehy palpably comes alive (‘volupté’ is one stage direction), released to wild abandon. Then  abandonment as her lover returns to South America. The resulting action makes Helen’s name resound through America.

Multi-roling suggests everyone’s a mechanistic cog: persecutor, prosecutor, or enforced witness to judging Sheehy’s Young Woman/Helen for trying to as Treadwell puts it “win free” back to brief happiness.

There’s memorable support. Steven Beard’s oblivious controlling Doctor and equally unctuous Priest, weary, wary Bartender and more humane Judge;  Wendy Nottingham Nurse is nonplussed as to why motherhood horrifies Sheehy’s character, also a Jailer. There’s Daniel Bowerbank’s hesitant Younger Man at Bar being picked up by Sam Alexander (one of the first gay seductions of the modern theatre – another Treadwell first). Bowerbank’s condemned Prisoner singing is plangent; Alexander sparkles as a triumphant Prosecutor.

Daniel Abelson’s Defence Lawyer is actually as good as it can be, a flicker of agency, though as smart-talking Young Man at the bar, you feel the machine-patter of seduction or sophistry.

There’s fine ensemble work from Christian Alifoe, Steven Dykes, Jane MacFarlane, Caroline Moroney.

If there’s parallels to Helen in O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape where the male is exposed to mechanical ritual; (a ship’s engine room) and animalistic reduction, Machinal’s an expressionist drama at the end of a genre including  The Emperor Jones, and Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine.

By marrying American naturalism to it though, Treadwell created a hybrid that could have kept her name shining had she not immediately diversified back to a naturalistic comedy of manners, baffling critics. Treadwell’s next expressionist-inspired work For Saxophone was never staged.

Jones and Sheehy have taken this work to new heights. Only when we see the best of her other thirty-eight plays will Machinal’s lonely pinnacle be rightly augmented. This triumphant revival by Ustinov Studios and the Old Vic might finally encourage exploration. You must see this.

Published April 23, 2024April 23, 2024 by Simon Jenner