Women, Beware the Devil (Modern Plays)

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The trouble is, the snobbish and dim Edward isn’t interested in Elizabeth’s candidate, wealthy merchant’s daughter Katherine (Ioanna Kimbook), preferring to sate his sexual needs with the staff and wait for a status match. Rather than keenly felt drama, Raczka and Goold for the most part focus on humour and social critique, as their anti-heroine, Agnes, deliciously turns the tables on the house – lord, ladies, servants and all – while the civil war threatens the very legacy that Elizabeth, in particular, is fighting for. Lulu Raczka’s first play Nothing, a set of interconnected monologues about sexual violence and popular culture which premiered in Edinburgh nine years ago, won The Sunday Times Playwriting Award. Yet, in spite of it all, there is something exhilarating about its disruptions, which seem deliberate. So there’s a certain amount of self-selection in the people who choose to study there, and a certain amount of theatre nerdiness.

Women, Beware the Devil | Introduction by Lulu Raczka Women, Beware the Devil | Introduction by Lulu Raczka

The play is not interested in female empowerment, but in complicated depictions of women and their relationships to power, themselves, and each other.

Agnes’ revolutionary spirit flies lustily in the face of middle-class lickspittle convention and propriety, a defiance that is clumsily emphasised in a couple of half-baked fourth-wall-breaking monologues. Agnes is forced into wickedness: the Devil may be Elizabeth, rather than the chap with horns; and maybe it’s we humans who are evil and Satan is just a facilitator. I suppose we’re now living in a time with similar conversations about institutions and systems and whether to change them from the inside or shatter them completely, so it’s obviously in a similar period of change.

woman Shirley Valentine Sheridan Smith is a transcendent one-woman Shirley Valentine

The aforementioned chap is the devil, no less, breaking the fourth wall with spoilers, and bemoaning the fact that, whereas once upon a time he was the accepted cause of the world’s ills, today “it’s structural, systemic, never evil. For the Almeida: Tammy Faye; Patriots; Spring Awakening; Albion; The Hunt; Shipwreck; Richard III; Medea; The Merchant of Venice; The Last Days of Judas Iscariot; American Psycho (also Broadway); Ink; King Charles III (also West End/ Broadway). The performances are superb, from Oliver’s conniving Agnes to Leonard’s dastardly Lady Elizabeth, and Leo Bill as her profligate brother Edward who keeps demanding beef at the dinner table in one of his many riffs about cows. When that comes under threat, she elicits the help of Agnes, I was a year late handing in my play – everyone at the Almeida was very annoyed about it,” she explains, a little rueful.This could so easily have been programmatic: a right-minded, much-needed but doctrinaire screed about the howling inequities of the education system. Nearly 20 years ago, against the odds, he put on Paradise Lost in Northampton, and made it luscious. Agnes initially refuses, but the ways in which Elizabeth and her sister in law Catherine work upon Agnes precipitate a diabolical revenge.

Women, Beware the Devil at the Almeida Theatre Glass reviews Women, Beware the Devil at the Almeida Theatre

Rupert Goold’s direction is swift and ruthless, while Miriam Buether’s design is as ingenious as a Jacobean sideboard. Lady Elizabeth, unmarried sister of the dimwitted Edward, takes her duties towards the house seriously, as well she might. That opening scene is only the first battle of wits and manipulation which we will see unfold between Elizabeth and Agnes.With that, we’re off to the ancestral seat of the De Clare family, where Lady Elizabeth (a silken, purring Lydia Leonard) is hatching a scheme to cling on to the property.