Kelly Hotten jangles perfectly as one of her lovers. Jodie McNee – man’s suit, man’s hair, cigarette behind her ear – is bereft, though apparently Artful Dodger tough. Perfect for the prison in which the action is partly set, suitable for scuffling through town in the blackout. The stage is bare, dark, with a metal grid embedded in the floor. These lives are not followed in a straightforward linear fashion. Georgia Lowe’s slowly revolving design makes a virtue of being in the round. But in a different form, skipping from prose into gesture. So many tiny details – the way, for example, that a cat moves – which might be thought untransferable from the page are here. She gives only slivers of the prose in the dialogue, relying on Rebecca Gatward’s first-rate direction and a wonderful cast to embody the rest. Here are the experiences of a conscientious objector, a woman obliged to have a backstreet abortion, same-sex couples forced to hide their love. A generous wish to include as much as possible might tempt a writer to make it bristle with period detail: fattening it up with a busy design, larding the dialogue with knowing references to spam and dried eggs, ramming home the themes found in its individual stories. It would be so easy to flatten this in adaptation.
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