Review: THE MALADIES, The Yard

We open on a woman kneading dough in 16th century France and jump quickly to present day corporate offices in which a team of podcasters have been signed up by The Man. They then seem to make their pitch in a space that appears to be both an office and a studio in which some people need to wear mics and some don't and the well established journalistic convention of "off the record" has morphed into "off the recording". There's a lot of off-stage cousins who help with exposition and soon we're back to the compulsive dancers in Strasbourg. It's all rather confusing and a portent of things to come.

Playwright, Carmen Nasr has an important, if somewhat familiar message to impart - that women forced to fit in with societies that oppress them will manifest that stress externally and will then be blamed for it. To do so, she has written a script that takes us into four timeframes within its 70 minutes running time: 1508 France; 1962 Tanzania; 2011 USA and 2023 London. As one might expect, that gives director, Yasmin Hafesji and the energetic cast an insurmountable storytelling task.

It's all so quick that the nuts and bolts of drama cannot be established with any authority. The four podcast hosts initially appear interchangeable and, just as we get to know the confident Jessica (Linda Wachaga), she tapes up her mouth in solidarity with the women losing their voices at Slackerz (a corporate media company, but not the same corporate media company that has contracted our podcasters) and we see her only very briefly again.

There's a song ("The Loco-Motion" written by a teenage Carole King working as a woman in a male-dominated corporate media company - an interesting parallel not pursued) and a condescending creepy US cast show host and a condescending but not quite as creepy UK podcast guest and even a hint of office romance. All of this requires 31 characters played by 18 members of the Almeida Young Company - how are we supposed to disentangle all of this in a shade over an hour?

While one can have sympathy for the chaos Covid has wreaked on this play's development, it is professional theatre supported by a published text. Those of us on the other side of the fourth wall do deserve a little more drama to grab hold of on this swirling sea of psychogenic episodes stretched over 500 years. The missed opportunity is more than a little irritating, as there's a tremendous energy in the room, a real desire to reclaim the narratives for groups of women who have collectively twitched, fallen silent or danced in behaviours ascribed (by men) to 'hysteria', a gendered word that undermines itself in in its overt sexism.

Sometimes bold ambitious theatre works, but, inevitably, sometimes it doesn't. The reviewer is obliged to reach a conclusion on that point and convey that to the reader - but they are also obliged to underline the fact that theatre has to run that risk, else we would never have new plays, new writers and new actors.

The Maladies is at the Yard Theatre until 23 April

Photo Helen Murray

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