This new play about sexual assault and an alleged rape culture at an Oxbridge-style college was already a knotty experience when previews started. Then, on the day it was due to open in June, its star Lia Williams had to pull out because of illness. The Irish actress Justine Mitchell stepped in at no notice to do great things in Williams’s role as Jo, the outspoken first female master of the college. Two weeks later she still carries the script with her, consulting it only lightly. This kind of fits with a story in which everyone has to keep checking where they stand. Oddly it’s not distracting.
Jo, a former broadcast journalist, has long breezily spoken truth to power. What happens now that she is the power though? What happens when students such as the third-year activist and blogger Nikki (Phoebe Campbell) fail to see her old-school feminist frankness as fit for purpose? What happens when Nikki befriends Paige (Liv Hill), a first-year computing student who drunkenly goes to bed with a third year and wakes up realising that he raped her while she slept?
Does she follow Nikki’s urging to go to the authorities, to become the focal point for a campaign? Is Nikki principled, damaged, ambitious, or all of the above? Where does an atmosphere of licence become a culture of abuse? There are a lot of questions in Alma Mater, all of them good ones, most of them put in the mouths of promising characters who don’t have quite enough room here to sprout a third dimension. The Australian playwright Kendall Feaver impresses hugely with her intelligence, her nuance, and yet as drama this doesn’t quite slip its moorings.
There is a lot of gnarly debate and personal complications, also involving the college chair Michael (Nathaniel Parker) and his wife, Leila (Nathalie Armin). Everyone has a point. Everyone is also, fitfully, hugely annoying: tunnel-visioned, self-righteous, self-interested, complacent, blinkered … Why doesn’t Jo mind her language more or go to HR when things heat up? Because that’s the tragedy of her character? Or because there would be no play?
It’s superbly acted, and Polly Findlay’s typically intense production puts everyone within a bare rectangular playing area bounded by benches. Great work from the designer Vicki Mortimer: there is no escape from this intractable furore. Yet everyone feels like a strong supporting character. Nobody quite holds centre stage — not even Jo, notwithstanding a fabulous speech at the end. Meanwhile, Nikki, her antagonist and mirror image, has vanished from the tale, only to reappear in a too neatly theatrical epilogue involving a college tree.
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Nobody will be bored by all this, and much of what’s aggravating about it is supposed to be aggravating. So take a friend. You may not surrender entirely to the fiction, but you’ll have plenty to talk about afterwards.
★★★☆☆
150min
To July 20, almeida.co.uk
