A play within a play within an obsession
Watching a woman who cannot stop watching herself produces its own vertigo. Written by Heather Woodhouse and directed by TJ Roderick, In His Words is an exercise in mise en abyme, a Russian-doll structure where a story folds a smaller version of itself inside its own frame. This architecture is the entire argument of the piece.
Esther (Woodhouse) is an actress who has just been cast in the lead of a new play she is convinced is about her, written by an ex she rarely mentions to her current girlfriend, Isabella (Megan Goldsman). That small and corrosive omission becomes the fault line the production runs along. Esther is not cruel so much as elsewhere. Even when Isabella returns from her new job caring for Miss Havisham, an elderly eccentric client and discloses that the woman’s sister drowned in a cave, Esther cannot quite arrive in the room with her. Instead she turns to Miss Havisham (Madeline Horan), who haunts the edges of the stage for most of the play’s runtime, more spectre than character, surfacing occasionally to sing. It is a shrewd piece of blocking as much as writing as the audience watches Esther choose the past, literally, over the woman sitting three feet away from her.
The Great Expectations scaffolding is laid on, Miss Havisham’s wedding dress is one of the production’s best costume choices of a woman arrested mid-ceremony forever and the parallel between Esther and Dickens’s own perpetually-in-waiting Estella is evident. Isabella, meanwhile, keeps returning to Dorian Gray, reading passages aloud in a way that initially seems like set dressing and gradually reveals itself as its own commentary on vanity, self-image and the distance between how we appear and what we are. Riya Rajeev, doubling as both Rohan the play’s fictional director and Jack the ex-boyfriend, gives the production’s most physically eloquent performance when her posture changes like how she manspreads into the tie and hat of Jack in a way that fits how a woman gets rewritten by a man’s account of her.
The production is unafraid of dissonance in its design. The set is dominated by an armchair on castor wheels, wheeled about the stage by the cast and positioned so that Isabella sits reading in the corner while Esther and Rohan rehearse out of her eyeline. Sheets of white plastic and cave-like wooden forms hang from the ceiling and crowd the front of the stage, evoking the cave that swallowed Isabella’s client’s sister; against this the armchair and its reading lamp look almost comically domestic. The whole cast performs barefoot throughout, which strips a certain formality from even the play’s most heightened and aburdist stretches. The soundtrack is stitched together from Die Antwoord, Lou Reed and Passion Pit and Isabella’s rendition of Perfect Day catches the audience off guard with how much it asks of us emotionally.
Woodhouse has spoken about writing the play out of her own experience of OCD, the compulsive re-litigating of the past and the need for everything to align and make sense. This is legible throughout the performance, even in the production’s most fragmented and referential passages. Where the play occasionally loses its footing is in that density, there is a lot of meta-theatrical scaffolding and not every reference may land with equal clarity in the audience, particularly in the mise en abyme sequences where several timelines and text-registers are operating at once. However, this is the production’s charm and the production is generous enough to let its central relationship sit in uncertainty.
This production trusts its audience to do some of the assembling themselves, staged by a company clearly building something distinctive in Woodhouse & Roderick’s ensemble. It doesn’t all cohere on a first watch, and I suspect it isn’t meant to. What works unmistakably is the central question underneath all the theatrical noise: what does it take to feel like yourself, in a world, and sometimes in a relationship, that keeps asking you to be someone else?
In His Words runs at the Bread and Roses Theatre, London, until Saturday 8th August. Tickets here.