Ancient Greece, modern hearts – three women, one island and the best-dressed love triangle
Sappho has always been more myth than woman. The premise announces itself early on when Sappho (Charlotte Boyle), visiting us some the past, parallels trees falling in forests to lesbians going unrecorded, letting the audience know the play’s premise in ancient Greece is less of a history lesson rather than a rom-com populated with birthdays, housewarmings and the ordinary social churn of an island where everyone seems to know everyone else’s business. The poet narrates part of her own story, since it lets the play borrow Sappho’s fragmentary, longing voice. Sappho is freshly out of a situationship with Atthis and newly smitten with Anactoria, the Lesbos island’s new reigning bombshell where Ruby Blue Tansey-Thomas brings a magnetism to Anactoria that makes the island’s fixation feel justified.
Charlotte Boyle as designer heavily leans into the ancient Greek aesthetic. Libby Boyd’s Atthis is distinguished mostly through costume rather than any real shift in performance as her sleeves unbuttoned, arms free, where the other two stay fastened at the shoulder and arm. All three women wear the identical draped clothing in different colours, punctuated by gold rings, bracelets and cuffs.
A handful of ruin-scaled pillars, trailing green plastic ivy, do double duty as tables and party venues, and the terracotta jugs and drinking vessels are convincing enough that they read as functional.
The play’s focus on women is its forte and it proceeds as though a world revolving around these women’s friendships and relationships as a story that never once has to justify its own centre of gravity. As implied by the title, the play isn’t arguing these women into existence so much as declining to wait for permission to be seen.
Where it earns its warmth is in refusing to let its central joke, women loving women long before any thorough historical accounts. The astrology-inflected flirting and the Love Island-adjacent aside work as seasoning, tucked into scenes that are watching three women navigate desire, jealousy and the slow reshuffling of a friendship group, with all the low-stakes tenderness of a rom-com. It doesn’t always go for the laugh, and lets the affection between these women do more of the work than the jokes do.
What stays with you afterwards isn’t the concept, clever as it is, but the current running between Boyle and Tansey-Thomas, which manages to feel both ancient Greek and entirely of this moment.
Schrödinger’s Lesbians’ run at the The Cockpit Theatre, London, has now concluded.