Intimate Apparel is an intimate play. It concerns the private and personal texture of the inner lives of those caught up in and in their turn fuelling, the grand sweep of history. Lynne Nottage’s award winning play about a black seamstress working at the turn of the last century, gives an emotional voice to the innumerable adventurers who threw in their lot with the rest of teeming humanity that found refuge and new opportunity in the great melting pot that was New York. Loneliness and the need for simple human intimacy are pitted against stifling tradition and the shortcomings of reality when measured against dreams and expectations.
Director, Laurence Boswell, has sensitively balanced the various relationships, which revolve around the central character of Esther whose search for emotional fulfilment seems to have been answered by Panama Canal worker George Armstrong after a sequence of contrived letters, written in each case by third parties. The magnificent, touching and nuanced performance of Esther by Tanya Moodie, engages our sympathies so that even the somewhat predictable disappointment and final desertion of husband, George leaves us just a little pleased that she can carry on the search for something better. Tanya is unquestionably an actress of the first water and her performance alone is worth the price of a ticket .
Sara Topham is her match in Mrs Van Buren, the socialite, with a predilection for exotic and erotic underwear. Her cut glass genteel Southerner, out of her natural environment in the bustling, burgeoning metropolis is pitch perfect as her childless marriage slides towards alcoholic disintegration. Her rich and layered, at times almost tangible relationship with Esther is a joy to behold. Dawn Hope’s pillar of rectitude, Mrs Dickson is also nuanced in the warmth and understanding she is able to show towards Esther.
Fleeing from persecution in his native Romania, yet trapped in his Orthodox Jewish faith is cloth merchant, Mr Marks. Ilan Goodman finds more than enough humanity in his character to avoid any kind of stereotyping of the New York Jew. Equally rounded is Rochelle Neil’s burlesque dancer/prostitute who inadvertently helps to wreck Esther’s short marriage.
Chu Omambala, despite a slightly dodgy Barbadian accent, showed the joy, expectation and innocence of the newly arrived immigrant in ‘the land of opportunity’. His rapid disenchantment with his postal bride only serves to highlight the resilience of Esther as a new chapter in her life opens.
Mark Bailey’s clever and economic set deftly sketches the sense of place as the scene swaps between workroom, boudoir, bordello, merchant’s house and Panama. Lighting by Ben Ormerod and sound-scape by Jon Nicholls maintain the high quality of this production which is the last in the Ustinov’s American season. ★★★★☆ Graham Wyles
