In the Next Room (Or the Vibrator Play)

[st_emma]

We ventured out to a new theatre tonight to see In the Next Room, stopping first at Beehive for dinner, which was truly, utterly wonderful and way, way too much food.

We had originally found out about this play through one of those postcards that get sent out occasionally to people on mailing lists borrowed from other theatres. My initial attraction was not, as you might imagine, to the salacious subject, but to the two lead actresses: Marianna Bassham, who was delightful in both Gaslight and Not Enough Air, and Anne Gottlieb, who was spectacular in Not Enough Air. They play Sabrina Daldry and Catherine Givings, respectively, and have wonderful onstage chemistry.

I'm not sure quite how it slipped my attention, but apparently in the Victorian days, doctors used to treat hysteria by using manual stimulation, and later vibrators, to cause "paroxysms" of the uterus. Victorian knowledge of female sexuality being what it was, it never seemed to occur to them that they were inducing orgasm; ladies, it was believed, simply didn't have orgasms, so obviously this was some sort of deeply therapeutic release.

I thought the play did a remarkable job of depicting just how constrained (and grim) upper middle class women's sex lives were back then. And while I can see a happy ending on the horizon for Dr. and Mrs. Givings, I just can't envision the same for poor Sabrina Daldry, most likely a lesbian and stuck with a "very considerate" husband who sneaks into her room while she's sleeping and insists that she keep her eyes closed during sex, which is described as "painful". Ugh.

I did like the image of the wall coming down, to highlight not only the destruction of the boundary between what happened "in the next room" and what happened in the Givings' relationship, but also as a visual metaphor for the dropping of boundaries that were preventing communication. And I absolutely loved Mrs. Givings' dresses.