Brighton Review: Arnold Wesker's The Mistress Upstairs at Three and Ten
Run ended
Reviewed by Mathilda Gregory
This charming, one-woman play is totally absorbing: a mesmeric Jo Merriman fills the remade space with ease. The story of a woman having an affair, waiting for a call from her lover, is a fresh-feeling slant on the love-triangle staple. With the focus firmly on the “other woman”, the couple whose home she may or may not be wrecking are unseen figures; still, they are very obviously haunting Samantha, as she drinks and complains to her mannequins about her lot in life. Nicola Haydn’s production of this slight, yet powerful, show presents a very masculine Samantha, all helmet-like hair and tailored trousers. It’s appropriate enough for a woman who has found a very unconventional, emotion-shunning life, after being influenced by her father’s disdain for all things sentimental or ‘coussy’. All the same, by her career choice of dressmaker, butch Samantha has unwittingly allowed her repressed love of the frilly side of life to slip into view like a wayward petticoat. The energy of Merriman’s performance whirls and hisses around the space at Upstairs at Three and Ten. The switched-around location works beautifully. It’s as if it was a piece of Samantha’s made-to-measure couture, and the little drama perfectly fitted into the tiny space. For all Wesker’s vaunted ability to write women, though, I found some aspects of Samantha a little clichéd. It came through most in her unhappy frustration with her choices, and the life that had resulted. The premise is that a single woman with a string of lovers, and a straightforward, unashamed attitude to her own desires, would be regretful and lonely in the final reckoning – an idea which seemed like it was drawn straight from the pages of the Daily Mail. But the show rescues itself from these issues with its neatest dramatic device: the pile of begging letters from charitable organisations that Samantha works her way through. Samantha’s lonesome woes are very much first-world problems, and as her obsession with them and her wicked ways fills her with guilt, she writes cheque after cheque to help towards the relief of true human misery. There are situations in the world that make Samantha’s relationship problems seem beyond trivial. And the way this piece makes us care about those domestic misfortunes, while placing them in the wider context of the world’s real troubles, is the genius at its heart. |
