The Writer
Almeida Theatre, London

IN THE WRITER, the audience certainly has to put the work in. But the rewards come thick and fast. There's resonance aplenty in Ella Hickson’s energy-packed, layered and complex piece of theatre about theatre, which doesn’t so much play with genre as bend it, snap it to smithereens and put it back together again — or sometimes not.

In a tremendous opening scene, a young woman (Lara Rossi) describes watching a Bullingdon Club-type scenario on stage: “The audience is the same!” she protests. It’s reminiscent of the rape scene in The Accused, when women in cinema audiences experienced men sitting around them whooping and cheering.

Hickson's agenda is set, and the titular protagonist (Romola Garai, pictured) comes across as a desperately uncertain artist but that impression is rapidly dispelled — we realise that she’s not neurotic but anarchic. Her yearning is deep, her vision wide, but directors exist to squash a passion for theatre that “should be insurgent.”